Tom, for ever more, in our hearts

Sorry to go on about yet another dead bloke, but it's not every day that your first rugby hero passes on.

It's a bit like losing your first girlfriend; you think you'll never get over it. This week's No Boundaries was supposed to be about the wings Allister Coetzee will name on Sunday night for the Springbok tour of Europe; instead it's about a Springbok wing of 62 years ago: Tom van Vollenhoven. By Sunday night we'll have got over Tom and moved on to other, more recent, girlfriends and Springbok wings.

At the time we knew Tom as Karel, his first name, but by the time he left South Africa after playing only seven rugby Tests he was Tom. And that's how he was known for ever more after joining rugby league at St Helen's in Merseyside, England, where they actually paid you to play. If you'd listened to the high priests of rugby union at the time, that was like a combination of heresy and harlotry. A lot of those high priests are still spinning in their graves, or rotting in hell.

Karel - or Tom - came into our lives along with many other rugby luminaries of the time, not all of them in green and gold; Cliff Morgan wore red, as did Jeff Butterfield and Tony O'Reilly. For the first time in our young lives it was live, full-colour Test rugby and not the historical version.

Van Vollenhoven had been picked to play centre - wherever that was - my father told us, for the first Test against the 1955 British Lions (the Irish were then blithely ignored in the title although the team contained five of them, including O'Reilly and the captain, Robin Thompson).

Then the Boks lost. It was terrible. Some people said it was worse than when Smuts lost seven years earlier but we didn't know who he'd played for. The man who missed the kick that could have won us the Test was forever humiliated by a famous photograph taken at Ellis Park, showing a Quinns Bread billboard in the background with the ball swinging away from the left-hand upright. Jack van der Schyff rode off into the sunset to hunt other big game and was never heard of again.

Two weeks later our father returned to Port Nolloth from an arduous 500-mile (there were no kilometres then) journey to Cape Town with the joyous news that we'd won at Newlands and that our hero, then playing on the wing, had scored three tries, running past that Irish red-haired kid O'Reilly each time. News didn't travel fast in those days.

From that moment, Van Vollenhoven was our hero. Not only was he the best thing since Captain America (a black-and-white serial showing once a fortnight in our town at the time) but he also had a cool haircut. My brother and I persuaded the local barber (and also charge office desk sergeant) to give us similar shaves; our mother called them "prison cuts".

Then, just as we were beginning to really love him, Van Vollenhoven left us for the Merseyside, becoming a star at St Helen's and a hero for some real Englishmen. Judging by the outpourings this week from that part of the world for the 82-year-old, they love him still. Yet back here, we have all forgotten him. Well, not all of us.