2 Days in One by John Beattie
I have two days that merge into one. My father was a big, rough man, a gardener from Glasgow who went to Borneo in his early twenties to work as a rubber estate manager in the frontier days when being accosted by a cobra was as common as getting in your ex army jeep to rampage through the jungle. He was my hero, and yet my brothers and I knew that the toughness that was part and parcel of him was softened by a congenital heart problem that came to haunt him in his sixties.
Our family came back to the UK when my father was around forty. He retrained as there was very little call for rubber planting in the West of Scotland, ran a marathon, took up squash and fencing, worked far too hard to put the three of us through private school, and then after he retired picked up hobbies like archaeology while studying for two degrees at the same time.
He graduated, of course. So my mother and father, and my wife Jill and I, went for lunch at the Norton House hotel in Edinburgh to celebrate after the ceremony. I noticed my father’s lips were bluer than usual, he was out of breath, he looked incredibly tired but I could tell he was proud. I can still smell the dampness of the vegetation which took me back to the sweet smell of the undergrowth in the Far East, I can hear the crunch of gravel under his feet, and I can see him tall and erect in his suit as we walked our lunch down. He called me aside. Now, my father never, ever gave me advice. My life up to that point had been accompanied by mild shakes of the head or approving nods, but this time it was different. “Don’t make the same mistakes I made.” He said. “Don’t worry about money, do what you want to do in life.”
I knew what he meant though; three young children, a mortgage and the pressures of life do force their constraints on freedom. The following morning he was dead. Two weeks after that I gave up full time chartered accountancy and went to South Africa to cover the 1995 world cup.
And this is where the first day merges with the second day. On their honeymoon my parents’ boat had stopped in at Cape Town on their way to Borneo because the Suez Canal had been closed at the time. My mother’s grandmother was South African. My first big rugby tour had been as part of the 1980 British and Irish Lions party to an apartheid ridden South Africa where bus stops were segregated, toilets were segregated, land was segregated, and the white man dominated. I hated it. The blacks hated it so much they supported us against the Springboks, their home team. I’d gone amid a barrage of criticism from MPs who had written me letters, and many members of the public had joined them in trying to persuade me not to go. Midway through the tour I really wished I hadn’t. And yet it was beautiful, a stunning country, and I felt part of it as my family had been moulded by it.
Now here I was, fifteen years after that tour, in Johannesburg for the 1995 World Cup final, New Zealand against South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison and was now the president, apartheid was dead, the crowd was a multi-racial buzz of anticipation, and I was an emotional wreck behind a microphone high up in the stand.
You might think that my day, then, is about sport, but it has nothing to do with sport. Sport was merely the canvas for the painting.
Before the game Nelson Mandela came out wearing a Springbok jersey and the message he sent the world was obvious because a black man was wearing one of the accepted symbols of white superiority. It was all about forgiveness. A jumbo jet flew over the stadium with a message written beneath the wings wishing the home team luck. The world was watching a rainbow nation rise from its inhumane past. Somehow, the world felt like a good place to be.
And for one, still moment, I cried like a child in the stand as I remembered my father, what he had said to me just before he had died, why I had given up my job, and what that risk had let me see at first hand.
Those two days have become one in my mind, and they changed my life forever.
John Beattie presents Sport Weekly on BBC Radio Scotland.
