Anele Ngcongca’s charm even left journalists speechless

When Mamelodi Sundowns invite journalists for a media day at their base in Chloorkop, we are often allowed to pick and choose which players to interview and more often than not, players shy away from talking to the media.

READ MORE: Mngqithi describes Anele as a ‘special child of the soil’

We then have to soften them up with gentle persuasion, until they agree to field some tough questions from the media. I remember one time where everyone wanted to speak to Anele Ngcongca, but he had already gone for a shower after training, and so we waited while interviewing some of his teammates.

After some time, he walked out of the dressing room heading towards his car and he had to walk through a sea of journalists, who all had a keen interest in talking to him at the time. As he walked towards us, he smiled, noticing that we had our microphones, recorders and cameras all on standby. He literally laughed by himself before he got to us.

He calmly greeted all of us, seemingly throwing bait but no one would bite it. We all knew that we wanted to speak to him – he was enjoying a great run of form at that time. Eventually someone gathered the courage to ask him to come over and field a few questions.

Ngcongca chose not to respond to that request, he just smiled at our direction and he continued to walk away very slowly, showing us he is not running away, but also not keen on speaking. Normally when this happens, we just walk up to a player and get on with the interview, whether they feel like it or not, we frankly don’t care – editors want the stories.

But with Anele, it was different. Not a single one of us had the courage and guts to bully him into speaking to us. We just stood there in complete awe of how he just smiled his way out of an interview, and that no one had the balls to chase him down. We spoke among ourselves, “ah bafathu, siyam’yeka vele?”, loosely translated to, ‘are we letting him go just like that? ‘He heard us mummering and he continued to smile, probably feeling untouchable. However, the great gesture, much to the annoyance of many reporters, is that he took time to say goodbye to the group of us as he waved and smiled.

That was by far the friendliest snub of an interview I have ever seen. A stroll paired with a smile and a wave goodbye is unheard of. We did, of course get countless interviews with him on other days and he was a true gentleman of the game.

Rest in eternal peace, Anele “Gugulethu” Ngcongca.

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