Talent spotting is a Craven Week tradition

It was the great Aaron Sorkin who said that if you copy from yourself it’s not plagiarism. The writer of the West Wing was answering criticism that the same lines crop up over and over, in the different TV series and movie scripts he has written down the years.

In that spirit, I confess that some of what I’m going to say now I’ve said before – in a 2009 column that I wrote – and that some cutting and pasting has taken place here.

It’s just that as I was packing to leave for the Craven Week in Paarl tomorrow, I had the strongest memories of the journalists I used to see there every year. This will be my 27^th Craven Week, in 30 years. I missed three. Once because I was spoken into going overseas instead and twice because the Star was too stingy to pay for me to go. In those days they still forked out for reporters to report on events that they were actually at.

My memory was jogged by seeing Morris Gilbert at the USSA rugby week at Wits last week. Morris was a rugby writer at the Beeld. He’s the high performance manager at Tuks rugby club now. He was a constant presence at the early Craven Weeks that I attended and he was a firm believer in the principles that the week was based on. We all learned a lot from him.

He told me his first week was in 1982 in Windhoek and he had anecdotes from just about everyone since then.

He made me think of another Craven Week regular from those days, a retired headmaster called Dawie Crowther, and here’s where the copying begins.

Talent-spotting has always been a past time among regulars at the Craven Week. And there is a surprising number of fans who attend the week each year, just to revel in the feast of rugby. Predicting who will rise above their peers in the years to come is all part of the fun.

I have been lucky enough to attend just about every Craven Week since 1988 as a reporter and, I confess, I have dabbled in some soothsaying of my own in that time.

My success in predicting who was going to make it to the big time has been dodgy. There were others around me, however, who would select entire teams of standout players, and their forecasts were often very accurate.

The best of those was Dawie Crowther, an old-timer who was a Craven Week coach and SA Schools selector in his day and who continued attending the week for many years once he had retired.

His speciality was choosing the outstanding player of a particular week and, with very few exceptions all of those he marked went on to play for South Africa.

At one of those weeks, an Afrikaans newspaper asked him to name the 15 players who had made the biggest impression on him over all the years that he attended the week. I regret that I never wrote down that team, it would make interesting reading now.

I do, however, remember quite a few of his selections. Some of them seem like pretty logical choices now: Whal Bartman in 1981, Reuben Kruger in 1988, Os du Randt in 1990, Corne Krige and Louis Koen in 1993, Joe van Niekerk in 1997, Bakkies Botha in 1998 and Jean de Villiers in 1999.

Crowther stopped attending the Craven Week at some stage, I don’t remember seeing him at any week after 1999. He did tell me that the change in the age cut off at the tournament - it was changed to under-18 in 1998 - meant the end of the really dominant individual stars. Before that, as an under-19 tournament, you would find in every team a number of players who were at their second, or even third tournament and that experience generally told.

Interestingly, when pressed for who over all the years made the biggest impression on him, he came up with two names who never played for South Africa. In fact one of them never played serious rugby again.

The first was Stephen Brink, who played for Free State at the 1991 and 1992 weeks. He did play Currie Cup rugby for Free State and Sevens for South Africa and, famously, for New Zealand at the Hong Kong Sevens one year when the All Blacks had so many injuries that they could no longer field a full side.

Crowther’s most outstanding player over all his years, and I and just about everyone else who had the pleasure of seeing him play rugby as a schoolboy would have to agree, was one Herschelle Gibbs. He took the 1992 Craven Week in Pretoria by the scruff of the neck and almost single-handedly won the main game for Western Province, 22-16 against Free State, that year.

Unfortunately for rugby, Gibbs was also quite good at cricket and the rest, as they say, is history.

There won’t be a Herschelle Gibbs in Paarl next week, there will only ever be one of him, I can guarantee that. There will be talent aplenty though and we are going to hear from more than one or two again in the years to come.