Illuminating Lives
Page 20
This was not, however, the way that Craven saw the situation in February 1990. He had an imperfect grasp of the magnitude of the change required in South Africa, and this had a bearing on his failure to understand the precise linkages between rugby and politics. For Craven, the abolition of apartheid primarily involved the scrapping of social and economic discriminatory practices. It did not entail a universal franchise, majority rule and a totally new political dispensation. Publicly, Craven repeated his view, which, given the circumstances at the time, appeared as antediluvian – namely, that the ‘government had to be very careful about the vote. There is one thing that the government must never do, and that is to give everybody an equal vote.’17 He could see no reason why South Africa could not return to rugby as usual; apartheid, as far as he was concerned, was officially abolished and international tours could be resumed. The fact that a new political order still had to be negotiated and that the transitional process was fraught with pitfalls and possible reversals was immaterial to him.
Sportspeople in anti-apartheid organisations had to take such political realities into account; sport had been an important weapon in their arsenal, and to surrender it without being able to show tangible gains would have been politically unacceptable. The SARB had to show its commitment to change. ‘This is the time’, it was argued, ‘for the SARB to display its sincerity, to catch the moment.’18
The moment, however, meant different things for different people. For the greater part of 1990 and well into 1991, a series of acrimonious exchanges followed. Exploratory talks between the SARB and the NOSC ground to a halt amid accusations and counter-accusations of intransigence, insensitivity and opportunism. While other sporting codes managed to merge with relative ease, rugby remained the odd one out. ‘Perhaps it is the aggressive nature of the game that causes rugby officials to fight,’ one journalist observed wryly.19 But central to the impasse were two almost diametrically opposed perceptions of the role of sport in society. Craven tended to deny the social significance of rugby as portrayed by his opponents, and he consistently argued against what he considered to be outside interference in rugby matters. For the NOSC and the anti-apartheid South African Rugby Union, there was not such a stark dividing line between sport and society. Sport was seen as ‘inter-linked with the total social formation’ and had to ‘reflect society’.20
Gradually, though, pressure mounted on Craven to come to terms with the new forces at work, and even the much-revered Nelson Mandela was roped in to prevail on him to come to an agreement regarding the format and powers of a refashioned rugby federation. Craven was averse to being dictated to, but he was also pragmatic enough to realise that without some strategic repositioning, South African rugby would not get back into the international fold. Eventually, a new unified sporting body, SARFU, was launched early in 1992, and with that the moratorium on tours that Craven’s opponents had insisted upon was at long last dropped.
With the return to international rugby, Craven’s stormy era of involvement in the politics of sport had come full circle. Although he had summarily dismissed anti-apartheid critiques of South African rugby in the early 1970s, he finally came to terms with these arguments some twenty years later. In part, such developments can certainly be attributed to wider contextual changes, but they can also be viewed as part of a pattern of other anomalies in Craven’s life. It can, among other features, be traced back to his less-than-promising school days, which were followed by his obtaining three doctoral degrees at university; his position for more than three decades in charge of what many regarded as the prime Afrikaner game, despite his uneasy relationship with establishment Afrikaner institutions; his potentially fragile health, while he nevertheless excelled in an extremely robust sport; and, more recently, his name still being honoured by students of his former residence, although there are also others to whom he is merely the dude with the dog. The most poignant vignette, however, is that in the days before his death in 1993, despite being clear-headed, he had lost all interest in the game to which he had devoted his life. He even showed no inclination to watch the Springboks on television, in what must have been a first for him. It was, in more ways than one, his final contradiction.
Further reading
Danie Craven, being the person that he was, has not failed to attract biographers. Of particular value in writing this piece was the exhaustive work by Paul Dobson, The Life of Danie Craven (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1994). Other useful books are Ted Partridge, A Life in Rugby (Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1991) and George Gerber, Dok Craven: Agter die Kap van die Byl (Stellenbosch: US Press, 2000). References to additional material can be found in the endnotes.
