Going golfing with editors

It can’t be much fun working for a big commercial newspaper these days. Journalists all seem to be paranoid about losing their jobs because of takeovers, retrenchments or just being the wrong demographic. Editors are stressed out by mounting political pressure on press freedom, being the wrong demographic or having to go out and flog advertising. Everyone seems to take the business of newspapering far too seriously these days. And it’s a crying shame.

It’s all unlike the good old days when hacks didn’t give a hoot about losing jobs or being fired, because there were plenty of openings elsewhere. And editors could be brave and bold, eccentric, opinionated and rule a powerful roost because of a great big no-go zone that existed between themselves and their business managers and even boards of directors. It was in this environment that Harvey Tyson, editor of The Star in the 1980s, and his ilk not only prospered but made the newsroom a fun place to be.

Harvey has always been one of my favourite people for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was his ability to make me loosen up, laugh and stop sweating the small stuff.

I don’t know why I subjected myself to it, but whenever I had the chance I would inveigle myself into a golfing four-ball that at the very least had Harvey in it, but at best both Harvey and Rex Gibson, the former editor of the Rand Daily Mail and subsequently Tyson’s deputy at The Star.

Harvey has this incredible ability to play golf and indulge in serious bird watching at the same time. It is not great for one’s golf, but it’s a laugh a minute. In fact, now that I think of it, Harvey and I, along with that turbo-twitcher and another former editor of The Star, Peter Sullivan, hold something of a record for identifying 42 different species of bird at the Jo’burg Country Club all in the space of playing 18 holes.

It was on days like those that I recognised that Harvey Tyson was a quite outstanding editor. He has, you see, this incredibly annoying habit of talking nineteen to the dozen on his opponent’s backswing. But what sets editors apart from the rest of mankind is that where ordinary mortals would apply golfing gamesmanship by talking on their opponent’s backswing, Tyson would always display his obsession for both sides of the story by talking nineteen to the dozen on his own backswing.

Irritating as it might sound, particularly if you were his partner, Tyson’s constant gabble and heart-stopping yells of “Hey, isn’t that a Yellow-breasted Apalis?”, just as someone was about to putt, never really prompted anyone to avoid playing with him. Somehow, he has always had the knack of persuading you that talking on your backswing is ultimately good for your game.

It was the same argument he used in the mid-1980s when government paranoia over the English press was at its highest and almost every week a contingent of security police would storm into Harvey’s office at The Star and tell him they were shutting the paper down. Time after time Tyson employed all those golf course communications skills, and more often than not the cops would walk out of the building trying to remember what on earth they were doing there in the first place.

I believe Harvey Tyson was one of South Africa’s truly great editors. He was an excellent manager of people, a wordsmith of note and a public speaker of the highest order.

Only a year or two before he retired I remember leaving a dinner party just before midnight because of a date with Harvey and other members of the Finance Writers Golf Club at 7am on a course about 100km out of Johannesburg. Tyson was only just warming up when most of us left him sliding down the banisters with a glass of J&B in his hand, whooping like a kid who had just cracked matric. But there he was at the crack of dawn the next morning, on the first tee, talking the hind leg off a donkey and looking as though he had put in a solid eight hours sleep.

We noticed something was wrong when he fell on his backside trying to play his first shot. He then proceeded to fall on his bottom after every shot for the next three holes. It took him a good half hour to realise that the reason he kept falling down was because he had forgotten to don his golf spikes and was still wearing his dancing shoes.

Harvey lives in Hermanus now. He remains as active as ever and still is a barrel of laughs.