The late Peter Fregene’s funeral rites ended last weekend. What you are reading now is the dialogue that emanated from my piece of last Friday. It’s a dialogue between a constant reader the one and only IBK and the columnist.

IBK: Prof TA, I read your nice, very fine, eulogy for, and obituary of, for Mr. Peter Fregene. As I read the essay, bits of (my child–ish) memory and Derridean sensibility crept up to me like, a wild cat preparing to pounce on prey. First, I used to think in my childhood that sportsmen would forever be physically immortal. I grew up hearing that physical exercise was healthy, indeed a way to remain in top physical and mental form. Physical health experts and professionals are still pushing that narrative on YouTube, Tiktok, and other kinds of social media.

Exercise in the form of footballing, gym sessions, running, walking and aerobic exuberance it is said would keep one away, far away, from physical, mental, or intellectual degeneration. So, when I read your column last Friday on the death of the highly acclaimed goalkeeper, I was, or became, alarmed for one reason, and one only— namely that a vigorously exercising man, a physically fit goalkeeper, or is it Gatekeeper, could just die, die just like that.

Perhaps the great Fregene had stopped being a goal-gatekeeper, had stopped physically exercising, or stopped being physically fit. The poor soul! But I had thought that once one was physically fit and sportingly vigorous or was a gym fanatic would still be just that well into his 80s and 90s.

Now I know, after reading your column, dear Prof TA, that that’s not the case. Yet for a strange reason, I felt a deep affinity with the deceased, the great goal-gatekeeper, Mr. Peter Fregene. I felt that I had or I should have met him, that is, before he died. Someone who kept waves and waves of intentionally furiously flying balls, flying like Russian missiles, from hitting the net, from landing in the net, should live on just to be much older than normal.

So, may Fregene’s memory linger through the ages. Nevertheless, dear Prof TA, I suspect that Fregene’s death has given you the occasion, the opportunity, and the enthusiasm to write. Derrida would argue that we use language (speak or write) only in response to an/the event— the event of a death, a love, a friendship, or such.

That is, had Peter Fregene not died, you would not have or have had a reason to write (about him or his demise). Prof, you are beautifully garrulous with the Sign, you’re also a technically linguistic terrorist but with a Derridean bent, namely you have or had turned Fregene into a metaphorical football: you balled and balled the flying Fregene into your own metaphoric event, the event of your Saussurian column.

Indeed, you killed Fregene semantically and hypostatically; you paid tribute to a man whose death allowed you, Prof, to (w)rite (about) his passing, you Prof TA, to “pass” him onto the immortal realm of the Signifier.

Mr. Peter Fregene has died in (actual) fact but he lives on in the nicely turbulent yet colourful synchronicity, in your ebullient cryptisation of a beautifully efficient goal-gatekeeper who served his country, his club, and his sporting community.

May Mr. Fregene’s memory, name, and Bust acquire an immortal presence in the Sports Hall of Fame, and especially now that Prof TA has obituarised the great sports man. To close my non-logocentric account of the Prof TA-Peter Fregene grammatological and dialectical poesis, I should applaud Prof TA’s immortalisation of the figure of the memorable sporting persona, and one who now “lives” in two places—both in the physical grave and in Prof TA’s Shuttle in the Trespass of the Sign. A Sign full of Hyperbolic Tricks, the tricks of language, imagery, and re-introduction.

IBK, I deployed my literary memory to bring to the fore for my readers the Nigerian international football personage Peter Fregene the flying cat of a goal-tender. And you have deployed your academic and scholarly intellection and locution to do him further football justice in support and appreciation of my flavourous imagination on his demise. What rapturous sensations of similar raptures from ends that join themselves at their joining points! Let’s see how IBK’s can enter the column for our readers’ further delight even though we grieve for the one, the super “goal-gate-keeper” of immense, immortal talent.

TA, your column on the man is a great tribute and obituary and eulogy rolled into one. Goal keepers are the game’s Gatekeepers. Yet if they do their work very well, they make the game both boring and uneventful since the spectators want to see the ball securely behind the net once in a while. Your column also brought Fregene in a post-death way all the way to Kano, Sokoto, and Jigawa and the hot, dusty, arid spaces of 12 degrees longitude. Ha ha ha! (I wasn’t talking about deserts)!

IBK, you were not talking about deserts! But Peter Fregene’s glorious fame extended (and still extends) beyond the latitudes and longitudes of the deserts and savannahs. From the Delta coasts and rain forests of Southern Nigeria, Peter Fregene lived (and still lives).

From Sapele, Warri, Benin, Port-Harcourt, Enugu, Owerri, Ibadan, Lagos, to the far North: Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto and Jigawa Fregene the un-boring magnificent goal protector will always exist in “a-post-death way”. IBK the Ibrahim Bello-Kano, I am also delighted that Peter Fregene will ever exist in your reading in “a-post-death way”.

IBK the Ibrahim Bello-Kano that is Ibrahim Bello-Kano’s talk on the immortal figure Peter Fregene has enriched the meaning of my literary memory and a full range of my emotion and perception of the supreme keeper of goal for further photographers and their mass spectrum of our sports personages.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.