For cricket fans, it's a delicious irony that South Africa is trying to be the voice of reason in the sport's latest political showdown. Until little over a decade ago, the country was cricket's pariah, barred from international competition for refusing to play against nonwhite teams. Now, as another African nation Zimbabwe faces isolation ahead of cricket's quadrennial World Cup, South Africa is calling for politics to be kept out of the sport. A new boycott, says Ali Bacher, captain of the South African team during the wilderness years, "would not just be a bad day for cricket, it...
