All Black quoted on apartheid in sport

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32522, 4 February 1971, Page 15

All Black quoted on apartheid in sport

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) LONDON. The case against isolating South Africa in sport now had the support of the All Black, C. R. Laidlaw, said an article in the "Observer,” written by Andrew Mulligan.

Mulligan, a former Ireland an Lions scrum-half, and now a journalist, quoted Laidlaw as saying: “The most rewarding aspect of the All Blacks* tour to South Africa last summer was that several dyed-in-the-wool Afrikaners specifically confessed that they had had a change of heart about multi-racial sport.” Laidlaw had said that because of the All Blacks’ tour, many South Africans who had not previously contemplated multi-racial sport had now decided that there was no harm in it.

However, it had been a pity in many ways that the All Blacks had not won the series, because “the South Africans interpreted the playing of their white team against our plural team as a crusade.”

Mulligan has written several articles about the effect of apartheid on sport in South Africa, and made a television film for the 8.8. C. that was strongly criticised by South African authorities.

He quoted Laidlaw as saying that the value of the tour was poignantly highlighted

1 by the fact that the star of the tour was a part-Samoan player. B. G. Williams. Off the field Williams had ; been seen dancing with white - girls, which was normal to ' him. When one Afrikaner had referred to “that black bastard” dancing with the girls, Williams had superficially treated it as a huge joke. Laidlaw said that when he and a fellow team-member invited a group of coloured teachers to their hotel in Cape Town there had been no reaction from the hotel staff. The hotel manager had said later, however, that he had been “obliged to report” that coloureds had been on the premises. To Laidlaw, said Mulligan,

' the question was now how to continue putting pressure on South Africa to change. Laidlaw did not believe that sanctions would work, but saw the next step as a demand to South Africa to pick a non-white, on merit, for their next tour. “I have no wish to be associated with the arch-sporting and cloistered thinking of the major controlling bodies over here on one hand, or the demonstrators’ ethos on the other,” said Laidlaw at the end of the four-column article. “But there is a mid-point—-and although mv British and New Zealand friends advised me not to go to South Africa last summer, I know it was right to go.”