OBITUARY | Brilliant Sy Lerman had the uncanny ability to write colourfully

As a young man aspiring to become a soccer journalist, one of the writers who inspired me was Sy Lerman.

Back then, I remember reading his brilliantly written articles with his head and shoulder byline and thinking, “I want to be as good a writer as this woman.”

I thought he was a woman because of his hair and the name was an uncommon one.

You can imagine the embarrassment I felt at discovering that Lerman, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 88, was a man.

And that discovery came in 1992 when he was attacked by the late Bafana Bafana coach Stanley “Screamer” Tshabalala for what “Bra Stan” felt was a vendetta being waged against him.

The headline “Don’t Scream, Just go” was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Tshabalala as Lerman used his brilliant penmanship to justify why he believed the former Mamelodi Sundowns coach was not good enough for the national team.

I saw Lerman on TV for the first time and was astounded that he was not a woman.

Still, I continued to admire his work and for years during my journalism studies I collected cuttings of his articles — pasting them into that good old two-quire black notebook with a red spine.

His amazing ability to centre a report on a single incident from a match enthralled me, and in later years I’d see it done by some of the best journalists in England

I read Sy Lerman a lot, enthralled by his uncanny ability to not only report on matches but to bring them alive colourfully often using analogies from the many books he’d obviously read.

And therein lay his genius. Sy Lerman was very well-read.

He would use the curious case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for a match report.

He found ways to get Oliver Twist into a preview.

Yet, for all my admiration of his writing before getting into the industry, I learnt the truth of the saying “Never meet your heroes”.

For one, he was pretty rude to me when I first met and tried to introduce myself to him, eager to tell him how much his work inspired me.

Disappointed by my hero’s rebuff, I quickly moved from wanting to write like Sy Lerman to wanting to write better than him.

Brilliant a writer as he was, the old man had a serious weakness.

Sy Lerman was tardy.

I do not recall him ever arriving for a match or even a press conference on time.

I still have vivid memories of him ambling into the press box at the FNB Stadium, never greeting anyone and then asking those he was close to for details of what he might have missed.

Once, I remember some of us contriving to mislead him just so we could teach him a lesson.

We never got to do it though, if only because there was one young journalist — Reginald Nkholise — who somehow became Sy’s ‘note taker’.

Perhaps most memorable for me about Sy was that even though he would arrive late for a match, he still managed to write better reports — and often longer ones — than all of us who’d watched the full 90 minutes.

His amazing ability to centre a report on a single incident from a match enthralled me, and in later years I’d see it done by some of the best journalists in England.

The refrain so and so’s death has left such and such an industry all the poorer is a cliché.

Yet while Sy had long stopped writing on football before his death on Sunday, there can be no denying that South African soccer journalism in particular has been left a tad bereft by his absence.

And the finality of his absence is all the sadder — particularly in this age when good soccer writers are rare.

For those of us who grew up reading his work and got inspired by it, the memories of Sy Lerman’s brilliant writing will remain.