Black scribes now at home, but it’s a strange place
On Tuesday I hosted a panel at the ParkWords Literary Festival, a day of celebrating books and storytelling, and casting an eye on the things that ail and uplift this fair land.
It is a community day when half of Tyrone Avenue in Parkview is closed to traffic, and the restaurants set up tables on the road for the wine and coffee drinkers.
My panel was to discuss the soon-to-be released book by Business Day rugby writer Liam Del Carme called Winging It: On tour with the Boks.
It is, as Liam writes, a book that aims to place “the reader in the boots of a rugby writer on tour with the Springboks”.
Liam is, naturally, on tour with the Boks at the World Cup in Japan, so his friends and colleagues, Stuart Hess, cricket writer at The Star, and Simnikiwe Xabanisa, now a freelancer with City Press after many years at the Sunday Times, stood in as we went through his book and delved into broader issues in sports journalism.
I feature in a few stories in the book, having been to a number of Rugby World Cups with Liam and having known him since 1998 when I was sports editor of The Sunday Independent and employed him as our rugby writer. Sim also features, as do many of those who have spent time on the road running after the Boks over the past few decades.
There are an extraordinary number of tales of drinking, which is to be expected.
Liam tells the stories in crisp detail, and has done his due diligence in confirming and getting details on others.
Some of those involved have hazy memories, and some names have been made hazy to protect the not-so-innocent. I won’t be telling any of the stories here in detail.
The book is still a work in progress as his publisher wants tales from the current World Cup in it. I received three early, unedited copies last Friday and spent spare moments rushing through it over the first weekend of the World Cup.
If you know Liam, you may have heard many of the stories over beers. No marriages were harmed in the writing of it.
On Tuesday, Stu, Sim and I got to talking about a chapter in the book that is entitled “Being Black”.
There was a time not so long ago that writers of colour, to use a clumsy phrase, were scarce in South African press boxes. Stu, Liam and Sim were among the vanguard and have experienced racism from fans, players, coaches and even their own colleagues.
The walk through the crowds at Loftus were always the worst, when they would be told the “football is tomorrow”. They had to fight both for acceptance and to have their voices heard.
They had to deal with fans, players and coaches who thought black writers had a lot to learn, and also editors who believed the same thing and tried to mould their words and thoughts to fit in with the establishment.
Much, thankfully, has changed in the past 20 years, but racism in the “white” sports still lingers.
I celebrated my 40th birthday in an Australian bar in Montpellier 12 years ago today. Sim was with me, as were most of the SA press pack, including Vusi Kama, the Bok media man who I studied with at Rhodes.
On Tuesday, Sim remembered South Africans from outside our group giving him grief about his dreadlocks and, by association, the colour of his skin on that night.
He also remembered the press pack closing ranks when on tour when racism happened, standing up for their colleagues and occasionally suggesting that the argument be taken outside to be sorted out in an oldfashioned way.
We three agreed that sports journalism in SA is in a strange place, where quantity has overtaken quality. The immediacy of the need for information has rolled over the craft of storytelling in sports, where reporting and repeating overwhelms the need for writing. There is less money to send sportswriters on tours these days. The press pack is smaller than before.
The days of grand tours, of the experiences Liam has written about, are few and far between, and that is sad for sports journalism and a disservice to readers.
● Liam Del Carme’s book will be officially launched on November 15 at the Pirates Sports Club in Greenside, Johannesburg.