The deadliest passion play

It has become an oft repeated South African truism that we are a football-obsessed nation, with hordes of passionate supporters. I have certainly never doubted it.

Take Sandile, one of my brothers from my extended family, for instance. (If you weren't African you'd call him my first cousin). Sandile and I shared a passion for the Mighty Amakhosi, Kaizer Chiefs, but I think he was more dedicated to the cause than I was because he would go to bed on an empty tummy if Orlando Pirates happened to trounce Chiefs.

My own commitment to Amakhosi always wavered around supper time. So my elder brother Mazwi and I would share Sandile's portion of drumsticks like Levi and those guys shared Joseph's Technicolor dream coat in the Holy Bible. No need to be heartbroken and hungry, I still maintain, 30 years on.

What I didn't know then was that passion for football could get ugly and physical. I learnt this when I started following the local league in my Hammarsdale neighbourhood. One of the fiercest rivalries was between Unit 2's Highlanders and Unit 3's Eastern Invitation. Don't ask me what was up with those names. But woe betide the poor referee who would disallow a goal by Eastern Invitation!

One of their prominent officials, Mthofi Mkhize, was known to invade the pitch, cow whip in hand, to gently persuade the man with the whistle that perhaps he had erred. Pandemonium would ensue and afterwards it would be discovered that the furry prize for that final had been seen bleating on the back of some van exiting Mpumalanga Stadium. In summary, great fun was had by all.

I was taken back to those times in the early '80s when I came across a bizarre story on the wires from the town of Pio XII in northern Brazil. Apparently, a footie match was in progress when the referee, Otavio da Silva, blew his whistle, fished out a red card and sent off Josenir dos Santos Abreu.

Anyone who's watched enough football knows the drill by now. Dos Santos protested and his teammates probably mobbed the referee, pleading with him to do what I have never seen a referee do, which is to say: "I didn't know you felt this strongly about the situation. Ok, I un-red-card you".

Yet, week-in, week-out, this is what players do. No need to judge; clubs don't head-hunt PhD students to play for them. However, in this story from Pio XII, there was a bit of a twist in the normal, retarded football behaviour. The referee whipped out a knife and plunged it into Dos Santos, who keeled over and died in transit to hospital. Enraged fans then invaded the pitch, got all Biblical on the ref and stoned him to death.

Pretty bizarre story, isn't it? What if I told you it got even weirder? Well, it did. The crowd proceeded to . wait for it . behead him, fix his head on a stake and display it in the centre of the pitch. My natural tendency to embellish is well documented, I know. Not this time. I wish I was making this up.

This story left me with gazillions of questions. People with normal brains would probably ask questions such as where was security while this bloodfest went down, what socio-economic conditions led to such violent behaviour, and what can be done to prevent such incidents from happening in future. Yawn.

That's not how my brain is wired. The first question I asked myself was whether a knife is standard issue in the Pio XII Referees Association and, if so, why. I then spent some time asking myself what kind of knife Da Silva used to gut Dos Santos like fresh trout. I cannot explain why, but I'd like to believe it was a Swiss Army knife - the irony would be delicious considering the Swiss approach to war.

Then I started asking myself what the player had said to the referee to deserve the carving. Zinedine Zidane only head-butted Italian player Marco Materazzi for allegedly making lewd comments about his sister. So I can only hypothesise that there was a comment about Da Silva's mother's sexual morality.

I've read that Brazil is a deeply religious country, split between the Catholic majority and Pentecostal happy-clappy types. Which denomination did the crowd who re-enacted the stoning scenes from the Old Testament belong to? These questions and others I couldn't possibly ask in this family newspaper would help me decide just how flabbergasted I should be by this story on a scale of "wow" to "oh my freaking word".

In case some squeamish, easy-to-offend individual is reading this, let me hasten to add that I do not find death funny. I am genuinely intrigued by this story. Also, I've had an epiphany - in retrospect, South Africans are not as passionate about football as we like to believe.

Sure, a few pyromaniac amateur fire-starters have attempted an Emperor Nero to turn Soccer City into a gigantic bonfire. And some Chiefs fans have attempted a Butch James and tried a spear dive on a ref. But thank goodness no one's ever beheaded super ref Daniel Bennet and stuck his head on a corner flag.