Leaving, but not going away

When I was deputy principal at High North Boys’ High School there was a yellowing sheet of paper pinned to the notice board of the communal office I worked in.

It was a poem by Saxon White Kessinger called The Indispensible Man. Here are a few lines from it:

Sometime when you feel that your going
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow these simple instructions
And see how they humble your soul;

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that’s remaining
Is a measure of how you’ll be missed.

You don’t get to my age without appreciating the truth in that – no-one is indispensable. No matter how good you may think you are, they will find a replacement and the show will go on. So, please take what follows in that spirit.

While I thank those who have said that the Saturday Star School Sport supplement will never be the same without me, I accept that of course someone else can do the job and it would be disigenuous of me to begrudge them that, seeing that I have always said that my intention was to add strength to the bows of the teachers who have dedicated themselves to coaching children, and to acknowledge the efforts and dedication of the girls and boys who play sport at school.

On that score, I’m happy that there is still a place where the pictures and stories that the schools who send them in can get the publicity they deserve.

But, for me, it’s always been about lot more than that. I think Alan Thompson, headmaster of St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown sums it up excellently in the school’s latest newsletter:

Although winning is always great and we never intend to lose, winning is not everything. I hate losing and I try never to do it, but there are obviously times when a team learns more from a loss in a good game than it ever would learn from a win in a bad one.

Sport is not about “College” either. For the purpose of sport is not as a marketing tool or an act of inter-institutional one-upmanship. It is about our boys, individually, and in the teams that they become. It is about each boy finding his own unique giftedness and giving it his all that he may flourish and, above all, have fun.

That’s always been my view, and it’s often been a minority one. Sure, you have to report on the big guns and their big wins, but everyone is important, and winning has nothing much to do with that.

And I think I was consistent in railing against anything that I regarded as uneducational and unethical practices in pursuit of winning matches.

And there I think they may battle to replace me. It’s not a brains or talent thing, it’s a mix of doing the same thing over and over for years and years (mainly) with bits of educational and coaching practice thrown in, allied to an insane willingness to spend every Saturday for the last 29 years at schools, watching sport.

It may be a good thing that readers no longer have to suffer my holier-than-thou editorialising – except for those of you who were conned into clicking on the link that brought you to be reading this electronic rant.

I do, however, believe that things sometimes need to be said. My only regret at packing the print media world in is that I no longer have the space to do that.

I’ll still be watching, though, and splashing away furiously in my own little bucket, whether it makes any difference or not.