Herschelle Gibbs brought a young lady over to see me in the SuperSport Park press box on Tuesday. She had a message for me. A man sitting in the grandstand just in front of the press box was asking to speak to ‘Kevin McCallum from The Star’. That usually means one of two things. One of my mates from the East Rand is drunk in the stands and has lost his phone, or a reader would like to have a word.
Readers having words is not always that much fun. There was an old man in the northern suburbs who did not like my writing and would send in letters to the editor moaning about me. The letters stopped coming a long while ago. I suspect he died.
The man who wanted to speak to the writer from The Star was a Kiwi. I recognised him from Sunday, from the second day of the Test. He had been standing on the grass embankment close to the players' change rooms and had had a couple of jars, and was good-naturedly baiting Faf du Plessis as he worked towards his century. The fans around him were laughing with him and not at him. It was a lovely moment. I used him as my intro for my piece on the day’s play, writing about his ‘tired Hurricanes jersey’.
He stuck out his hand and introduced himself as “John, the bloke with the tired Hurricanes jersey”. I didn’t quite catch his last name. I think it was “Humphries”. He presented me with the tired jersey and thanked me for mentioning him in the piece.
On Twitter, Cormac Sullivan told me about how he and his family had sat next to John on Sunday and “even after 15 beers in the late arvo, he still threw balls to my 6 year old”. He had seen at least 15 hakas from John that day, perhaps one for each beer.
I went down to meet John just after lunch on what would be the last day of the Test. We had a few jars. He had been coming to South Africa since 1985 and loved the place. He owned a deer farm just outside Wellington in New Zealand. He had called his farm “Bloemfontein” because he loved the Cheetahs and the Free State. They were “hard bastards”, he said. He liked hard bastards.
John had played cricket until he was 48. He remembered being hit in the face and having his jaw broken. “I had to drink my grog through a straw.” We spent an hour or so talking, interspersed with cheers and beers. He spied a group of South Africans trying to start up some singing in Castle Corner across the ground: “I reckon I should go over there and give that lot a bit of a rev.” We said our goodbyes. I think I may frame that tired Hurricanes jersey. - The Star