Eddie Barlow: As big and bold as life itself
Luke Alfred
* * *
Before Eddie Barlow came along in the early 1960s, South African cricket suffered from a bad case of colonial cringe, a kind of hat-clutching baaskap. It dined at cricket’s high table with England and Australia but, in truth, it was a country cousin, tolerated by politeness and convention. Barlow, the much-loved youngest son of a lower-middle-class Pretoria family, changed all that. He believed he could do anything with a bat or ball, and his boundless self-belief became a sort of willed prophecy. He was successful as a cricketer because he believed he could be successful, and, because he believed he could be successful, he was. As an opening batsman, he argued that fast bowlers should not simply be tamed, they should be confronted; as a bowler, he was a partnership-wrecker par excellence. Many conditions and many great South African cricketers coalesced in the early to mid-1960s to drag South African cricket out of its apologetic period, but Barlow was the golden key, unlocking the door to a completely different world.
Barlow was not the best South African cricketer of his generation. He had none of Barry Richards’ fragile grace and none of Graeme Pollock’s lazy power. There was none of the whirlwind Mike Procter about Barlow. He didn’t, for example, break down doors as Procter did, sending an innings to its death in a tailspin. Although a reliable and quick slip fielder, he might not have been as slick a catcher as Tiger Lance. As a captain, he wasn’t as calm – or as patient – as was Ali Bacher. He was fervent and emotional, with a gambler’s carelessness. This perhaps answers the question of why he never captained South Africa, as he and many others felt he ought to have done.
For all this, Barlow had a galvanising energy. As a player, you followed him, often up Cape Town’s Table Mountain, on one of his legendary training runs, as he swooped to the back of the bunch to cajole the stragglers. He was, to borrow a phrase from the famous English cricket writer Neville Cardus, like the celebrated Victorian cricketer W.G. Grace, ‘institutional; people regarded him and discussed him just as they regarded and discussed Mr Gladstone and the National Debt’.1 Barlow was indeed an institution. Many boys, now men, and many men now gone, have taken the words Barlow het verklaar (Barlow has declared) to the grave with them. With Barlow at the rudder of his beloved Western Province, Cape Town offices emptied on Monday afternoons. Fans used to come from as far away as Stellenbosch and Paarl, fathers picking up sons outside the school gates to rush them to the oaks of Newlands and the mountain for a hops-scented afternoon of cricket.
The trains to Newlands station from town were packed with fans listening to the radio commentary so that they knew exactly where the match stood when they arrived. Fritz Bing, a former player who sat on the Western Province Cricket Association committee at the time, remembers the buzz: ‘Five, six, seven thousand people came into the ground from tea-time onwards. The coloureds loved him. The Afrikaners loved him. His whole nature appealed to them.’2
Basking in adoration: Eddie Barlow signing autographs for young fans in the 1960s
The former England cricketer Robin Jackman, who played a handful of matches with Barlow during the 1971–72 season in Western Province before securing himself R300 plus perks in Rhodesia rather than the R200 per season he had been receiving, remembers Barlow the hustler from
the perspective of the opposition. ‘If you were batting last and four down at 6 p.m. – and remember you bowled 20 overs in the last hour in those days, so you could get 35, 36 overs post-tea … you almost invariably lost,’ he recalls. ‘He bowled himself to a close-in field and he didn’t give you too many that you could leave alone. Throw in the spinners from the other end and a couple of home town decisions, and that was it, you lost the game.’3
‘Edgar John’, as Charles Fortune amiably called Barlow in his SABC radio commentary, was a child of the Second World War. He was born on 12 August 1940, the son of John (otherwise known as ‘Pops’) and Dorothy, and younger brother of the protective Norman, who was four and a half years his senior. Mainly because both his parents were working in Pretoria and the family couldn’t afford a nanny, Eddie was enrolled at the fledgling Waterkloof House Preparatory School early, aged four and a half. Ever caring, Norman held his hand on the way to school. Once colloquially called ‘Ruddles’ because it was apparently started by the Ruddles brothers, the school’s motto was ‘Work hard, play straight’. Barlow did a bit of both. Then again, he was a free spirit. If it didn’t make sense to play straight, why bother? He was never one to be suffocated by orthodoxy, if orthodoxy didn’t make sense.
