My First All Blacks Test
King’s Park, 1976
My first All Blacks Test was in 1976, when the Springboks hosted the New Zealanders at King’s Park in Durban. We left our farm, Oakvilla, mid-morning in the Mercedes-Benz 280E. My parents and I made the trip together. My brother went separately on the school bus. My sister skipped the whole thing to visit her friend Nolene.
We didn’t own Springbok jerseys or any proper kit in those days. I went in corduroy pants, a plaid shirt and my Grasshopper shoes. That was as close as it got to match-day attire for a farm kid from the Midlands.
First stop was the beachfront. We met my dad’s friend Oom Jan Strydom at Barons steakhouse, a place that sat in the same side street as Magoo’s Bar, the same Magoo’s that would later become notorious for reasons far darker than rugby. It was bombed by the ANC. Lunch was the mandatory steak, rump or sirloin, with basting and either pepper or mushroom sauce on the side. I always went for the monkey gland. Bliksems lekker. I could have happily turned around and be driven straight back to Oakvilla after that meal and still called it a perfect day.
Instead we pushed on to King’s Park. The place was packed. We parked some distance away and walked in with the crowd. Just past the ticket booth stood a trolley from The Fudge Lady. My mother bought toasted coconut marshmallows. Fresh, warm, with that unmistakable aroma you never get from the plastic-wrapped versions in Pick n Pay. I can still taste them.
We climbed to our seats on the open stands opposite the grandstand, right on the halfway line, second tier. The concrete steps felt dodgy even then. Behind us they had put up scaffolding for extra seats that almost certainly violated every health and safety rule in the book. But this was Africa, and the stands were full. My mom mentioned that Windhond played here. Windhond was her uncle, Riebeeck. He was a Junior Springbok.
There were no fly-bys that afternoon, but there were streakers. We laughed, and it was understood that the proper response was to try and hit them with ripe naartjies. Before kick-off there would be a quick sweep to pick up the fruit.
Then I saw him, the ice-cream vendor working his way along the row, polystyrene box balanced carefully. I tugged my dad’s sleeve. He raised a hand. The man opened the lid and dry ice billowed out. Among the loot I spotted them: Eskimo Pies.
I lost all composure and grabbed one.
You cannot understand what that meant unless you grew up on a farm like Oakvilla. We never had Eskimo Pies at home, and you didn’t find them in the New Hanover Tea Room either. Ice cream at home was the condensed-milk-and-cream version my mother made. This was different. Sitting in the stands at King’s Park on the day of an All Blacks/Springboks Test, biting into an Eskimo Pie, that memory is still sharp.
The game itself was epic. Sid Going was everywhere, cheeky and disruptive, impossible to ignore. On the Springbok side Morné du Plessis carried a presence you could feel from the stands. Years later, when Oom Jood told me that Morné had gone to Grey, I turned to my dad and said I wanted to go there too. I wanted to become a Brak as well.
After the final whistle I stretched out along the full length of the back seat of the Mercedes. The lights of the car snaked through the Midlands as evening settled. I slept the whole way home to Oakvilla, tired, full, and completely happy.
It was a perfect day for it.