Who could but love an opening paragraph such as this?
‘Staircase number one at the All England Club leads you into a section of the stadium just above the members’ enclosure. Climb the stairs on finals day and there, suddenly, in the sun, the soft old centre court, lying waiting, all green; waiting; for two o’clock. It is venerable, that court, and it lives.’
It is the gateway to Gordon Forbes’ seminal work, A Handful of Summers, by some distance the finest literary effort on sport by a South African. Lew Hoad called it the greatest book on tennis ever written; The Times of London hailed it as a triumph of sports publishing. Bjorn Borg himself thanked Forbes ‘for reminding us of the fun we had’.
The unusual aspect of Forbes’ book is that he wrote it himself. With few exceptions, the complexities and nuances of sport are lost on its practitioners and it requires a secondary figure, a spectator of sorts, to reflect with honesty and to look beyond the edges; the so-called biographer.
Forbes was a top tennis player who travelled the world in search of a game. The world was a simpler place then and as a consequence the stories are searingly honest, ribald and endearing. He taps a vein of great wit and charm and the result is a memoir that resonates more than 30 years after it was first published, in 1978.
A Handful of Summers enjoyed an international release and has been re-published eight times, most recently last year. It enjoys a renown all of its own, not least because it has stood the test of time and, frankly, little else has come along to displace it as the greatest South African sports book ever written.
It’s scandalous that so few South African sports books are written by sportsmen themselves, in the manner of a Mike Atherton or a Brian Moore, two fine English sportsmen who somehow had it in themselves to craft their stories beyond the anodyne.
In trawling layers of history and seeking out the gems that undoubtedly exist in SA sports literature, two things become obvious: the library may be full to bursting, but there’s a lot of ordinary work out there – the rushed, formulaic biographies post-1990 are most typical – and football has been criminally underserved. This may be a consequence of the sport being polarised along a racial schism for so long; it may be that local publishers never believed in the genre. The result is that much of the great game’s stories remain untold, perhaps forever.
As Sy Lerman, the doyen of local football writing, remarks, the sport is ‘sadly lacking’ in its contribution to literary excellence. ‘It stands out for not being in the queue,’ he says sniffily.
Forbes*, who is now 77 and lives in Johannesburg, continues to be amazed by his own book’s success, not least because what began as a little diary to frame his memories has given him a renown far beyond his abilities as a tennis player.
‘I was lucky – tennis was full of mad characters,’ he says. ‘Nowadays money makes them more sophisticated.’ (And presumably boring).
It was his sister who convinced him to parlay his thoughts into a book. He loved writing. Indeed, at the age of 15 he wrote a ‘terrible’ cowboy novel in five exercise books. What mattered wasn’t the quality, but that he loved the writing.
He later created a character (Sam Shabel) for detective stories and he flogged these to the Rand Daily Mail and others.
But it was A Handful of Summers that marked his arrival as a serious writer. In the US and England, in particular, he was lauded for his warmth and gentleness as a writer. While he remains bemused by his book’s success, he comes closer than most to capturing its charm when he says it is probably because it captured an era that we will never see again, ‘when all sports were games’.
‘It’s now a business and it has become tedious, like Michael Schumacher. He’s brilliant, but it’s tedious watching him. It’s like watching Rafa and Nadal; they’re brilliant, but there is a tediousness to it.’
You want to argue the point, but then he launches into the story of Torben Ulrich, a tennis contemporary (and father of Metallica drummer Lars), who once remarked upon watching white men playing jazz: ‘Do not say it is beautiful, rather say it is skilful.’
He underscores the point by describing Rod Laver not as an exceptional tennis player, but an artist for whom ‘every point was an invention almost’.
If A Handful of Summers captures this genteel mood, it also proves the rule that such a book could only ever have been written from inside the changeroom, up close and personal.
Years later, Forbes followed up with Too Soon to Panic, a solid encore, but one which Forbes himself describes as ‘nice in patches’.
Nowadays he is still invited to Wimbledon and the cries ring out as he climbs the stairs, ‘Forbes, how the hell are the summers doing?’
The Women’s Tennis Association even hands A Handful of Summers to its players, telling them to read it, ‘because that’s where tennis comes from.’
Any list of top South African sports books, which is necessarily non-scientific and favours literary work over statistical tomes, takes a big detour at this juncture. For instance, The Fighters and Springbok Saga are two sweeping books of historical (rather than literary) nature, both written by the same man: Chris Greyvenstein.
Greyvenstein was a giant among sports writers and his two best works on boxing and rugby are epic and encyclopaedic, each a magnum opus. No serious book collection is complete without both. They aren’t traditional works of literature, but they are gorgeous in their breadth and historical regard.
