1953 — South Africa go into the fifth and final Test of the away series in Australia trailing 2-1. The match in Melbourne was a six-day affair with eight-ball overs. Batting first, Australia made 520 after Neil Harvey scored 205. SA, captained by Jack Cheetham, replied with 435, but paceman Eddie Fuller and spinner Hugh Tayfield hit back, taking 5/66 and 3/73 to bowl out Australia for 209 in their second innings. Russell Endean (70) and Roy McLean (76) guided the visitors to a six-wicket victory on the final sixth day to tie the series 2-2.
1981 — Sydney Maree clocks a hand-timed 13 min 38.3 sec 5,000m at the Millrose Games in New York, a South African indoor record that remains to this day.
1982 — Leonard “Wagga Wagga” Likoebe of Kaizer Chiefs scored a hat-trick to wrap up the BP Cup in the second leg of the final against Moroka Swallows at Orlando Stadium. Chiefs won the match 3-1 and the final 7-2 on aggregate. Likoebe had been a reserve in the first leg.
1982 — Mark McNulty of Zimbabwe wins the Sun City Classic, his fourth victory in five weeks, banking R16,000 and clinching the Sunshine Circuit Order of Merit with two tournaments to play. His season’s earnings of R65,560 was a record for the tour at the time.
1984 — SA racing drivers Sarel van der Merwe, Graham Duxbury and Tony Martin combine to win the Daytona 24-hour classic. Racing in a March 83G, they finished nine laps ahead of the defending champions in a Porsche 935. The SA crew had endured drama along the way, like running out of petrol after six-and-a-half hours just 800m from the pits. Van der Merwe had to run to the car with enough petrol to get back to the pits to fill up. In total they drove 3,962km in their 640 laps.
1987 — Harold Volbrecht loses in his second world title bid, getting knocked out in the seventh round in Atlantic City by WBA welterweight champion Mark Breland, an Olympic champion for the US at the 1984 Games. Volbrecht came down with “flu” a few days before the fight and admitted he was surprised when he was cleared to fight at the weigh-in. He lost his first challenge to Pipino Cuevas in 1980.
1999 — Vuyani Bungu stops Victor Lerena of Colombia to make a record 13th defence of his IBF junior-featherweight title at the Carousel Casino, north of Pretoria. He eclipsed the South African mark of 12 successful title defences he had shared with WBA junior-lightweight champion Brian Mitchell. It was the second time Bungu had faced Lerena, having outpointed him in his third defence in April 1995.
2000 — Siyabonga Nomvete heads in a goal as a 10-man Bafana Bafana beat co-hosts Ghana 1-0 in their Africa Cup of Nations quarterfinal in Kumasi. Nomvete netted a well-weighted cross from Shaun Bartlett in the 42nd minute, but SA were under pressure again after Eric Tinkler was red-carded almost immediately after the restart for flattening Kwame Ayew. He had brought down Otto Addo in the first half.
2004 — Sebastiaan Rothmann loses his IBO cruiserweight title in dramatic fashion, getting stopped in the ninth round when he seemed to be one punch away from a technical knockout victory. Fighting in Sheffield, Rothmann had English veteran Carl Thompson in trouble on the ropes when he got tagged and dropped heavily. A former WBO champion, Thompson still went on to beat David Haye in his next fight.
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