There was a hearty gregariousness to home life. A good middle-distance athlete in his youth, it was from his dad, John, that Eddie inherited his sporting talent. John worked as a fitter and turner for the Department of Transport (a blanket appellation that in those years included both the railways and the airways) in Germiston, while Dorothy cooked, baked, sewed and mended, providing the hub around which the spokes of domestic life revolved. Constantly on the lookout for bargains, she once brought home a bulk pack of twelve pairs of underpants for John and the boys. Her Cornish pasties were legendary; and she adored Siamese cats. Her cooking was so fine that she once sent a Christmas cake to Eddie while he was on tour in Australia in 1963–64, his first trip overseas and the tour that made him as a cricketer. The cake became famous, a symbol as redolent as the Springbok. Charles Fortune even spoke about it over the radio. Not to be outdone on the domestic front, John chipped in where he could, although Dorothy had no peer in the kitchen. He would often go to the market and scrounge for meat and vegetable bargains, with the boys sometimes in tow. They called the resulting concoction ‘Pops’s Atomic Soup’.
Dorothy’s Christmas cake became an emblem in 1960s Australia. It was that kind of trip: domestic, fun and mutually supportive, with the mandatory chaffing between the tour manager, the martinet Ken Viljoen, and the younger, more freewheeling players. The cricket was bone-hard – as it always was in Australia – but the tourists were young and happy, thrilled to play against State and Australian sides with whom they shared a kind of sun-blasted southern-hemisphere camaraderie. Many were young and wanted to stretch their legs. As cricketers, they were desperate to find out exactly who they were.
Barlow had no doubts about who he was – his old mate Lance, who had known him since he’d been a Ruddles boy, called him ‘Muhammad Ali in glasses’4 – but his view of himself wasn’t always shared by others. Dick Whitington, a snarky Australian working for the Rand Daily Mail, wrote that had the side for Australia been chosen at the end of February rather than on 1 April as it turned out, Barlow and a fellow player, Tony Pithey, would have been omitted. ‘Barlow was a borderline selection,’ he sniffed, ‘even after his century against the Cavaliers at the Wanderers.’5
Thus, the ‘borderline selection’ took his place alongside skipper Trevor Goddard, the Pollock brothers, Graeme and Peter, Barry Richards, Mike Procter, Tony and David Pithey, Kelly Seymour, Joe Partridge, Peter Carlstein, and the swashbuckling wicketkeeper-batsman Denis Lindsay, representing the cream of South Africa’s young and not-so-young talent. On the third game of the tour, against a Combined XI in Perth in early November 1963, the visitors hung on to a slender 43-run first-innings lead, with Barlow and Pithey opening the second innings on the Saturday. Watched by the legendary Don Bradman, they were 222 without loss at close of play, the ebullient Barlow 129 not out against an attack featuring Richie Benaud, the prince of leg-spinners, and ‘Garth’ McKenzie, the quickest fast bowler in Australia. Bradman was impressed, predicting that the Tests would be hard-fought and therefore commercially successful for the Australian Cricket Association, of which he was head. He was even more impressed when Barlow added another 80 runs on the Monday (with Sunday being a rest day) before the South Africans declared on 532 for three, with Graeme Pollock reeling off an insouciant hundred for good measure.
The Combined XI refused to give it away and scored heavily in reply, yet it was still the kind of start in Western Australia that could only be dreamt of. The batsmen were scoring runs and the bowlers were netting wickets. Subsequently, Barlow scored a slow century down the coast in Melbourne against a feisty Australian XI, and, later, the tourists crushed a strong New South Wales side, winning by the snotklap of an innings. The arc of a perfect tour was only spoiled by the imposition of an infamous curfew by Viljoen (to prevent the players from jolling too religiously – they sometimes went to bed in their civvies) and by Barlow’s idiosyncratic running between wickets. In the Melbourne game, he managed two run-outs (including his captain, Trevor Goddard) in going for his second century of the tour. Whitington wrote the following day that just before lunchtime a message was smuggled onto the pitch. In it, the players respectfully suggested that Barlow might like to take his lunch out in the middle. Bradman chuckled, noting that ‘Eddie has taught the Australians something – how to run out your captain going for a single from a no-ball.’6
For all of Barlow’s swagger, his self-belief wasn’t as contagious as he might have hoped. While the tour had started well, the side played poorly against Queensland immediately before the first Test in Brisbane, and in the Test itself – with an opportunity to win the game by chasing it batting last – the South Africans tamely shut up shop at the end. Their timidity cost them, for they lost the second Test while drawing the third, finding themselves in the fourth one-down with two to play.
