Wellington’s annual Sevens Rugby tournament has been and gone; the two-day event in the capital is a paler version of the Mardi Gras in Rio.
The main feature is everyone has fun. And for many of the exotically attired and party-loving crowd the fact that rugby is being played in the stadium is incidental, ping-pong or marbles being played would rate the same indifference.
For others though it is the sixteen teams from Argentina to Kenya, some nearly as colourfully garbed as the spectators, who provide non-stop action from noon until late evening. This year saw big upsets as perennial favourites NZ, Samoa, Fiji and points leader South Africa all faced early defeats.
Back where it really counts, at the cash register, such an event is estimated to generate a quick $15 million for the city coffers.
A large media contingent provides saturation coverage that ranges from the TV networks to the print journalists and of course the photographers. And in the ranks of lensmen there is a mixed bag of hard working pros shooting every game, downloading, scanning, captioning and wiring pix both domestically and internationally. Most of the pros favour the 400mm f2.8, others like Anthony Phelps, shooting for Reuters, prefers the 500mm f 4 on his Canon 1D Mark III and as backup for the closer action his very new Canon 5D Mark II. Phelps, a veteran shooter, said that the 5D is a superb camera for low light work and something special in video mode, and a special camera for his commercial work.
Others, who have grown older and dare I say frailer, myself included, have scaled down to the lighter, more manageable 300mm 2.8 with an extender when needed.
There is a raft of others toting cameras that seem to come out of the woodwork for this particular tournament and their gear can range from older digi cameras with short lenses to even a venerable film camera.
Up on the massive concourse that is the main entrance to the stadium I watched a couple of hard working candid photographers shooting the crowd and handing out their cards. It was like a re-run from those days when the candid shooters patrolled the streets of the main cities with their battered Leicas and snapped the lunchtime office workers.
These new candid men quickly posed groups of Supermen, dancing girls, Roman legionnaires and two clowns with their children in fairy costumes. Happy people making for happy pictures… it was hard to go back to the games.
The crowd as much as the players make for the success of the Rugby 7s Carnival and thirty five thousand packed into the Westpac Stadium on each of the two days.
Wessel Oosthuisen, my old South African mate, asked me before the final game on the second day, “How do these people manage to stand for two days in a row? And they are all ages!”
At the time Wessel was sitting near the sideline in a comfortable chair he had borrowed and there he sat covering the action with his Nikon D700 sporting a new 300mm f4. “It is a lens that is so easy to travel with and with the high ISO I can leave my 400 2.8 at home. My other camera is a D300, plus a couple of short lenses make up my kit,” he said.And as he was covering the rest of 7s tournaments for his own agency it made sense.
Wessel started work at 17 as a photographer on Die Vaderland, the main Afrikaans language newspaper in Johannesburg. That was back in the sixties when he reminded me that he wore a tie and jacket to work, (same for myself on the NZ Herald,) and carried a 5×4 Speed Graphic to cover local rugby and other sports, and he was just learning to speak English. Later he joined the new Johannesburg daily, The Citizen. He had a front page picture in the first edition of the new paper of the All Blacks playing North West Cape in Uppington in 1970.
Thirty years to the day and shortly before he retired he had another front-page picture of children playing and a loyal reader wrote in noting that fact.
One of his best known sports pictures was taken in 1970 during the first rugby test at Pretoria and Wessel had caught All Black halfback Chris Laidlaw being slammed in a dramatic, many would say shocking, head high tackle by Springbok forward Frik du Preez. Wessel said he shot that pic on a Pentax SB with a 200mm f4 lens using Kodak Plus X 100 ASA, no motor drive or auto focus of course.
Later he used Leicas and then moved to the Nikon F with a Novoflex 400mm f5.6 lens that had a pistol grip focus, “A great lens.”
Over the long years he has covered news and sport throughout South Africa including political coups in the puppet homelands and one of his special memories, the swearing in of Mandela as President.
He has visited Russia over twelve times, first when his youngest daughter Heidi-Marie, a top gymnast at 15, was invited to visit Russia and train under a brilliant coach. Since then he has been drawn back to the huge country, he says he enjoys both the people and the land and adds with faint smile, “You know people of both countries were forbidden to have contact with each other and we were both looked upon as being the skunks of the world.”
And he added, “When I first went there I found the women did not have hair on their chests, in fact they are among the most beautiful in the world.”
But he has had his moments with Russian security when he photographed a train tunnel, one of 39 near Lake Baikal, and was detained by security police. He managed to save himself being interviewed by the KGB by giving up his film and pointing out the Americans could photograph the whole area better from outer space. Reluctantly they let him go.
He has covered the last three Olympic Games and because of his daughter specialised shooting gymnastics. The Sydney Games in 2000 gave him one of the worst experiences when all his equipment was stolen from a secure locker in the media centre. He later found out that one key could open any one of six lockers alongside his own. “I found that hard to take seeing I have never lost any equipment back in SA through theft.”
He is shortly publishing his own big rugby book in A3 size and embracing 47 years of SA rugby; mainly pictures with short text and a split of 368 black and white and 68 colour. One chapter is titled “Rugby Royalty” and leading the group, not hard to guess, is Pinetree Meads. The book, it should be something, and he hopes I can attend the launch in SA.
In spite of corruption and the deterioration of medical services in SA he is firm he will not be leaving the great country and believes that the many races of the Rainbow Nation can hold it together.
Words and Photo: Peter Bush
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