BACK WHEN ALL CRITICS HAD TO FRONT THOSE THEY SLAMMED
“So do I see an embarrassed face at the back of the room there?” Well, of course I was embarrassed because everyone in the room, meaning local and international media, turned to look at me. When they should really have been focusing on the World Cup semifinal that was coming up in a few days between the Springboks and France in Durban.
It was 1995, the speaker was the late Kitch Christie, this nations first World Cup winning coach. I didn’t expect him to be a World Cup winning coach for lots didn’t seem right in the buildup, such as the axing of that fine Bok No 8 and talismanic Western Province captain Tiaan Strauss.
On the eve of the tournament I wrote a preview that ended with something like the following: “Expectations that the Boks will actually win the World Cup are a bit pie in the sky and I will happily eat all the buck manure that falls out of the sky above Ellis Park if the Boks do get across the line as winners on 24 June.”
Ouch! It wasn’t just Kitch, speaking slightly before the event, that let me have it, but also the readers of the Cape Argus, who jammed the switchboard at Cape newspapers after Joel Stransky had kicked the extra time goal that made the Boks World Cup winners for the first time.
At the start of the World Cup some of the Transvaal Boks had taken me on about something I had written about Kitch’s selections, so it was a fun time, just as it was at the next World Cup four years later, when I couldn’t avoid overdoing the criticism of the then Bok coach Nick Mallett for dropping his captain Gary Teichmann in the buildup to the 1999 tournament in Wales.
I thought of all of this when this week the DHL Stormers director of rugby John Dobson wondered aloud what the world was coming to, referencing the social media attacks on Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Salmaan Moerat.
I wrote some stories when I was young that I am embarrassed about now, and I probably was too hard on both Kitch and Nick, but there was one thing that both me and the other mainstream writers had to do in those days that the keyboard warriors of this age don’t have to do - I had to face up!
As did every other rugby writer who had to keep a stream of copy going for demanding bosses and a demanding audience and therefore had to interact on a daily basis with those rugby people who had been targeted by our pens.
“Die pen is magtiger as die sword!” (The pen is mightier than the sword). The late Tommy Loubscher, the strongly built prop from Velddrif on the Cape West Coast, used to say that as a greeting every time he saw me. Well, yes, but there was a also a responsibility that went with it and you were held to account.
You had to face up to what you had said and take it on the chin, and having studied journalism at Rhodes, where journalism ethics were a big part of the curriculum, I always knew where the line was. That’s not to say it wasn’t overstepped occasionally.
These days there is no line, and while I wrote in my match report to the game that I was surprised the Stormers didn’t drop Feinberg-Mngomezulu into the pocket to attempt a winning drop goal against Toulon, that was not something I blamed the player for. Like appears to have happened, in vitriolic fashion on social media. Often from people who hide their identity behind nom-de plumes.
The advent of social media has made life so much more difficult for coaches and players than it used to be when Mallett or Christie could identify their attacker and have it out with him.
As for the journalists, in my first year of rugby writing Dick Cocks, a Wallaby flanker and former Natal player who wrote an amusing but at times pretty acerbic column in the Natal Mercury, and was also a Natal selector, gave me some good advice - “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.” Meaning take the backlash. There’s too much anonymity to those who do the attacking these days for that advice to seem meaningful.
THE DAY BORDER BEAT THE ALL BLACKS
Driving through East London last week in accessing the R72 to Gqeberha via Port Alfred, there was no sign anywhere of its new name. Which may be understandable given that the name change decision was only made in February. But given how long it has taken Port Elizabeth to be phased out of road signs, it might be a while before we see much indication that the city my varsity mates who lived there called ‘Slummies’ is now KuGompo City.
A drive through KuGompo City (there, I’m being politically correct by calling it by its new name), always gets the memory going. Apart from personal memories from the late 1980s when I was courting my soon to be wife, who although born in Scotland lived in King Williams Town (Qonce), there have been some biggish rugby matches played there over the years.
I well remember the late Michael Toms, a cricket and rugby commentator with dulcet tones who was based in Durban but also covered Border when the game was important enough to be covered ball by ball, in the mid-1980s ending his summary of a day of domination by Border of the West Indies rebel cricket team by saying “Like the day that Border beat the All Blacks, this day will be remembered for a long time”.
A friend’s father was part of the Border team that beat the All Blacks. That win came in 1949, with Border winning 9-0, so avenging a 22-3 defeat in their first ever meeting in what was then definitely East London in 1928.
BACK WHEN THERE WAS MORE TRAIN THAN TRAINING
“When we were young, we had it tough…” Okay, let’s not get into that British comedy skit that takes the one-upmanship of older blokes reminiscing about their youth to a ridiculous level, but for all the rightful concern about the load of the modern professional player, who gets paid a mint for his minutes on the field, the boys from back in the day did have it tough in different ways.
That 1949 All Black touring squad experienced a nightmare tour in terms of results - apart from their 4-0 series loss to a Springbok team captained by the father of the 1970s Bok captain and World Cup 1995 manager Morne du Plessis, Felix, they also lost three provincial games and drew four others.
They actually played Border twice on that tour, with the second game, played on the same Recreation Ground in East London just under three months after the historic first match, ending in a 6-all draw.
Three months? Yes, they did have it tough in those days. The All Blacks would have spent weeks at sea getting here, so to make it a worthwhile trip they stayed a long time and played what today would be considered an entire season of games.
The tour started in Cape Town on 31 May against Western Province Universities, with a two point win, and ended on 21 September, nearly four months later, with an 11-all draw in the same city against Cape Town Clubs.
