THE TRANSVAAL AUTOMOBILE CLUB - NURSERY OF JEWISH SQUASH STARS

The Transvaal Automobile Club long dominated South African Squash, largely through its many Jewish players. Steven Katzew describes this golden age for the TAC and for the sport in SA.

Steven Mark Katzew is a Johannesburg-based advocate. He attended High School in Welkom, Orange Free State, going on to study Law at Rhodes University, Grahamstown. His articles on South African Jewish sporting personalities have appeared in Soul Sport and Jewish Affairs.

This is a story about a few good men passionate about the game of squash who, through using their own resources and endeavours, guided Johannesburg’s, and perhaps even South Africa’s, best known squash club, the Transvaal Automobile Club (known in squash circles as the TAC) to the official rating as South Africa’s Number 1 squash club. It is a story of vision, commitment, perseverance and patience. It is also a story with a strong Jewish flavour, for the TAC is, and remains, one of the adornments of Johannesburg Jewry - an institution that belongs to Johannesburg’s early beginnings through which the Jewish community was able to give full expression to its pursuit of the ultimate in excellence in the sporting field.

Perhaps fortuitously, the TAC was not, and never has been, an exclusively Jewish club. I say fortuitously because, as will be shown, wonderful non-Jewish players and a superb non-Jewish coach participated in the road to excellence. It is reflective rather of the enormous success of Johannesburg Jewry as a partner in the creation of this great city with a deep culture of institutionalised excellence.

The theme of commitment to excellence has a deeper significance too for the Jewish community. It is what keeps it flourishing and firmly committed to the excellence of its institutions that is so central to its acknowledged status as a flag-bearer for Diaspora Jewry on so many levels.

The story needs some contextualising and background.

The concept of a club as the crucible for sportsmen and sportswomen of a particular national or religious group is not uncommon. It is especially prevalent in the context of Diaspora communities of all persuasions. The reasons for their existence range from a natural tendency of members of a community to congregate in the same institutions to instances where members of a particular group establish their own clubs in response to being denied access to other clubs.

There are a number of examples in South Africa. Prominent amongst them was the erstwhile Jewish Guild in Johannesburg. Although constituted as a Jewish club, with the advent of professional soccer its soccer section attracted outsiders to the community. The result was that the soccer section of the club became a high profile open club with a Jewish ethos. The same applied to the soccer sections of the Greek clubs Hellenic in Cape Town and Corinthians in Johannesburg and to the Italian club Olympia, also in Johannesburg.

The focus of this article is the squash section of the famous TAC (in recent years renamed the Killarney Country Club, or KCC) which, although never constituted as a Jewish club, over time acquired a distinctively Jewish ethos due to the demographics of its surroundings. It nestles in the leafy suburb of Houghton adjacent to populous Killarney. It acquired its name, which is associated with motoring in the early 1900s, when the agricultural holding that once stood on the present site of the club, Cooks Farm, became the recognised rendezvous for burgeoning numbers of enthusiasts of the then nascent pastime of motoring. These informal gatherings of early motoring enthusiasts galvanised into an exclusive club of motoring patrons called the Transvaal Automobile Club, with its headquarters on Cooks Farm. The club evolved into the Automobile Association of South Africa (AASA), which ensured roadside assistance and safety to those early members. The appeal of an exclusive club devoted to motoring began to wane with the mass production of motor vehicles. The Transvaal Automobile Club, under the reconstituted guise of the AASA, relocated to premises closer to the Johannesburg commercial hub to become the ubiquitous dominant service provider of roadside assistance to motorists in South Africa. Cooks Farm, however, retained its status as a social club with its acquired name, the Transvaal Automobile Club.

With the gradual absorbing of the surrounding farmland into rapidly expanding suburban Johannesburg, the TAC became a popular retreat for residents of the neighbouring suburbs and a venue for sedate activities like golf, croquet, tennis and bowls. The squash section was a relatively late addition to the club’s range of activities. Although squash was played in South Africa in the early part of the last century at the exclusive Johannesburg Country Club and at certain private schools, it was only after the Second World War that the sport acquired general appeal. Schools, universities and private and municipal clubs added courts to their existing sporting facilities in response to growing demand from young professionals, entrepreneurs and students who were attracted to the sport’s high tempo and economy of duration, which suited their busy lifestyles.

Squash was also advancing by leaps and bounds internationally. The quartet of Pakistan, Great Britain, Egypt and Australia comprised the game’s leading exponents. Despite attempted boycotts against South African players and teams - especially by Pakistan - in protest against South Africa’s then racially based discriminatory legislation, individual South African players and teams still managed to make their mark in encounters with individuals and teams from Australia and Great Britain and even in encounters with individual players from Egypt and Pakistan.

A number of South African squash players, including the likes of Roland Watson, Paul Symonds, Ian Holding and Stuart Hailstone, achieved international acclaim over this period (from the seventies to the millennium), which is generally regarded as a golden era in South African squash. This was also a golden era for Jewish participation in sport in South Africa. Despite sanctions and boycotts against South Africa across almost all sporting codes, extraordinarily high standards of domestic competition were maintained. This manifested in sporadic encounters with individuals and teams from other countries who defied the boycotts to test their mettle against the acknowledged prowess of their South African counterparts. The feats of Jewish men and women who achieved fame in this era in many sports, including high profile national team sports like soccer, cricket, field and indoor hockey and rugby, and on the international tennis circuit as well, are legendary. The list is too long to mention. The stories of many of these Jewish sporting stars have been published. Those who have not received the publicity they deserve are stories for another day.