A Lions supporter to the core – at 91!

We spent some time with former Transval and Springbok flank Piet Malan this week. Read on to see what this rugby legend has to say.

It would be a very rare exception if former Transvaal captain and Springbok flank Piet Malan missed a match of the Lions at Coca-Cola Park – and after their recent form where they strung together four consecutive wins, Oom Piet seems to have an extra spring in his 91-year-old legs.

Oom Piet, as he is fondly known and called by everybody, is the oldest living Springbok and a man who would virtually as a matter of course attend the after-match function in the presidential suite, from where he watches the provincial matches as an honorary guest.

Piet Malan became the oldest living Springbok at 86 years of age, after the death of Howard Watt, the longest surviving member of the 1937 Springbok tour to Australasia, in August 2005.

Ernst Joubert, a loose forward who captained the Lions in the 2007 Currie Cup final against the Free State which the Lions lost 20-18 in Bloemfontein, is a grandson of the sprightly 91- year old, and he is a source of great pride for Oom Piet.

Oom Piet was capped for the Springboks against the 1949 All Blacks at the age of 30. He fondly remembers his 33 matches for Transvaal that included two finals and the Currie Cup title, which was won in 1950 again st western Province.

“Those were wonderful times,” he reminisces. “And it was very different to what it is today.

“When we played in Cape Town, we left Johannesburg by train on a Wednesday evening and arrived in Cape Town on the Friday morning. The Sunday after the match we wandered about in Cape Town, and that evening we’d leave to arrive back on Tuesday morning - too late for work!

“That meant we were away for a week for a single match!”

“The train trips were great fun,” he recalls. “The new guys were initiated on those trips - and the belts holding up the train bunks in those days were used to give them the initiation “bakoond” on a bare bum! It certainly wasn’t pleasant, but we all went through it - and it certainly helped for team spirit!”

The game in his time was as hard up front as it is today, says Malan, but much slower. “We weren’t as fit as today’s guys. We couldn’t train as hard, obviously, because we all had fulltime jobs. When we got to the training field, we had at most an hour to train with a ball before it was dark, and then we did a little running. There weren’t floodlights in those days.

“The result was that we battled hard in the rucks and scrums, but did a fair amount of walking on the field!”

Without touch judges “the odd fist would find its target - but you would know that the man on the receiving end would wait his turn and get you back, either in that match, or when you met again in a future match!

“And the fields on which we played often had no grass! Even Ellis Park, where the grass is now taken care of and watered daily, was very hard to tackle and to get tackled on.”

The 1950 final, which Transvaal won 22-11 against Western Province at Ellis Park, he remembers well. “We strangled them with our forwards,” Oom Piet recalls. “We scrummed them and beat them in the rucks, and thereby put pressure on their scrumhalf Ballie Wahl. He simply couldn’t get the ball away and was trampled into the ground on a few occasions - and the first time that happened, big Gert Dannhauser said to me: ‘We’ve got them!’ We knew then that the game was ours.”

“Were you paid?” Oom Piet was asked.

“Not a penny. All we got after a provincial match was a beer or two. Perhaps that was why the guys drank more beer in those days than the professionals of today!”

Piet Malan studied at Potchefstroom University until 1941, and then came to Johannesburg as a teacher. Those were war years, and no Currie Cup competitions took place between 1939 and 1946.

He joined Diggers; in those days – as indeed until the 1980s – a real powerhouse in Transvaal, as well as in South African rugby, with a tradition and pride that performed the feeder role to the provincial system extraordinarily well.

“Club rugby in those days was tough. We had strong sides to compete against: ERPM, Simmer and Jack, West Rand … it was good, hard rugby and the standard was exceptionally high.

“That helped to prepare us for the Currie Cup when the competition restarted in 1946.”

Transvaal, with Piet Malan in the side, lost the Currie Cup final to Western Province in 1947, and then won it in two back-to-back tournaments in 1950 and 1952. Malan was still in the 1950 side, but had retired by 1952.

It is not generally known, but Oom Piet was instrumental in the establishment of the Craven Week as a provincial schools tournament. He suggested to Dr Danie Craven, then the president of the SA Rugby Board, that a provincial tournament for schoolboys be organised to coincide with the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the South African Rugby Board in 1964.

That became reality, and the first of the famous Craven week tournaments – unique in world rugby – took place, and have taken place annually since then.