Back in Mallorca, sport wasn’t really a big deal. King's College was brand new, with very limited access to proper facilities. But we did manage to cobble together a soccer team, and I ended up captaining it. And yeah—I was reasonably good. But it wasn’t a serious thing. There were no roaring crowds, no rituals, no gods in short shorts.
Then I arrived at St. John’s. And suddenly, sport was everything.
Athletics, cricket, rugby, hockey, tennis, squash, swimming—you name it, they did it, and they did it well. I sucked at most of them. Actually, I sucked at all of them.
You had to choose between obligatory sports. In the summer term, it was cricket or tennis. In winter, it was hockey or rugby. Unless you had one leg and a signed medical note, hockey was considered a social death sentence. Rugby was the outright king. The First XV were treated like gods.
Our main rivals were from KES—King Edward VII School. Founded in 1902 by the British colonial administration as Johannesburg High School for Boys, it was part of Lord Milner’s push to establish elite English-speaking government schools in the Transvaal, modelled on the British public school system. In 1911, it moved to its current campus in Houghton and was renamed KES in honour of the late British monarch.
It was widely believed—at least in our circles—that KES had been positioned to rival schools like St. John’s, which were private and, at times, financially struggling. That contrast—state power versus private tradition—made the rivalry more than just athletic. It was ideological as well as personal.
In 1981, when I was in Lower 4, St. John’s beat KES for the first time since 1969, when my own brother Niels had kicked the winning conversion. I remember that 1981 match vividly. Watching First Team games was compulsory, so the stands were packed. Years later, I came across a grainy video of the match, shot by one of the teachers. The level of play was amazingly high—even by today’s standards, it was fast, physical, and fierce. That was a hell of a day.
I, meanwhile, rarely made it beyond the D team—if that. Most of the time I was just a reserve, lingering on the bench, hoping not to be called on. I wasn’t tall, I was skinny, and definitely not built for collisions. The idea of getting tackled and face-planting into a bone-dry, rock-hard Johannesburg winter field didn’t exactly appeal. Rugby wasn’t my game, and that became clear fairly quickly.
Swimming? Hated it.
Tennis? Passable, on a good day.
What I actually excelled at—was shooting.
Back in Mallorca, I’d been given Niels’ old BSA Meteor air rifle and turned into a quietly lethal crack shot. That skill and the rifle came with me to South Africa. I’d spend afternoons plinking away in the garden, and to my delight, I discovered that shooting still existed at St. John’s—albeit in a shadow of its former glory.
In earlier years, St. John’s had run cadet programmes, and inter-house as well as inter-school shooting competitions were a big deal. Being captain of shooting once held the same prestige as captaining rugby or cricket. The biggest, most ornate trophies in the house cabinets were all relics from that era.
By my time, it had been relegated to an after-school hobby you could do twice a week. There was still the annual inter-house tournament, but we no longer competed against other schools.
Shooting took place at a range behind the squash courts, supervised by Potty Chamberlain, a semi-retired master. You’d collect your bolt-action .22 Brno from the armoury and carry it down to one of the brick firing enclosures. The targets were set 25 yards away, and behind the shooting line were a few benches where others would sit—either waiting their turn or quietly trying to psych you out.
I got very, very good. Potty took a shine to me and I became something of his protégé. While I muddled through every other sport, doing the bare minimum, shooting was the one place I took seriously. I was really good at it.
By Standard 8 or 9, I was made Captain of Shooting for Hill House. We had annual inter-house shooting competitions, which still carried some weight—mostly because of those legacy trophies. Under my captaincy, we won it two—maybe three—years running. But the prize I really wanted was “Best Shot,” a new title introduced in my final year.
And I was by far the favourite to take the title.
To qualify, you had to shoot your official score on a designated day. Once it was in, that was it. No second tries.
On my chosen day, I arrived at the range to find a couple of Alston House thugs—boys I already didn’t trust—sitting unsmilingly on the benches behind the line. I lay down on the mat in one of the brick shooting bays and began the routine.
You started with two sighters. I fired them, laid the rifle down, and walked up the range to check the target. Came back, made my sight adjustment, and repeated the process—two more sighters, walk up, check the grouping, another adjustment.
Then I fired my fifth and final sighter.
As usual, I laid the rifle on the mat, walked up to check it, and while I was there, I manually changed the target over to the scoring one.
That’s when they must have done it.
While I was downrange—focused on the sighter and swapping over to the scoring target—one of them must have stepped forward and slid the rear sight on my rifle up a few notches. Just enough to throw off the elevation without being obvious.
I came back, lay down, and began my ten scoring shots—completely focused.
The rhythm felt right. I was calm and steady. I knew I was shooting well.
Then I noticed something strange.
My grouping was tight—exactly what you want—but it was forming about six inches below the bullseye. A near-perfect cluster… just in entirely the wrong place.
And that’s when I realised what had happened. I hadn’t touched the sight since my final adjustment. I hadn’t made a mistake. Someone else had.
They’d waited for the exact moment I was furthest from the rifle—with my back turned—to sabotage my score.
I was mortified. Almost in tears, I showed Potty and told him what I thought had happened. He took one look at the grouping and knew I was telling the truth. If the shots had been over the bullseye, it would’ve been a perfect score. He said I could reshoot the next day, which was extremely generous of him, because that was generally not allowed.
I did—but by then I was rattled. I wasn’t nearly as calm as the previous day, and I blew it.
I never won Best Shot, although Hill House still won overall, as we always did.
Years later, in my final year, my name was read out in assembly as Captain of Shooting. It should’ve been a moment of pride. Instead, the amphitheatre erupted in laughter. Everyone knew it was a ceremonial title by then. We didn’t even compete against other schools. It was just a tradition on life support.
Still, shooting was my thing. I had a gift. I just arrived twenty years too late to make anything of it.
And to be fair, I wasn’t totally passive about the rest of it. I knew my scrawny frame wasn’t doing me any favours. Being that skinny at St. John’s made you easy to overlook—or worse, a soft target. I decided I needed to change that.
So I got my mum to buy me a bench press. I set it up in my room along with two dumbbells. I didn’t have proper ankle weights, so I improvised: I strapped the dumbbells to my legs using cloth fly rod sleeves.
And then I ate like it was my job.
I invented a kind of eggnog—three raw eggs, whisked in milk, chugged down in one gulp. I’d also sit in the garden with half a loaf of bread and a giant glass of water and just force it down. Carb-loading, 1980s style.
It worked. Over a few months, I put on about ten kilos. I didn’t get big, exactly—more lithe, I suppose—but it was enough to stop being a see-through waif. Enough to make my presence a little harder to ignore.
Looking back, I do wish I’d tried harder at the traditional sports. But I also know that, in my own way, I fought to hold my place in that world. I didn’t quit. I just picked a different kind of target.