Springbok rugby has been especially well served by writers. Until readmission, no tour took place without a book being rushed out. This has all but stopped, doubtless because television and the wired world now transmit these stories, all but rendering such books a relic of an age gone by.
Of the earlier books, among them EJL Platnauer’s The Springbokken Tour in Great Britain (1906) and Springbok and Silverfern by Reg Sweet, Ivor Difford’s seminal 1933 work, The History of South African Football (1875-1932), is a masterful tribute to a storied history.
More latterly, Edward Griffiths’ book on Francois Pienaar, Rainbow Warrior, captured the essence of one of the giants of SA sport, weaving in the peculiar cultural and political dynamics that make his life’s story so absorbing.
Yet the real rugby mould-breaker was Dan Retief’s More Than Just Rugby, his biography on Wynand Claassen. It could be said to be the first rugby book that went way beyond simply trotting out a life story.
‘He was a good subject and he gave so much,’ says Retief. Indeed, Claassen was so honest that he was fired as a selector and was very much on the outer of SA rugby for many years.
Retief’s regret is that the book was published too hastily – many of the corrections weren’t carried out – although a re-published version sought to clean up the errors.
His latest book, Springboks and the Holy Grail, reflects Retief’s depth of knowledge and ability as a writer. He’s taken what could have been a historical bore and given it pace and energy through use of anecdotes and personal insights. Prominent historian Paul Dobson has proclaimed it the best rugby book ever written.
Cricket has much to be thankful to Louis Duffus for. The former Transvaal cricketer was a prolific writer who was a war correspondent in World War II and later became sports editor of The Star. Of his many works, Cricketers of the Veld is arguably the finest. However, little else, certainly by way of biography, has come along to suggest domestic cricket is a haven of literary excellence.
Boxing has been the setting for more top-class writing about sport than any other, and SA is no exception. Gavin Evans’ Dancing Shoes in Dead, is a rare gem. Set against the backdrop of apartheid it is a memoir of his twin passions of boxing and politics with the death of Jacob ‘Dancing Shoes’ Morake providing a telling thread. Read it if you can, for it tells of a remarkable time in South Africa and does so with depth and sensitivity.
Rodney Hartman’s book on Brian Mitchell (Champ!) is another book that was perfect for its time. As fine a writer as Hartman was, he was helped by Mitchell’s circumstances which mirrored the social tale of so many fighters – poor, uneducated and scruffy, but able to rise to the top of society through their fighting fists.
I was sorely tempted to include Donald McRae’s magnificent works – Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing and In Black and White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens – but three inescapable facts preclude this. The most obvious is that they were published in the UK, but also because McRae makes his home in London and the stories are essentially international.
The former Germiston High pupil has done remarkably well: he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for both efforts, the only writer to have twice done so.
A trio of rugby books completes any serious study of the finest South African sports books.
Mark Keohane’s Springbok Rugby Uncovered makes no claims to literary excellence, but seven years after it was published it seems staggering that it even saw the light of day given how many individuals were exposed.
No rugby book before or since has come close to uncovering the machinations of the South African rugby beast the way Keohane did, going to its very heart. For that alone, it is an extraordinary effort.
Craig Ray’s book on Jake White, In Black and White, was a publishing phenomenon that shifted a staggering 220 000 copies – 50 000 on its first three days of release alone – and outsold even Harry Potter. It, too, was sold on the strength of its story and was a masterstroke of timing (and endurance on the author’s part). Ray deserves praise for not only getting the job done, but by managing it by working closely with someone who could be exceptionally cranky and had a World Cup to win.
He worked under enormous pressure to get it out quickly, the final two chapters being bashed out at a Starbucks at Cairo Airport.
Mike Greenaway’s Captain in the Cauldron, the story of John Smit, is another praiseworthy book. It helped that he had such a formidable sporting figure to work with, but to Greenaway’s credit it is Smit’s style rather than his own that dominates the pages and he does so with a clarity and sense of poise and context that elevates the book above so many others in the genre.
The writer’s Top 10:
- 1 A Handful of Summers (Gordon Forbes).
- 2 Springbok Saga (Chris Greyvenstein).
- 3 The Fighters (Chris Greyvenstein).
- 4 More Than Just Rugby (Dan Retief).
- 5 Dancing Shoes is Dead (Gavin Evans).
- 6 The History of South African Rugby Football (Ivor Difford).
- 7 Cricketers of the Veld (Louis Duffus).
- 8 The Brian Mitchell Story (Champ!) (Rodney Hartman).
- 9 Rainbow Warrior (Edward Griffiths).
- 10 In Black and White (Craig Ray).
* This piece pre-dates Forbes’ death, aged 86, in 2020.
(This article was originally published in Business Day Sport Monthly, sadly long since departed).
