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"&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere in Mpumalanga, on the road to Mala Mala, the terrain began to look vaguely Minnesota \u2014 \u201CForeign but familiar,\u201D said my brother-in-law Mike, perhaps because his Twins cap was reflected in the van window.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We were 8,917 miles from Target Field, but everything in South Africa could be converted to Minnesota. Windhoek, the Namibian lager, was \u201Cmore Grain Belt Premium than Grain Belt Nordeast,\u201D said my brother Tom, two days into a safari, when it was becoming hard to tell the animals \u2014&amp;nbsp;Oxpecker, Black Rhino, Barn Owl \u2014 from Target Field craft beers. Each sighting of a steenbok in the bush called to mind the former Twins catcher Terry Steinbach, to say nothing of the former Twins outfielder Randy Bush.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This&amp;nbsp;was to be expected when my father turned 80 in June and 25 of his kids and grandkids and offspring-in-law celebrated with him in Africa. Our family tree is spread wide, like the umbrella trees of Kruger National Park, but its roots are in Bloomington, Minn., onetime home of the Twins, who are never far from our minds in summer, even when summer is a South African winter.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Our trip began in Cape Town, on its famous Victoria &amp;amp; Alfred Waterfront, with three members of our party in Twins caps and a fourth in a Twins T-shirt exchanging nods with a passing stranger in a 1990s\u2011vintage Twins windbreaker. In those nods was a shared history of men named Mongo and Bombo and Lombo, as well as the shared malaise of the 2014 team, mired in the crawl space of the American League Central.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over lunch in an old Dutch winery, talk naturally turned to Old Dutch potato chips \u2014 a Minnesota staple whose Rip-L Chips come in a two-pack called the Big Twin \u2014 which led to talk of another Minnesota brand endorsed by the biggest Twin of all. \u201CDid you hear?\u201D Mike said. \u201CKemps dropped Mauer.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kemps, as every Minnesotan knows, is a purveyor of milk and ice cream, and Joe Mauer, the Twins\u2019 catcher turned first baseman, is milk and ice cream incarnate: Homegrown and calcium-rich, he had been featured on Kemps billboards \u00ADbeneath the caption TALL, DARK &amp;amp; WHOLESOME.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But a series of injuries and a payroll-crippling salary of $23 million have turned the kind of people who phone into radio stations against Mauer, who has maintained his equanimity and sideburns, if not his otherworldly hitting. In ice cream terms, his persona has passed from vanilla to rocky road, and Kemps did not re-up his deal when it expired at the end of 2013.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To us, though, Mauer still embodies the best qualities of a Joe \u2014 one part Joe Cool, two parts Regular Joe \u2014 and to my 10-year-old nephew Joe Kolar, whose rookie season of life coincided with Mauer\u2019s rookie season as a Twin, he remains Our Joe. \u201CIt\u2019s fun sharing a name with such a good player,\u201D said Joe, who has a Mauer poster on his bedroom wall in Minnesota, a state from which I never really achieved escape velocity.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And so we\u2019re still paying attention to the 2014 Twins, who have not aroused much excitement, even among those of us who know skipper Ron Gardenhire is an anagram of Groin Hardener. My brother Tom is a Minneapolis resident who still bikes with his family of four to Target Field, where they occupy good seats while he partakes of the park\u2019s nearly two dozen craft beers. \u201CI think of it as a very steep cover charge,\u201D he said of his tickets. \u201CI know the names of the players but almost nothing else about them.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;As he spoke, we were failing to take notice of a passing rhino at the Mala Mala game reserve on the Sand River. \u201CIt looks like the Minnesota River between Bloomington and Mankato,\u201D Tom said.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;And so it went for two weeks. On Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was \u00ADimprisoned for 18 of his 27 years in captivity, I was led into the great man\u2019s tiny cell by another former \u00ADinmate, political prisoner 38/84, \u00ADKgotso R.J. (Dede) Ntsoelengoe, whose fight against apartheid got him sentenced, as a 20-year-old in 1984, to 25 years on this windswept outpost looking back at Table Mountain.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps missing the point, I said that Pule Patrick (Ace) Ntsoelengoe of the Minnesota Kicks in the North American Soccer League was my favorite player as a kid. They shared a stadium with the Twins and...\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CYou know him!\u201D Dede said of his distant relative. \u201CAnd you said our name right!\u201D (It\u2019s pronounced net-so-LEN-gay.) \u201CWhen he was playing soccer, I was busy with the struggle,\u201D he said, \u201Cbut he once told me that Americans didn\u2019t know how to pronounce his name. They called him Not-So-Long-Ago.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What helped sustain Dede in prison were what he called the Four Pillars of Prison Life. \u201CThe first of these,\u201D he said, \u201Cis sports.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I looked around at our motley collection of Twins caps (and Blackhawks T\u2011shirts and Notre Dame sweatshirts), and Dede said, \u201CSundays, we were confined to our cells morning till night. But on Saturdays, we played soccer from eight to two, and if we ever talked sports, it would descend into chaos.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;That chaos is a common language, so that my extended family shares not just a surname and pipe-cleaner calves but also an ability to imitate Rod Carew\u2019s batting stance, as well as an abiding affinity for the late South African midfielder who played at Metropolitan Stadium when the Twins were on the road and the grass was taken over by the Kicks.\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;\u201CAce Ntsoelengoe!\u201D Dede Ntsoelengoe said on a rainy morning in his former prison yard halfway around the world. \u201CYou have made my day.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Twins, alas, were not making ours. They lost their fifth straight game that night, 2-1 in Boston, as a furtive glance at my phone would reveal. Back in the States, I still follow them, largely through my dad, whose nightly phone calls from the Twin Cities to Connecticut carry a high-volume backing track of Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven calling the games on Fox Sports North. Dad is the third man in the booth, always saying the same thing: That the Twins don\u2019t have the starting pitching to compete (even though Phil Hughes has been a happy surprise this season).\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;My father can be an unreliable narrator. We\u2019d been chatting for half an hour one night in 2007 \u2014 the ball game humming in the \u00ADbackground \u2014 when an ESPN ticker informed me that the Minnesota pitcher was perfect through eight. \u201CWhy didn\u2019t you tell me Scott Baker has a perfect game going?\u201D I shouted down the line, and my father replied in a small, chastened voice, \u201CI didn\u2019t wanna jinx him.\u201D\r\n\r\n&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dad has a penchant for butchering player names \u2014 I will always think of the White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko as Paul Kernocko \u2014 but he loves the Twins and I love him, and my greatest regret in life is that when the Kiss Cam found me at the Metrodome, I turned to my left and kissed my wife when I should have turned to my right and kissed my dad.\r\n&lt;/p&gt;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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