The Errol Tobias Debacle
I was rudely reminded this morning during a Radio Algoa interview where Daron Mann had Errol Tobias, commemorating his inclusion as the “first person of colour”, as he puts it, to don that jersey that Luke Watson wanted to puke on, this day 32 years ago. Those painful memories came flooding back to me like this happened yesterday, like the stunned silence in our “change room” while we were preparing to take the field for our rugby match when one player commented: “Boys, we are going to take the field now, but 60km from here Errol Tobias is sitting in the springbok change room preparing to sell us out”. I felt that same pain this morning, and even that was exacerbated when he continued to extol the virtues of the “great Doc Craven” , the same Craven who a few years earlier said that over his dead body will blacks ever wear a springbok jersey. He also talked ad nauseam about the “great Danie Gerber and Naas Botha and his “chommie” Rob Louw. Admittedly, this was a “nice-feel” morning show, so no controversial questions were going to be asked, but he deftly skirted the question about how the “non-white” community felt about his inclusion in the springbok team by saying that his club and the Caledon community were very proud of him. He made no mention of the fact that the majority of the population at the time referred to him as a sell-out.
I wondered for a moment how he would have responded to certain questions during such an interview, questions like:
1. How did you feel knowing that after being an “honorary white” for a short while, that you will have to go back to your township to which you are restricted by law, with its inferior schools, clinics and hospitals?
2. How did you feel “representing” a country in which you cannot vote?
3. How did you feel running out on the field at Newlands knowing your family and friends are barricaded behind the posts in front of the south stand, because they were not allowed to sit on the Main or Railway stands?
4. How did you feel knowing the overwhelming majority of “your” people were not cheering you, but the opposite team?
5. How did you feel, knowing that there were at least three or four players better than you, playing non-racist sport under the then SARU, who refused to be used like you have been?
One can maybe understand and ascribe his actions then to naivety or ignorance, but to still idolize those people after 32 years, having had an opportunity to grow up, to mature, to think about the past and what it did to us, is simply astounding. I suppose he believes he has nothing to say sorry for.
Taken from Grassroots Rugby: Written by Aubrey Minaar