Putting your list of top 18 year-olds on TV is just not right

 I’m showing my age a little here.

When I first started going to the Craven Week in the 1990s Dr Danie Craven used to be there. He was getting on in years, and running South African Rugby, so he never spent the whole week, but he’d be around for a day or two, and he would speak at the SA Rugby-hosted dinner on one of the nights.

He had a cruel tongue in those speeches, I recall, and he’d use it when he disapproved of what he saw. There was a certain prescience in the things he mainly complained about – he could see his vision of what the week should be – a values-based festival of rugby with no winners and losers, and no individual honours – being replaced with the full-on tournament that it has since become.

I remember Doc at the 1991 week in East London. At that time there was a pundit working for SABC TV by the name of Zandberg Jansen. He was a wonderfully eccentric old man with a colourful use of Afrikaans idiomatic language. He would analyse the Currie Cup games of the previous weekend, and draw up what he called a “barometer” – a ranking of the players. Those were the isolation days, remember, so rugby fans were drawn to that sort of thing. It was good watching and I tried not to miss it.

Anyway, that year they sent him to the Craven Week and he set about creating a barometer of the players there. I was covering the week as a freelancer for The Star, but I was still a teacher then, and on the Transvaal Schools committee, so I was in on things and it soon became clear that the officials at the week, all teachers in those days, many of whom had been there for a while and were steeped in the spirit and traditions of the week, didn’t approve.

They felt it was wrong to be singling out players and were concerned that making Jansen’s list would be seen as a prize to aim for, putting unhealthy pressure on the 18 year-old players and distracting them from the real reasons why they were there. And what about the players who don’t make the list?

Some games were televised in those days, but SABC didn’t own the week the way DSTV does now, so the talk around the midmorning coffee and milk tart table was that Jansen should be told to bugger off. They were contemplating how to do that when Doc Craven arrived. He’d seen the show the night before and you can guess how that all ended.

No barometers at the Craven Week for the next 33 years. But is that about to change?

I love SuperSport Schools. They have taken school sport to a whole new level, giving players a platform to show their stuff, and bringing the games from around the country to those like me who love watching them.

They’ve gone into punditry too now with weekly magazine shows, and guess what? Zandberg’s barometer is back. I enjoy the programmes and I admire the pundits, but this week they published a pecking order of players in hockey, and I don’t approve. In the rugby show individual players have also been named, praised and discussed at length.

They have indicated that this will be regular feature with names added to and subtracted from the lists, I assume. And I know they are going to be at the inter-provincials in the winter.

A lot has changed since the days when Doc Craven used to pop in at his week, I know. What hasn’t changed is the fact that these are 17- and 18-year-olds, and that education is about building character. I just don’t think that rating and ranking them on national television is doing much for that. Do they really need that sort of pressure, on top of everything else that goes with playing in a must-win team environment, in their matric year, just when they are starting to become adult men and women?

Doc Craven knew they don’t all those years ago. So do I, but then, I guess I’m showing my age a little.