Peter Hain - Pitch Battles: Protest, Prejudice and Play

Pitch Battles
Sport, Racism and Resistance

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield

Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200,

Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

6 Tinworth Street, London se11 5al,

United Kingdom

Copyright 2021 by Peter Hain and Andr Odendaal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949467

ISBN : 9781786615220 (cloth)

ISBN : 9781786615237 (pbk)

ISBN : 9781786615244 (electronic)

Edited by Gurdeep Mattu

Copy-edited by Dorothy Feaver

Indexed by Christine Shuttleworth

Designed by Mark Thomson

Typeset in Garamond Premier and Shne

by International Design UK

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi/niso z39.481992

In 2020 two seismic global events overtook and enhanced the relevance of this book. Dramatic Black Lives Matter movement protests sparked by the callous killing by an American police officer on 25 May in Minneapolis of a black man, George Floyd, sent shockwaves reverberating around the world.

In a filmed horror lynching that lasted eight minutes and forty-six seconds, officer Derek Chauvin clamped his knee over Floyds windpipe, ignoring his anguished plea, I cant breathe. The protests quickly spread from the United States to other parts of the world, shedding light on the depth of systemic racism throughout societies globally, sport included, still persisting despite official policies opposed to it. The impact of this terrible killing was heightened by the fact that it took place in the middle of the unprecedented Covid-19 global pandemic which, at the time of writing, has infected more than 35 million people, and killed over one million.

More than half of humanity, some four billion people, were put into a state of lockdown, and whole economies ground to a halt eerily pictured by ghost airports, deserted streets and empty sports stadia. Every major sports competition on the planet was suspended. The virus has caused a rethink about our world, politically, socially, environmentally, technologically and economically; the normal propounded by global elites and monopolies is not an unchangeable reality, and sport is no exception.

The tragedy of human beings expiring while separated from loved ones, often attached to ventilators as space-suited medical staff bravely tried to help, and then that single public killing, has led to an upswell of solidarity.

The Black Lives Matter movement emphasises how black and indigenous people all over the world remain subject to oppressive structures and power relations shaped during 500 years of Western conquest taking in colonialism, slavery and the development of an exploitative global economic system leading to a chasm between rich and poor.

As the first comprehensive single-volume account of the making of the most racist sports system in the world South African sports apartheid and the ensuing six-decade-long struggle to overthrow that iniquitous system and its effects, Pitch Battles offers lessons that link directly to the ferment of energy and ideas in the Black Lives Matter movement.

While this publication is released to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the militant protests that stopped the all-white South African cricket tour to Britain in May 1970, the events of 2020 reinforce the interconnected themes dealt with over the following pages. From the Western dna of systemic racism in modern sport to the agents of change black sportspeople and their allies who spoke up against the odds, often at great cost to themselves this book traces how sport is inseparable from societal issues.

The issues raised by the pandemic and Black Lives Matter resonate closely with many of those that have emerged in South Africa over the past few decades as it has moved from apartheid and the liberation struggle to becoming a democratic country, though with the expectations of that transition in many ways unfulfilled.

Many rugby and cricket fans were horrified by the direct-action protests that caused widespread disruption of the all-white 196970 Springbok rugby tour and the subsequent stopping of the 1970 cricket tour to Britain. Yet, with fifty years hindsight, that presaged the end of apartheid sport.

Former cabinet minister Lord Peter Hain led militant direct-action demonstrations against those tours and, with one of South Africas foremost sports historians and fellow anti-apartheid activist Andr Odendaal, shows how decades of international campaigns and the rise of the non-racial movement inside South Africa helped change a country and led to a Springbok team captained by a township kid, Siya Kolisi, winning the 2019 World Cup.

This is a riveting story of vision, sacrifice, complex contestation, struggle and hard-earned change, full of human drama. Those opposing the system faced trial, torture, hardship and hanging. Pitch Battles rests on little-known contextual detail stretching from early colonialism to the coronavirus to explain the deep connections between the nineteenth-century British origins of globalisation, racism and gender discrimination in sport, and contemporary developments and why sport can never be divorced from politics or societys values.

Sportsmen and women who had rarely stood against injustice or inequality have started speaking out. Powerful sports establishments including the richest sports league in the world, the US National Football League, were compelled to apologise and respond. For generations, sportspeople had been in denial about the racism ubiquitous in global sport. The mantra to keep politics out of sport is fervently contested in this book.

In 2016 Colin Kaepernick led with his protest against racism. In June and July 2020 Britains Premier League footballers also bent down to take the knee when the season resumed after being halted for over three months by the Covid-19 pandemic. So did most Formula One drivers when their race season began belatedly in Austria, led by six-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, the only black driver in Formula One, who eloquently demanded diversity in motor sport and gave the black power salute on the podium after his first victory. Bubba Wallace, the only black driver in nascars highest level of motor sport echoed Hamiltons pleas.

Other sports also in South Africa followed as officials and competitors, who had for generations resisted taking a stand on issues of human rights and injustice, have found themselves swept up in the tide for change. The question remains: Will that change be fundamental? This depends on whether the pressure endures once the sense of outrage subsides. Meanwhile Pitch Battles illuminates and reinforces the case for sport to acknowledge and act upon its social responsibilities in a way it has rarely ever done.

Peter Hain, Neath, Wales

Andr Odendaal, Cape Town, South Africa

October 2020

Sport had never experienced anything like this before.

Five decades ago, in the British winter of 196970, mass demonstrations and field invasions during the whites-only South African Springbok rugby tour disrupted the cosy relationship between elites from the two nations and shone global attention on apartheid in sport and, more broadly, the iniquitous system itself.