There were 25 games in all, and in looking at their schedule it shows why the travel was such a talking point at the time. They travelled everywhere by train. The first part of the tour, which took in Cape Town, Wellington Oudtshoorn,, Port Elizabeth and then East London might not appear so bad, except I know there aren’t direct rail links between all those cities and probably wouldn’t have been then.
Then it was on to Durban to play Natal, which by rail would have meant they travelled inland before heading back towards the coast. In a week, there were times when they did considerably more days travelling than were available for training.
Quite literally, most of their time was spent on the train, with the furthest point from their arrival port (Cape Town) on the tour being Salisbury, now Harare, although it was in Bulawayo that they famously lost to Rhodesia in the first of two meetings in the space of three days. Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) won 10-8 in the first game and the clash in Salisbury was drawn 3-all.
The late Bok wing James Small, who hated flying, would have loved that tour, but the flying makes the modern mission so much easier. In the Greatest Rivalry tour later this year, the New Zealanders are only going to Cape Town, Gauteng and Durban. It’s going to be a tough tour for them, make no mistake, but I’d understand were any of those Kiwis from 1949 still alive if they proclaimed their trip to be far tougher.
RUSSELL NEARLY BEAT THE LIONS
There’ve been some interesting games played in East London in more recent times. The first tour game of the post-isolation era, one I was at, was played at the Basil Kenyon Stadium when France toured here in 1993. I was there to see a South Africa A side (the Bok second string), coached by the newly appointed Bok coach Ian McIntosh, destroy a highly rated French team that actually went on to narrowly win the two match series.
It was a rousing start to the McIntosh era. The players were in a celebratory mood. We were in the pub on the beachfront near the aquarium and I recall Guy Kebble, a powerful, behemoth of a prop taking me under his arm into an unmanned bar area and filling a large beer mug with ice and an alcoholic beverage.
I’d have been able to tell you which beverage it was if I got to drink it, but I didn’t. In clinking my glass and saying cheers, Guy’s movements were so enthusiastic and powerful that he smashed my glass, which together with the ice and whatever liquid was in got spattered across the floor.
It was me who was a bit over the top some 13 years later, when the Boks smashed Uruguay 134-3. It was the game where Tonderai Chavangha, the pacy wing initially from Zimbabwe, scored six tries.
I was on a driving trip from Cape Town to Durban to run the Comrades a few days later, and had been advised by club mates to make sure I went to bed early as I had a long next leg to my journey - I’d only arrived in East London just before the game - to Durban the next day, and then it was Comrades.
Well, let’s not go into detail, but somebody must have doctored my drink because I stayed out all night. Jake White, then the Bok coach and now probably wanting to get as far as he can away from East London after falling out with the headmaster of Selborne College, was sitting outside the hotel when I arrived back at about 6am.
He was confounded when I told him I was going to try and get a quick hour of sleep (I didn’t manage it) before driving to Durban, eight hours away, to run Comrades. I did finish the Comrades, but nowhere near my target time.
But before that, in 1997, there was quite a memorable game in East London. The British and Irish Lions were touring, and they stopped in Slummies early in the trip. Some may recall that in the last edition of this column I mentioned stopping in East London in 2019 to interview Russell Bennett, who played in some of the test matches in that series.
Russell also played against the Lions for Border, and it was a very close run thing for the tourists, who scored the winning try in the 73rd minute to prevail 18-14.
That wasn’t so long ago and yet these days Border rugby is off the map, just like the name of the city will one day be, which is sad considering how many players come out of that region. One of those being Makazole Mapimpi, who’s home town of Tsholomnqa, as I promised I would, I drove past on my drive from Buccaneers Beach Lodge back to Cape Town via a night in Jeffreys Bay last week.
As discussed previously, there are many points of reference to rugby players when driving through the Eastern Cape, both past and present, and it really is a shame there isn’t a viable top provincial team representing the region. There must be lots of youngsters who don’t want to be based far from home who slip through that crack in the system.
CHIPPIE A PART OF STORMERS FURNITURE THAT WILL BE MISSED
He is probably quite happy to have spent the last 15 years living in Cape Town, which is now his home, but one of the products of East London who could have made an alternative career nearer home were there a viable professional team there is the Stormers’ 35-year-old hooker Scarra Ntubeni.
Sadly, Ntubeni is coinciding his farewell home appearance for the Stormers after a stellar career with a sad week that will be rounded off by the commemoration of Chippie Solomon, the likeable and charismatic long serving Stormers team manager who passed away unexpectedly last weekend.
It is at moments like this you remember that there is more to life than rugby, the winning and losing, and it puts things in perspective. As players and coaches have said this week, it is hard to imagine the Stormers without Solomon being somewhere there in the mix.
He was manager for so long, starting way back in 2004 when Corne Krige would have been captain and Gert Smal the coach, and as Ntubeni put it, he saw so much happen and so many people come and go in that period.
Lots of stories have been related, with Scarra referencing his foul mouth and his first interaction, which was when Chippie phoned him and asked “Where are you, motherfxxxer?” Scarra was at home in the Eastern Cape and was instructed to get on a bus, with his first meeting with Chippie being when he picked him up at the Cape Town Station.
The story Chippie related to me that sticks most in the memory was one he told me about bumping into some people he knew in the team hotel in Pretoria before a game against the Bulls. They wished him luck and were clearly Stormers supporters, and yet they were wearing Bulls jerseys.
“What’s going on here?” “Oh, don’t worry, we do have Stormers jerseys on,” came the response, “we will just take these off once the Stormers are doing well.” They lifted the Bulls jerseys to show Stormers jerseys underneath.
Chippie was a character and the heart and soul of the Stormers. It is just a pity the game is kicking off at 13.45 or I am sure Capetonians would otherwise have turned up in great numbers to the Connacht game to both commemorate his contribution to the Stormers and that of Ntubeni.