Time to call a spade a spade

There are a few things that peeved me this week and they should be addressed sooner rather than later.
First, of course, is the issue of whether Harry Simon’s fight against Ruben Groenewald last weekend was legitimate.

Now, I’m not in a position to neither confirm nor dispute whether that fight was indeed cooked or not.
But what I can tell you is what the records show and that is that Simon is on his way out regardless of what his fans or even his management would like to believe.

At 37 years of age, Simon has come to the end of his boxing career and, by his own admission, has only four more fights in him at best.

A look at some of his peers from his heyday will confirm this.

Ronald ‘Winky’ Wright, from whom he claimed his first world title, and Felix Trinidad, who was one of the feared fighters during Simon’s prime, have both stepped out of the ring.

Thus, the reality is that it is Simon’s final chapters and the sooner both he and his fans realise this, the better for all of us.

The next issue on the agenda is the lacklustre manner in which sport administrators handle issues that make a sports reporter’s job easier.

At the Welwitschias match against the visiting South African Students on Saturday, none of the journalist received team sheets, with the result that even senior journalists had to run around asking for the names of the players involved.

How do the administrators thus expect reporters to do justice to their activities if we don’t have access to something so basic?

Some of the teams in the Namibian Premier League (NPL) are guilty of the same thing.

It is not uncommon to find journalists taking pictures of badly written team returns in order to at least have an idea as to which players turned out in a particular game.

Sometimes it is hard to decipher how certain names are spelled resulting in embarrassment for both the player and the journalist.

We, as sports reporters, are here to make things better but only if people meet us halfway.