More than one winner at Buffalo Park where change is writ large

A sizeable chunk of the membership of the Buffalo Club was not happy. How dare Border cricket decide to put up a new scoreboard? And so impede the members' view of the Indian Ocean, which they could see lapping onto Eastern Beach from their clubhouse's privileged perch on a hill overlooking Buffalo Park.

It wasn't enough that the members could watch all the live cricket they wanted in the comfort of their club, and without having to bother with buying a ticket. They wanted the view, too. To hell with spectators who would benefit from being better informed about the match.

The club's ownership of the ground gave them a false, unpaid for and unearned sense of entitlement and superiority over the wishes and needs of the ticket-buying thousands who thronged the grass banks and stands on big match days.

This was deep in the dark 1990s, when Buffs' membership was even whiter than the make-up of the teams that played at the foot of the hill. Then, clubs like Buffs, which had until recently been physically, mentally and emotionally ensconced in the bosom of the apartheid establishment, were seen and saw themselves as bastions of the old order.

You want fairness? Democracy? Something closer to unity? What you hoped would soon be reality? Rather join United or Willows in Buffalo Flats and Mdantsane, brown and black areas of East London. And, if you're white, be satisfied and shut up. Not many years earlier and you would have had the security police asking whether you were a communist or a terrorist, or both - they were the same thing for the goons, anyway - for wanting to play cricket with and against people who were not white. Or the cops would not have bothered to ask before they took you away. Buffs and its ilk was not for you and your ilk. Exactly the same people, and their enablers, among them members of clubs like Buffs, demanded that sport and politics be kept strictly separate.

So you wonder what the membership of Buffs club thought while they watched the