It's a slam dunk that Paul Slabolepszy will have a soccer play up and running in 2010. "How can I not," he says.
His latest stage sport is golf, which he hasn't played since the age of 18 "but I know enough to get it right", he concedes. It all happened a while back when a golfing organisation asked him to do a 30-minute sketch.
"They loved it and it would have been silly not to develop it further," he says of Not the Big Easy, which Paul tested at a small theatre in Pretoria, The Pierneef, before racing off to the Witbank MacFest and now the more solid run at Sandton's Liberty Theatre on Thursday and running until February 3.
This one he did for himself following the successful Art of Charf he wrote for husband and wife team Wilson Dunster and Elize Cawood.
"I love writing with people in mind," he says and was thrilled to see how the couple took the play, made it their own and are charming audiences with their relationship antics.
For Paul, it's all about storytelling.
"I usually hear about an incident, and develop it into an event," he says.
And with Not The Big Easy in which Paul plays the "other" Ernie, it's all about a man hitting the second stage of his life, looking back and forward as he spends the afternoon looking for his fifth lost ball.
Paul's always had a way with these Sad Sack characters. He has the ability to capture both the angst and the pain and yet have you chuckling throughout. It's a perfect end-of-year play. And for those looking for more raucous laughter, Paul has another option.
He and Bill Flynn have again teamed up for the big screen with their next sporting movie, Running Riot. "I really think this one is better than the first," he says. They learnt a lot and added much more outside action than in the first.
It's fun to do and their hope is that it will catch on amongst especially teenagers and the 20-somethings.
"It's really the kind of thing that could spin off into a cult movie," says Paul, who was surprised recently when walking at Aardklop and three 18-year-old Afrikaans boys shouted "Hi Crispin!".
Crispin and Tjokkie are his and Bill's characters who first popped up in Heel Against The Head and now take the action further in Running Riot.
Both of these were first successful plays before Paul adapted them for the screen but the next one they hope to do (depending on the success of Running Riot) will be written specially for the screen.
Chatting about his writing, Paul says he takes stories from the South African landscape and his own life. In Not the Big Easy for example he tells a story of the golf course at Musina where he grew up.
"They really had a course that used doormats for tees," he says and all these idiosyncracies are what he captures in his writing.
Even the language is shaped to reflect the people he talks about and probably to. He loves infusing his script with a strong South African flavour which rolls easily off the tongue. "It's how people talk," he says.
Theatre is Paul's favourite hunting ground, yet he knows they have their work cut out to develop audiences. "There are so many distractions out there," he says.
Although Paul knows all about the highs and lows of a career in the arts, his daughter is also on stage these days. "I tried to discourage her," he says.
But he also knew that if you have the passion, that's the only way to go. Now when he talks of her fledgling career and the auditions she has to go to, there's a glint of pride in this papa's eye.
Well, why not, if Paul Slab is your dad, it has to be part of the genes!