A song for bold and colourful writer Shaun Johnson
It took a few days of searching the shelves in my office to find a book I stole a long, long time ago. It is You ’ re Not Singing Anymore!, “a riotous celebration of football chants and the culture that spawned them”, by Adrian Thrills, the Englishman who began as a music writer, went into football journalism full time and is now back in music.
It is a cracking book of the history, songs and the fans and moments that made them. Inscribed on the first page of the book is the name of the man who bought it and a mark of how long I have had it.
“Shaun Johnson. London 1998.” Johnson, the journalist and author who died on Monday, had brought it home from his trip to watch Bafana at the 1998 World Cup in France.
He made the grave mistake of dropping it off at the sports department of The Sunday Independent on his return. He never got it back.
Johnson filed glorious copy from France, his great talent being an ability to recognise the moment, give it context and depth, and write it beautifully. He could find the absurd and the poignant, the mundane and the extraordinary, and he could stitch them together seamlessly.
France was not his first “sports” trip as a journalist, though as a football fan who had played the sport at Rhodes University, it read like a labour of love.
He was The Star’s political editor when he was sent with the SA cricket team to their momentous first tour of the Caribbean in April 1992.
It had taken some political manoeuvring to make the tour happen given how the countries of the West Indies had fought so hard and stridently against apartheid.
Johnson’s writing was, yet again, astonishingly good, but he worked hard to make sure he got the stories and details few others did.
When Ali Bacher, then CEO of the United Cricket Board, went to visit the grave of Sir Frank Worrell, the first black man to captain the West Indies, early one morning in Barbados, Johnson was the only journalist who went.
The other cricket writers, recorded Rodney Hartman in Ali: The life of Ali Bacher did not go and Johnson would go on to “record the behind-the-scenes stories of SA’s first short tour of the West Indies in April 1992 with bold and colourful strokes of his pen”.
There are, sadly, none of those stories in Strange Days Indeed, Johnson’s collection of columns. There is a time gap in the book where they should be.
Perhaps one day I ’ ll hunt them down in the Johannesburg Library.
Hartman wrote: “In Port of Spain, Trinidad, the intrepid Johnson found the average cricket fan keen to see the South Africans. One of them asked him quite pointedly: ‘Where’ sa Dakka Bakka? Where’ sa Whistle?’ and here we have to trust his translation of: ‘Where’s Doctor Bacher? Where’s [Kepler] Wessels?’”
At the end of 1994 Johnson, with his old friend Chris Whitfield and veteran journalist and editor Neville Adlam, were the three-man panel that interviewed me for a position at The Star.
It was hard not to be in awe of Johnson. I read him incessantly. He had an aura, but he was also incredibly kind.
He liked three things about me, he said.
One, I had worked at community newspapers in my first job. Two, I had studied journalism at Rhodes. And three, I played football at Rhodes and The Star’s football team needed new blood.
Whitfield told me this week that when I left the room after that interview, Johnson said: “Well, he’s got the job.”
Then Whitfield added: “He remained a fan of your writing long afterwards.” That praise will never leave me.
I went past the Radium Beer Hall on Wednesday, a pub where Johnson would drink with his friend and the owner, the inimitable Manny Cabeleira.
There are two framed pieces by Johnson hanging on the wall along the little passage that leads to the side of the stage. One is perhaps the best piece about the Radium ever written, the other a political column about Manny’s theory of when the 1994 elections should be held.
On a wall not far away from Johnson’s columns is one by myself, written during the 2010 World Cup. It gives me no small amount of pride to be able to be up on a wall of the greatest pub in the world alongside a truly great South African writer.
They were playing Van Morrison at the Radium on Wednesday, a greatest hits CD on a loop.
“And it stoned me to my soul,” sang Morrison, summing up the feeling of many on Monday when Johnson died, but like the title of the book I stole from him, there were few who felt like singing this week.
His writing, though, will sing in us forever.