May 2010. Parkview.

Rodney Hartman, the sports journalist, died aged 61 on Tuesday 18 May.

I met him for the first time during the early days of December 1998, 11 and a half years ago. Those were the days when men were men and journalists were still being offered those notorious "freebies", and were, remarkably, being allowed by their managements to grasp them with both hands (those were indeed the days).

Rodney and I were two of a party of seven or eight so-called "senior" journalists taken to London by South African Airways to see if Nick Mallet's Springboks could win 17 games in a row. As it turned out, they couldn't.

December 1998. Over Africa; London.

I must admit with embarrassment that, besides Rodney and myself, I can remember from that trip with certainty only Tim du Plessis, now the editor of Beeld. Maybe David Williams of the Financial Mail was also there.

I am also not certain now what I was doing then. I guess I had just finished my stint as part of the "tabloid team" reporting to Deon du Plessis, general manager of Independent Newspapers Gauteng. The Daily Sun, partially the fruit of those days, would come much, much later, after the management of Independent had through stupidity, arrogance, and internal politicking kicked the idea of a tabloid into touch and Deon - after a stint of fishing - had joined up with Nasionale.

I was probably about to start work as managing and news editor of The Sunday Independent (TSI). This would mean that I got the freebie through the kind offices of Deon. Or maybe I had already started at TSI and the trip came through the then Sindy editor, John Battersby.

Either way, I found myself sitting in business class next to a strange fellow called Hartman. I did not know about him, except vaguely, because I (foolishly) did not pay much attention to sports coverage then.

But we had the - for me - requisite conversation (requisite with "older" members of the press corps connected in any way with the Sunday Times) about my brother Joel, who had worked on the Sunday Times in the days of Joel Mervis. (Strange to realise now that in fact Rodney was only four years older than I.)

The reason Hartman was in my view peculiar was that in those days fatness and diabetes were someone else's problems, not mine. I smoked, as Tom Waits would have it, like a diesel, and I hit the food tray and the wine with a vengeance whereas Hartman would not go anywhere near the wine or any of the liquor. He said he had been a little ill. I repeatedly, and no doubt irritatingly, suggested that he relax, not be a silly billy, and have a tincture or two. But he demurred, looking at me slightly dubiously, as if to ask: "Don't you know?"

Later, we spent a fair amount of time together during those two or three days in London, especially on the Saturday night after our return from a freezing Twickenham, where the Springboks lost. The others went to eat and drink but I didn't feel like it and Rodney clearly wasn't doing much drinking. We walked an icy London for about three hours.

May 2010. Linden.

The thing is that I indeed did not know. I did not know that Hartman had been "fighting leukaemia" for 15 years, as The Star wrote seven days ago. Nor did I know then that Rodney had once been a champion roisterer.

His boozing exploits were legendary. He'd lock himself up in a room at the Carlton Hotel and lose whole days ... He was one of the last of that generation of journos, some of whom I was lucky enough to watch at work and play ...If I think back to the days when I was a cadet journalist on the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express (may they rest in peace), at about 6pm the serious fellows - Ian Reid, Peter Wellman, David Hazelhurst, Derek Taylor, and the list goes on - would head for the Federal Hotel bar and, if you went there yourself, and weren't working at the RDM that evening ... well, you'd finally go home but it was generally after at least 12 beers. Sometimes - and I drove a motorbike, a Kwaka 650, for some of that period - you couldn't even remember how you got home.

Rodney's roistering was of course not mentioned at the funeral service held at Trinity Church, Linden, on Friday afternoon, 21 May. In fact in all the outpouring of written emotion that has appeared, only Archie Henderson has mentioned that Hartman really knew how to party. But I suppose you don't mention that part of someone's life at his funeral in front of a grieving family.

2007. Sauer Street.

Ian McEwan has a hilarious - or maybe it's tragic - new novel out, Solar, about a very unpleasant scientist called Michael Beard. Towards the end of the book, we read (pp 225-6):

"... he was beginning to understand that, barring accidents, life did not change. He had been deluded. He had always assumed that a time would come in adulthood , a kind of plateau, when he would have learned all the tricks of managing ... all mail and emails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves, clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes ...the private life settled and serene, accommodation and finances likewise. [But] the calm plateau ...never appeared, and yet he had continued to assume ... that it was just around the next turn ..."

But of course, for most people, as Beard suddenly realises, such plateaus never arrive.

When I was working at the Sindy in 2007, busy with Zuma matters, and Rodney was mainly busy on The Star's sports pages, he'd often come into my office and ask me in his ultra-polite, gentle way whether I wouldn't please look into the matter of "Phil Snoyman's business".

Snoyman - a former top goalkeeper in the Johannesburg Rangers (1940s and 50s), a close friend of Sir Stanley Matthews, and a buddy of Rodney's - always believed that the purchase of his tyre business in Malvern by a large group had somehow not been above board. Snoyman claimed that there was proof to be found if only someone would look properly and talk to a certain accountant.

And I believed I would do this sometime for Rodney - and for Snoyman - when I reached that "plateau" of calm and free time. But I left the Independent group at the end of 2008, Snoyman died in March 2009, and now Rodney's dead.

1905. Kasteel Street, Belgravia (Jeppestown).

The Snoymans were a "famous" family. There were 10 brothers and a sister (Gertie) who formed a soccer team and solved the problem of what to do with Gertie by putting her in the goal. More renowned, later, as goalkeepers were Phil and brother Lubbe.

Matthews (Sir Stan) loved Phil and would always spend time with him on his visits to SA. And of course Hymie "Fish" Snoyman was famous at the Rand Daily Mail for being the man with the liquor. But you had to be a grown-up. Hazelhurst could buy booze from Fish - but he wouldn't sell to a laaitie such as me. Not a chance.

But before the Snoymans became well-known, they lived - in the early 1900s - next to my paternal grandparents in Kasteel Street, Belgravia. According to my father - who, be warned, never liked the facts to get in the way of a good story - the family was very poor. So his mother (my grandmother, Sarah) would always share her large pot of soup with he Snoyman parents and their soccer team.

May 2010. Kasteel Street.

Last Sunday I drove east down Jules Street to find my grandparents' home. It's gone; levelled; it's waste ground. And although Jo'burg and most of South Africa is being dolled up for the World Cup, that part of town is not. It's clearly pretty forgotten.

And the Snoymans, the keenest of footballers, and Rodney Hartman, are not going to be around for the great football spectacle.

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