Journalists are prepared to put up with a lot in the course of duty, but even we have our breaking point. For the South African contingent covering the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the final straw was the exorbitant beer price at the Mint Hotel, the media base for the showpiece.The monolithic building was surrounded by multiple-lane highways on all sides and, with no other pubs in safe proximity, they could charge us what they liked - if I remember correctly it was close to R30, around three times what we paid back home.The South African press contingent was large, with some media organisations sending up to two representatives each. Larry Lombaard and I covered those Games for the SA Press Association, the independent national news agency.Most of us drank beer, so we formed the Press Institute for Non-Teetotallers (PINT).One of the ringleaders was Mike Finch, who was doing radio; Mark Beer of The Star, despite his perfect nomenclature, unfortunately declined the role as spokesman.PINT did the typically South African thing and protested at the hotel entrance mid-morning.The Mint management retaliated with humour, sending out waiters holding placards reading "Free beers for journalists" and carrying trays of beers for the demonstrators.But the hotel didn't drop its price and soon afterwards an intrepid colleague discovered a tricky route across the highways to a modestly priced local pub. Cheap beer was worth the risk.So every night after filing our copy, normally around midnight, we ventured forth for booze, late supper and some pool.First we had to leap about 1.5m across a seemingly bottomless storm-water drain, landing in the road and then dodging speeding vehicles until we scaled the barriers in the middle.And then it was the same thing across the other side, finishing with a well-timed leap across the drain on the far end.We normally returned to the hotel around 3am or so, but on our last night we made the mistake of staying until after 6am.The traffic was far heavier than we were used to and suddenly we had to rely on our wits, dulled as they were.Disaster nearly struck when Paul Martin of Business Day (after a dry Games he had finally indulged) almost walked straight into the drain, but was pulled back to safety by Grant Shimmin of the Sunday Times.Somehow we negotiated the traffic without casualty.Since then I have been fortunate to cover four Olympics and two more Commonwealth Games, and seen the size of the South African media contingent shrink in that time, the result of cost-cutting.At Glasgow 2014 I was one of only two full-time print reporters there.The latest victim of cost-cutting is Sapa, which closed its doors last night.Sapa has forged many journalism careers - of that 1998 media corps, Beer, Finch and Shimmin were already ex-staffers. Martin had been a regular freelancer.The institution is dead, but Sapa's legacy will survive a little longer...