Jabu gets a life

SIMPLY by having a pulse in 2013, Jabu Mahlangu is raising eyebrows.

For years the former Bafana star's hell-raising youth seemed bound to end abruptly - in a road crash, an overdose or the twist of a thug's knife.

But he has much more than a pulse. Here he is, in a Brakpan townhouse, wrestling with the mystery of free will.

Mahlangu, now 33, is seizing control of himself. And like most recovering addicts, he is a knot of raw emotions: mainly hope, worry and gratitude to his wife, Thwana, and his three children.

Two years ago he tried to free his wife from the wreckage of his life. When Thwana married him, she was 19 and he was the charismatic 24-year-old prince of Kaizer Chiefs, then known as Jabu Pule (his mother's surname). By 2011 he was an injured nobody, broke and severely depressed.

"I said to my wife: 'You know what? You deserve better now. It's been seven years and nothing has worked for you,'" said Mahlangu, tears welling in his eyes. "It came from the bottom of my heart. I said to her: 'Let it go. Get someone.'"

"But Thwana said no, it's fine - she's going to stick with me. No one wanted me. Even friends and football people. No one.

"So many things have happened which she could easily have walked away from - as young as she is and as beautiful as she is. But they value marriage, she and her mother [Shadi Songame], who doesn't condone separation. I didn't know what marriage means."

The couple had no car, having just sold their two BMWs, and could not afford to stay in their Buccleuch home. The tabloids relished his retreat to the shelter of his mother-in-law's home.

"At the time I hated myself. Sometimes I would cry alone, feeling sad and useless because I wasn't providing for a woman of my wife's calibre and my beautiful kids. It was a very rough two years - full of anger. Whenever I went out to drink, I would fight with people. Then I chose not to go out any more. I do sometimes now, but that helped me a lot to heal. People were always making jokes about me."

Recently, the mockery has given way to sympathy and respect. In the moving documentary His Story: Jabu Mahlangu, screened last month on SuperSport, Mahlangu laid bare all his mistakes. With nothing left to hide or defend, he can move on.

He is helping the Transnet Foundation to hold sports camps for rural children and recently teamed up with the South African Football Players' Union and Liberty Life to advise young footballers on money management. He and Thwana own a maintenance company.

But what led him to drown his brilliance in a swamp of booze and cocaine? He's not sure. Although he takes responsibility for his choices, it seems nature and nurture ganged up on him.

Mahlangu is the son of alcoholic parents and was raised in a volatile home. He was a raging drunk by his mid-teens and had to be fetched from a tavern to appear for his school team.

"At one o'clock they would notice I wasn't at school and go and look for me at the tavern just before the game started. Sometimes they would get me, sometimes not. But if I came, drunk as I was, I would score two goals, create goals, entertain people."

The power and tension of stardom only deepened his passion for fermented self-medication. "My first thought when I was promoted to the Chiefs first team was that I could now afford to drink at another level."

At team hotels, on the eve of a match, he would bribe hotel barmen with R200 to smuggle booze to his room. "I'd say mamela [listen], I just want 12 Heinekens. Tomorrow we're playing, but forget about it."

Then came hordes of girls, hangers-on and kwaito-star friends. "People would cry just because they saw me."

He had three cellphones because the barrage of calls would drain a battery by midday. "As a teenager, I wasn't that interested in chasing girls," he said. "But I was pretty. And as soon as I scored for Chiefs, they went crazy for me. They just came up to me and said they wanted to sleep with me."

The death of his mother in 2000 deepened his loneliness and worsened his fear of spending time alone. Cocaine and fast women warded off the darkness. He blew R10000 on the drug in one weekend and another binge nearly killed him: severely dehydrated, he spent two days on a drip in the care of a discreet Tembisa doctor.

Many well-meaning onlookers tried to intervene, from the parents of Daveyton homeboys to football supremos Kaizer Motaung and Irvin Khoza. He cannot say why he did not heed their warnings. "I have to acknowledge the Chiefs family. They tried their best. Maybe it wasn't enough. Nobody can say, but they did try. That was my life. I drank. That was me."

Mahlangu has a theory that many parents of young South African footballers become unduly afraid of their potentially rich sons, fearing the loss of financial support if they try to impose control. "Because let's be honest, many of our footballers just forget about their parents as soon as they make it. They only come to visit them when they're dying."

He did not reject his own parents, but his affection for their memories is laced with pain. "They both gave me the love that parents should give. My mother, Dipuo, would talk too much. She loved to laugh and she drank, so I have inherited so many aspects from her. She could interact with people anywhere.

"The same with my dad, Daniel, who was always making jokes. Everyone in Daveyton knew him. He drove trucks across the country, so he didn't really know what I was all about. But sometimes during holidays I would go with him in his Unitrans truck carrying bricks to Durban. He bought me all the goodies and chocolates I wanted, and he would drink and drive on the job. We'd stop at bottle stores and he would buy quarts of stout."

The Mahlangu home was sporadically violent. He remembers one night when his father struck his mother on the head with a bottle. They later separated and then reunited after he begged them to. "They listened to their son. They phoned each other and had a meeting, and then my mom moved back. That was the happiest moment of my life."

Mahlangu is haunted by his lost parallel life of discipline and wealth. "I never realised how good I was. I knew I could play, but it never really came into my mind that I could change the situation of my family, make money, go overseas. I never had those dreams.

"At Chiefs, I performed better than the sober players. So can you imagine if I was living a clean, focused life? I would have been maybe three times better than what you guys saw.

"At one point coach Muhsin Ertugral said to the guys: 'I don't know what to say, but this guy performs better than the guys who don't drink. So why don't you all drink?' He was angry. His job was on the block. I wouldn't train, but I would keep scoring. So he couldn't drop me, and it made his life very difficult. Muhsin never gave up on me. We still talk. He's a true father. He didn't fail me. I failed him."

When he burnt his last bridge with Chiefs, Ertugral took him to play for Mattersburg in the Austrian league, a stepping stone to Germany's Bundesliga. After a fine start, Ertugral left and he was benched in mid-season - by a racist coach, he says - and began to wobble again despite a visit from Thwana. He missed training and crashed his car on an autobahn after falling asleep at the wheel.

"Then my agent found me a team in Greece, but my coach at Mattersburg said no to a move. And I lost my temper at the meeting. I turned the table upside down in front of the chairman and everyone. I said: 'I'm not going to play for you, so why don't you let me go?'

"I told them: F*** you guys. They were shocked. I was small but very angry. Austrians aren't used to that sort of thing. I told them: 'You will never see me at training. The only time you'll see me is when I collect my ticket home.'"

Coming home was not the answer. Patchy seasons with Orlando Pirates, Swedish side Osters, SuperSport United and Platinum Stars followed.

A groin injury brought an end to his playing days. It seemed like a cliff edge, but it has become a liberation.

His future is an open pitch and he's an intelligent man who thinks and talks with all the imaginative energy of his football. Over the years his story has become a national parable about the wasted gifts of post-apartheid township youth.

But it's his parable now, and he's rewriting it.