Colour and chaos
AN EXTRAORDINARY book lands on my desk. It's by my old sportswriter friend, Norman Canale, who wrote so entertainingly in the Sunday Express and the Sunday Times in days of yore and today lives in retirement at Waterfall.
Skimming through, I see a photograph of "Two-Ton" Tony Galento, the Brooklyn (New York) barman who took on the great Joe Louis, trained on beer and cigars and in the end came quite close to living up to his slogan: "I'll moider da bum!"
Also of Galento boxing against a grizzly bear
Also of Tom von Vollenhoven, Springbok hero of the 1955 series against the British Lions; also of the great Frik du Preez; of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney ...
Snakes in the Garden of Eden: memoirs of a sportswriter (Don Nelson) is a blast from the past, the days before television and long before the digital age, when it was writers like Canale who brought us our sport, national and international, in all its atmosphere.
Canale also brings us the colourful and chaotic world of newspapers in those days – "a lost newspaper age that was ribald, restless, flamboyant, raucous and exuberant …"
"It was an epoch of wonderful nonsense that most of today's dedicated and computer-literate journos can only wonder at, an age as extinct as the typewriter and the linotype machine."
Canale sees what he calls the "newspaperman's pub" as being at the heart of all this, an institution that has today disappeared as mysteriously as the lost city of Atlantis.
He identifies three: in Johannesburg the Federal Hotel (frequented by staff of the Rand Daily Mail, the Sunday Times the Sunday Express and the SABC); in Cape Town the Café Royal; and in Durban the Filler (which was actually also the Press Club) in the old Central Hotel in West Street.
He brings us some marvelous vignettes from Studio 13 at the Fed (the SABC had 12 studios), not least the tag-wrestling mime by Joe Openshaw (a dear fellow I once worked with during a spell he had in Durban), in which he would take on a series of empty bar stools, catch them in a scissors grip and triumphantly pin them to the floor – to a tumult of applause.
I can vouch for the Filler. A photographer named Alf Chapman once threw a firecracker in there on Guy Fawkes night and was banned for a month. He maintained it was because he caused the barmaid, Alice, to pour a full tot for the first time in her life.
I was in the Filler the night before I embarked for a sojourn overseas. In a corner at the end of the bar a fellow was arguing furiously with his girlfriend. She took off her engagement ring and flung it out of the window.
Next, everyone was out on the sloping roof, three floors up, searching for the ring. Somebody found it.
Years later I returned from overseas and went to the Filler. In the same corner the same fellow was fighting with the same girlfriend. The place had a certain continuity.
The Café Royal was special. It had a lunchtime table in the corner, permanently reserved for Sir de Villiers Graaff, leader of the opposition.
I was there one night with my colleague Leon Marshall, who hails from the Marico. He was telling us about the bitter Nat/Bloedsap rivalry in the Marico (a Bloedsap being an Afrikaner supporter of the United Party).
The Nats had taken over command of the local skietkommando, Leon said, at which all the Bloedsap members automatically resigned. A rumour got around that on a certain night the Bolshevik hordes were going to attack the farms of the Marico. The skietkommando spent the night on top of a silo with the kommando's bren gun. (The Bloedsaps weren't even told of the impending attack).
This was worthy of Herman Charles Bosman. At the end of the bar was a Bloedsap senator from the Marico, named Henri du Toit, smoking a cigar.
"That's a good story," he said. "Now I'll tell you some real stories from the Marico …"
It was another age, but it had its moments.
Tailpiece
MAN in bookstore: "Do you have a book called 'Husband – Master of the House'?
Salesgirl: "Sir, Fiction and Comics are on the First Floor".
Last word
In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.
Napoleon Bonaparte
No comments:
Post a Comment