Zlata Ibraimovic

Zlata Ibraimovic is apparently a celebrated footballer, captain of the Swedish team and plays for Paris St. Germain. I had never heard of him, but he is a big name in European football with a salary of 15 million Euros. Zlata Ibraimovic is not your typical Swedish name. There was an interesting article about him in this week's Sunday Star Times. It describes how, born to Bosnian and Croatian parents in Malmo, Sweden, he grew up in a home where his father listened to Croatian music, where the people they knew were Croatian and he didn't know how to socialize with the Swedish children he went to school with. He was an outstanding sportsman, a great footballer, but he didn't know how to talk to the beautiful Swedish girls around him. In the end he did marry a beautiful Swedish blond, but that is another story. 

My footballing career never reached the heights of that of Zlata Ibraimovic, but I could relate to his story. Living in Palmerston North as a teenager, most of the people we socialized with were Europeans, The Gabriels, from Berlin, the Sibels, the Goots, and the Wises from Poland, and I could include the Raines in this list. They were English, but ever so different from the New Zealanders we knew. Arch was a great talker, a cultured man in a British Fabian tradition. You could talk with him about politics, books, ideas, Bertrand Russell. There was nothing about him that was like the New Zealanders we came across, who talked about the weather, sport, anything to avoid touching on serious topics. We did have real New Zealand friends, Bert Bowman, a retired bus driver from Gisborne, who worked with my father. Bert and others gravitated to my parents, because they were such hospitable people, totally confident in who they were. They didn't try to be like others, assimilate, be real New Zealanders. They always believed that people have to accept them as they were. People liked my mother's Hungarian cooking and baking, my parents' unassuming life style, their European sense of  humour. The Jews of Palmerston North, some of whom had lived in New Zealand for generations, were not close friends. We were different from them. We were very European, proud of being European, proud of our culture. If I didn't know the latest pop songs or radio serials (there was no television), I did know the Beethoven concertos and the books of Thomas Mann. 

Good on Zlata Ibraimovic for succeeding so spectacularly in an alien world. This is one of the great things about football. The only thing that matters is whether you can score goals or stop the others from scoring.