A few months ago, at a meeting of the Table View Toastmasters Club, I was a participant in “Table Topics”, the fun part of the evening when selected victims are forced to make a 1 minute, unprepared speech on a subject chosen by the “Table Topics Master”.
The theme for the exercise was sports. Everyone was asked to comment on the current status of the national sports team that the topics master chose. Other people got rugby, cricket, soccer, etc. I got jukskei.
Obviously, I have no idea how the national jukskei team is doing, but I whiled away my minute by recounting the interesting experience of watching a jukskei test match between South Africa and the USA on television as a child. As surprising as this seems, the event really happened and I hoped that the audience would find this fact interesting.
After my minute was up, someone congratulated me on being a “very good bullshitter.”
Was going to let this slight pass? Nooooo! So I wrote to Jukskei SA to discover the details of this test match. In return I received a copy of an academic paper entitled, From Pioneer Passtime to International Status: Jukskei as South Africa’s Only White Indigenous Sport, by Prof. Floris J. G. van der Merwe, DPhil (Sports History), of the Department of Sports Science, Stellenbosch University.
This paper has the following to say:
In April 1972 a delegation of American horseshoe pitchers visited the national jukskei tournament at Kroonstad to demonstrate their game. Later that year, in August, a team of South African jukskei players did the same at the World Horseshoe Tournament in Greenville, Ohio (Hambidge, 1978: 95; Schoeman, 1983: 17). During the following two years visits to and fro resulted in the Jukskei Association of the USA being founded in Ohio in 1975. Four years later the International Jukskei Association consisting of the USA, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe was founded (Le Roux, 1990: 37), thus endowing the indigenous Afrikaner folk game with international status.
Since 1979 the Association has played an active role in organising international events and Springbok colours were first awarded in 1980 when a South African team visited the United States of America (SA Sport Federation, 1981: 7).
The first official test match abroad, between South Africa and the United States, took place during the National Jukskei Championships of the United States of America. Six teams took part in Huntsville, Alabama on 27 September 1980. The other teams were Ohio, Virginia men, Virginia women, Alabama and Massachusetts (Brand, 1981: 5; Venter, 1981: 111). This was preceded in April by international competitions between South Africa, America and Zimbabwe during the national tournament in Kroonstad (Brand, 1981: 9).
Let my thanks go to Prof. van der Merwe and Mr Tinus Barnard of Jukskei SA for this vindication. To those of you who doubted me, I say, “Bwah-ha-ha! Bwah-ha-ha-HA-HA!”
