In Sinjun’s terms, I was well on my way to being a Renaissance man. In my own terms I felt less successful. I had survived the system but that was in many ways the problem. I seemed to be losing control of my own life, forfeiting my individuality for the glittering prizes and the accolades of my peers. The need to win had become everything, the head had become more important than the heart, Hoppie’s advice had worked too well.
I had supported myself at school with the Bank and the various scams Hymie and I had developed. But what had been intellectual amusement for Hymie was deadly serious for me. I needed the money not only to survive but as a means of dignity. Hymie and I had become inseparable friends and with the death of Doc he was certainly the most important person in my life. But I knew deep down that Hymie had been chosen because he could help me survive the system. I was a user. It had become a habit; winner that I seemed to be, I had become a mental mendicant.
I was conscious also of the price I paid. That in return people took strength from me. Hymie, Miss Bornstein, Mrs Boxall all needed me as a focal point, I was required to perform for them in return for their unstinting help and love. The concept of the Tadpole Angel which I had tried to set aside would not leave me. After the Mandoma fight the black crowds at my boxing matches had become enormous and at the South African Schools Championships the police had been called to disperse the chanting crowd outside the Johannesburg Drill Hall. I knew that eventually something more was expected of me. All my life I’d been pushed around. By the Judge. By the Lord. By the concept of the Tadpole Angel. In my own way I had fought and in return had been given Doc and Hoppie and Geel Piet as my mentors. The point of all this was difficult to understand. Perhaps, after all, life is like this. But I felt that I needed to take one independent action that would put my life back under my own control. It was as though I needed to lose but hadn’t developed the mechanism to do so. I only had one problem with this; I hadn’t any idea how to go about doing so.
The only totally independent thing in my life was my ambition to become the welterweight champion of the world. It was the only thing that couldn’t be manipulated. I either had it in me or I hadn’t. It was the thing those who loved me, with the exception of Captain Smit and Gert, couldn’t understand. It was the one thing in my life that seemed to make sense to me. In this single action there was no corruption of the spirit.
In the last week of term Singe ’n Burn accompanied me to my interview with the Rhodes scholarship board. I had sat for two scholarships. One to Witwatersrand University and another to the University of Stellenbosch, an Afrikaans-speaking university with a brilliant law school. But, more than anything, I wanted to go to Oxford. I felt I was unlikely to compromise this desire, come what may. Hymie’s family had already agreed to pay for me to go, but even as a loan I found this unacceptable. Unacceptable to me, to the memory of Doc, to Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein, Captain Smit, Gert, Hoppie Groenewald, Big Hettie and most of all, to Geel Piet, who had never in his life experienced a hand extended to him in help.
Even my mother, convinced that the temporal things of life were secondary and who had given the Lord the entire credit for making my education possible, had sat behind a sewing machine from dawn until dusk to support me as much as she was able.
I was a man now, I was through with taking. I felt the rest was up to me. If I didn’t know what the next step in my life was to be, I felt that I might set it in motion by acting independently of the help that was always so generously extended to me by others.
Hymie, the gambler and businessman, reckoned the odds on my winning one of three Rhodes scholarships for South Africa were less than even. As the time for my interview grew close he grew more and more distraught. He sensed my need to act independently and that to some large degree the Rhodes scholarship would achieve this aim. At the same time he wanted to cushion me from the disappointment if I lost. It was not unknown, but highly unusual to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship straight from school. Rhodes scholars were almost always chosen after an initial degree at university, when the student had already confirmed a brilliant school career with an equally brilliant first degree taken in conjunction with a sporting and cultural contribution in the university environment.
‘Christ, Peekay, in my old man’s terms the fees to Oxford are petty cash. We’d be together like always and come back home and eventually open a practice together. You can start looking after the people and I’ll make us a squillion dollars. It’s all so easy. Why do you have to make it so bloody difficult?’
‘Well, for a start I’m going to be welterweight champion of the world. If I took your dad’s money, I’d have to use all my time to justify it at university.’
‘You don’t have to justify it, you can do both!’ Hymie yelled.
‘You know me better than that. Let me tell you something stupid, Hymie. If I had to choose between becoming welterweight champion of the world and taking a law degree at Oxford, the boxing would win.’
He looked stunned. ‘Why? You’re not the sort of guy who wants to be famous that way. In fact, you’re exactly the opposite.’
‘It’s got to do with something which happened when I was very young. I can’t explain it, it’s just got to be that way.’
‘Peekay, the money you’ll make as a professional, even a world champion, will be nothing compared to the two of us together in a law practice.’
‘It’s not something I can explain. I’ve worked for this since I was six. It has nothing to do with the importance of being the welterweight champion of the world.’ I chuckled inwardly. How the hell could I explain to him that I was doing it, in part, for a dead chicken!
‘Look, Peekay, you’re only just a lightweight, it will be two, maybe three years before you become a welterweight, you can take your degree, or a good part of it anyway, and then go on with your boxing career. I’ll help you. We’ll even make a lot of dough out of it.’
The interview with the selection board was a fairly harrowing experience, the first hour taken up with the board talking to Singe ’n Burn while I cooled my heels in the waiting room of University House. The waiting was the worst part. The selection committee was comprised of three fairly elderly men who simply started to chat with me. One of them, a thin man with round steel-rimmed glasses which slid down to the tip of his very long nose and whose hair was parted precisely in the middle and slicked down with brilliantine, looked like Ichabod Crane. He peered at me over the top of his glasses and quoted the first line of three verses from Ovid, then asked me to complete them. I had to laugh, it was stuff I’d learned from Doc when I was nine.
‘Not bad, not at all bad, only one small mistake.’
‘Please, sir, I disagree,’ I replied, my heart in my mouth. The three poems had been among Doc’s favourites and I knew them intimately. I was certain I’d not made a mistake.
‘Bravo, young man!’ Ichabod said. ‘You’re quite correct and, besides, you had the courage to say so.’ He pulled his glasses back to the top of his nose and wrote something down on a tablet of lined bright yellow paper.
The three examiners looked positively musty with learning and not at all like sporting types. But, after they’d chatted to me seemingly about this and that, they fixed on my boxing. Why, they wanted to know, was I obsessed with boxing? My submission showed me to be a brilliant student, a very talented musician, a good rugby player and a brilliant boxer. One of them read from the submission, ‘Has the ambition to become a professional boxer and to win the welterweight championship of the world!’ I could see he was quite taken aback.