The 25th of January 1964 will, however, go down as one of the great days in South African sporting history. Throughout the tour, there had been an arm-wrestle within the side between young adventure as epitomised by Barlow, Richards, Lindsay and the Pollocks, and the forces of prudence and reaction as represented by Viljoen and, to a lesser extent, the tour captain, Goddard. Perhaps Barlow, with his boundless self-belief, saw this earlier than most of the others, for whom the realisation took longer to dawn. But dawn it eventually did. In the South African first innings, Barlow and Graeme Pollock came together with the total on 70 for two; both Goddard (34) and Tony Pithey (0) were out, and a healthy start was by no means assured. Yet the tour management needn’t have worried. In what remained of the post-lunch session and straddling tea, Barlow and Pollock scored 225 runs between them, as the South Africans ended the second day’s play on 295 for two (Barlow not out on 125 and Pollock undefeated on 120).
The run-scoring mischief continued on the third morning, with Barlow finishing on 201 and Pollock grabbing 175. The South African first-innings lead of 250 might have been decisive, but the home side was stubborn in reply, counter-attacking brilliantly to beach on 300 for four (a lead of 50) by the fourth afternoon. Then, in what became a pivotal moment, Barlow grabbed the ball from Goddard, frustrated at the South African attack’s inability to move the game forward. First, he had Barry Shepherd well caught by Lindsay in the deep; Benaud dragged on to give him his second wicket, and then McKenzie stabbed back a straightforward caught-and-bowled off a full toss. Barlow’s five overs cost him six runs, and he grabbed three priceless wickets along the way. The Test was duly wrapped up the following day, but more important than the victory was what it meant. Wrested away from the managerial suits, the players were playing their brand of cricket: entertaining, attractive and occasionally inspired. What it amounted to was the Barlow template.
One of the first recorded instances
of the Barlow template was a match years earlier between Ruddles and Pridwin, a posh boys’ primary school close to the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg. Playing against Barlow that day was Ray White, who would later become a Cambridge sporting blue and president of the United Cricket Board of South Africa, the forerunner of today’s Cricket South Africa. As a boy, White reeled in the wickets with canny leg breaks, and he’d been harvesting his usual large haul when a little boy in spectacles stomped to the wicket, with Waterkloof six or seven wickets down. ‘My first ball to him was another cunningly-flighted spinner to which he jumped miles down the pitch and smashed it straight past my head to the boundary. The following ball suffered the same indignity. Shaken by this onslaught, I dropped the next ball too short and watched it disappear into the school building,’ recalled White. ‘Time to take your cap, Pinkie,’ the tiny batsman shouted scornfully down the wicket in reference to the dirty pink caps that Pridwin players wore and at ‘my woeful effort at troubling him. It was my first encounter with sledging.’7
White ‘remembers’ a boy in glasses, but, according to both Helen Hutchinson and Cally Barlow, two of Eddie’s former wives, he didn’t get glasses until he was twelve or thirteen. Hutchinson says that the optometrist was stunned that Eddie’s sight was so bad and immediately prescribed spectacles. His rugby wasn’t obviously improved – like his brother, Norman, he was a centre, and he’d learned to watch the opposing centre’s feet – but his cricket became even perkier. So did his riding of his beloved bike. Up until then, he had ridden down Pretoria’s jacaranda-lined avenues by looking down and using the front wheel’s distance from the kerb as the best indication of how he was going. Now he didn’t have to bother: like every other teenage boy in the country, he could weave down the middle of the street with no hands on the handlebars.