Those South African soccer grannies sure are on the move
It’s amazing the new things you can begin to do in your seventh decade. Or your eighth.
Like learn to play soccer. Fly on a plane for the first time. Or take your first overseas trip.
Not long before soccer’s World Cup in South Africa, I drove to a place called Nkowankowa, outside Tzaneen in Limpopo province to meet a group of South African women, mostly in their sixties and seventies, who had taken up soccer to keep fit. The oldest, Nora Makhubele, is 84.
It was a lyrical scene, as the women took to the field. And it made for an inspiring story, “They kick like grannies, proudly.”
After the article’s publication, the women, who call their team Vakhegula Vakhegula (“grandmothers grandmothers” in Tsonga) were sponsored by Herbalife to travel to the U.S. this month for the United States Adult Soccer Assn. Veterans Cup, a tournament in Lancaster, Mass.
I received an e-mail from Herbalife to tell me about the sponsorship. And tournament participant Anne Potter, who is playing with a Michigan team, also wrote. “We passed the hat yesterday at opening ceremonies and collected $1,000. They are coming with very little money.
“There has been an outpouring of care for these women.”
Most of the women in Vakhegula Vakhegula used to be domestic servants who worked their whole lives making their beds, doing dishes, washing and ironing, scrubbing floors and cleaning ovens and bathrooms.
They have no playing facilities for their soccer team — not even changing rooms — and they train in between cooking for their families and keeping their homes clean.
As night fell and the game ended on a reporting trip, a couple of the women jumped in my car so I could drive them across the little town to their neighborhood. Then I hit the highway, on my way home, feeling warm inside, but for one discordant note.
A group of local journalists who had been on the scene at the same time to do the story for a French TV network at one point lined up the gogos (grandmothers) and asked their coach to tell them to shout out in unison, “Bring it on, Zidane!” — a reference to French soccer great Zinedine Zidane.
Smiling (but obviously puzzled by such an request), they shouted out the phrase. But not loudly or enthusiastically enough. They had to shout it five or six times before the TV people were happy.
I asked some of the women what they thought of Zidane.
“I don’t know that place,” said one.
“I don’t know who that is,” said others.
