The stuff of legends in a brave new world

The moniker of this column has been appropriated to get more people to bet on, well, the gee-gees.

Seeking to draw more punters into racing from the burgeoning soccer-betting arena, the TAB brainboxes have invented a hybrid wager: the Soccer GG.

No kidding. They say imitation is the sincerest form of praise, but I'm not basking in the adoration pal. I feel burgled. I'm thinking copyright, trademark, intellectual property, lawyers, big compo cheque.

Okay, now I am kidding.

Still, I was a tad surprised by this turn of events as not many people nowadays use the term gee-gee, or geegee, or GG.

TAB boss Vee Moodley felt it necessary to explain it in a press release this week: "We derived the name from gee-gees, which has long been a slang term for horses. Soccer GG aims to stretch soccer and horseracing fans out of their comfort zones, while simultaneously adding a new level of entertainment to their betting."

This stretching involves guessing the outcome of five soccer matches, as in the Soccer 6 bet, along with the winner of a single horse race. Soccer GG is available on weekends, with tomorrow's August Stakes feature at the Vaal being paired with two PSL games and three English Premier League clashes.

To get Soccer GG off the ground, TAB is adding R50000 - out of its own pocket - to the first four pools.

I'll let you in on a secret: I didn't come up with the name for this column. Erstwhile sports editor Archie Henderson simply bunged the first thing that popped into his head on the top of my first effort - and that was that. You don't argue with Archie.

Some etymology detectives believe gee-gee is a child's word for a horse, from hearing coach drivers saying "gee up" or "giddy up" to get ponies moving faster. Others say it derives from horsemen shouting "gee" and "haw" at their draught animals - to get them to turn right or left respectively.

I like the story told by Marcus Armytage, British racing writer and sometime jockey. According to him, the term comes from the founding father of the Chester Races, Mayor Henry Gee, a zealous reformer of the post-medieval period who put the municipal house in order "with high hand and unswerving purpose", banishing vagabonds, banning single women from keeping common ale houses and stamping out government corruption. (Where, oh where, is Henry when we need him?)

Chester was the venue of a famously bloody annual football match on Goteddsday (Shrove Tuesday). The orgy of violence was eventually outlawed by the city elders in 1533. To compensate, Mayor Gee introduced a genteel horse-racing festival in 1539, and a grateful citizenry took to calling racehorses Gee-Gees in his honour.

Those Brits obviously still hankered for a spot of footie though, and if Henry had been less morally stuck-up he might have civilised the ball game, introduced the offside rule and combined the best of both worlds by devising a Soccer GG bet.