THERE is a particular kind of quiet that falls over a room when a rematch is about to begin, the kind that settled over Masvingo on Saturday night, as Stephen Paswani chalked his cue and looked across the table at the man who had, until that moment, owned a piece of his story.
Two years earlier, in Greendale, Godknows Masona, “Sir Gode” to those who know him back home in Mutare, had knocked Paswani out of the competition. It was the sort of defeat that lingers, the kind a player carries quietly from region to region, tournament to tournament, waiting for the table to turn. On Saturday, in front of a crowd that had shrugged off the cold to watch, it finally did.
It turned all the way. 5-0. A whitewash.
“Revenge, revenge, revenge,” was all Paswani could offer reporters afterwards, three words doing the work of two years.
Even he seemed slightly stunned by how completely it had gone his way.
“He is a good player, he rode his luck from the initial rounds and being a final I expected to win, but a 5-0 whitewash is not something that I had envisaged would happen,” he admitted, generous in victory to an opponent he had just dismantled.
If there was a lesson in Paswani’s win, he made sure it reached beyond the table. Thanking Delta and the Carling Black Label brand for the platform, he framed the tournament as something bigger than sport. “With the scourge of drug and substance abuse rearing its ugly head on the youth, tournaments like these keep us safe from idleness, for an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.”
While Paswani was writing his revenge story, Alice Chiota was quietly writing a sequel. The Chitungwiza cueist arrived in Masvingo already carrying last year’s crown, won in Bulawayo, and she wasted no time reminding everyone of it, declaring, in the days before her first match, simply: ndechangu ichi. This one is mine.
Diana Kabasa, representing Glen Norah, made her work for it. Chiota recovered from a 2-1 deficit before closing out a 5-2 win becoming back-to-back champion.
“It was a tight contest as usual, the ladies are playing this game at the highest level and it wasn’t a stroll in the park,” Chiota reflected afterwards, careful not to undersell an opponent who had pushed her.
What drove her, she said, was the taste of last year’s win still fresh enough to chase.
“Having won the tournament last year I was motivated to make it two in two, that’s where I derived all the inspiration from.”
Then came the moment that turned a pool trophy into something closer to a life update. Clutching her US$2 500 prize, Chiota did not talk about the game anymore. She talked about bricks.
“I’m now a landlord,” she said.
“I’m now going to finish the construction of my house.”
It was a small sentence carrying a large amount of Zimbabwean reality, where a cue, a steady hand, and a run of form at a bar-league pool tournament can, quite literally, put a roof over your head.
Between them, Paswani and Chiota captured the two purest emotions sport can offer: revenge finally settled, and a title successfully defended. Around them, 80 finalists from 31 regions had spent a season proving that this tournament, now in its latest edition under the Carling Black Label banner, has grown well beyond a bar-room pastime.
For Masona, there will be other nights, other tables. For Kabasa, the margin was closer than the scoreline suggested. But for Paswani and Chiota, Masvingo will be remembered as the night old scores were settled and old crowns were kept, one match, and one house, at a time.
