This will be a useful emergency gift for anyone interested in SA sport and who is in the R150-R200 price range on your Christmas list.
I say "emergency" at the risk of sounding like Scrooge, but though the book is certainly pleasing in its presentation of some excellent SA sports writing (and the title is inspired), this is a project that, one can't help feeling, has not been executed as well as it might have been.
First, the positives. It is no surprise to see work by the likes of Dan Retief (rugby), Colin Bryden (cricket) and Gavin Evans (boxing), and quality all-rounders like Rodney Hartman, Andy Capostagno and Andy Colquhoun. There is a brilliant piece by Neil Manthorp on cricketer Dewald Pretorius, three very funny articles under the name of Darrel Bristow-Bovey, and an enigmatic philosophical essay by novelist J M Coetzee on the meaning of our winning the rugby World Cup in 1995. The FM's editor (writing in the Cape Times in May last year) contributes a prophetic piece on why Morocco would not (and should not) be awarded the 2010 soccer World Cup.
The editors have also done us the great service of recalling the enjoyment we had in the late 1980s from "Thomas Equinus", the old Weekly Mail's theologian and alleged racing columnist. They also remind us of the quality of Donald McRae, whose Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing is arguably the best sports book ever written by a South African. This is one of the functions of the anthologist: to bring back into the light writers who deserve to be revisited.
But there are many puzzling absences, even taking into account the editors' admission that the collection does not pretend to be definitive. Of the older generation of writers who were household names between World War 2 and the 1970s, only Louis Duffus and Chris Greyvenstein are represented.
The single piece chosen for Greyvenstein is a pleasing one on the romance of sport, but there are so many other gems by him on rugby and boxing, the two sports on which he wrote pioneering and definitive histories, Springbok Saga and The Fighters. One thinks of his affectionate tribute to 1940s heavyweight boxer Johnny Ralph, who "embodied a dream shared by people who had never seen Ralph in action and never would . . . people who sat in lonely farmhouses with their ears glued to crackling radio sets, listening to the blow-by-blow descriptions".
One looks in vain for A C Parker, Ray Woodley, Reg Sweet, Paul Irwin, Fred Labuschagne or Charles Fortune. All of them (and others) regularly produced better writing than some of the more pedestrian choices found here. Of the modern writers and columnists who have proven records of quality, conspicuous by their absence are Michael Owen-Smith, Peter Robinson and John Robbie.
Perhaps the most indefensible omission is that of Edward Griffiths, whose work since the 1980s as columnist, reporter and sports editor, and then as a prolific author of books, puts him in a class well above most of those selected here. (The editors also take a risk by omitting such writers but including several of their own pieces - but I suppose they can do what they like with their own book.)
In an introduction that is strangely incoherent, even bizarre, Eaton and Alfred admit that the best writers of the past 100 years, when they have emerged, have been "very good". However, the ancient ones are to be found in "old treasured volumes in well looked-after collections. And it is best that they stay there, waiting for the enthusiast or specialist to hunt them down; because they could easily have been damaged by appearing in this collection." Perhaps that's because they didn't get an MA in creative writing from UCT, as Eaton's biographical note proclaims he did.
