By Mncedi Mabona
There’s a temptation, in this business, to treat every story we run as content a headline for today’s scroll, gone by tomorrow’s news cycle. I want to push back on that, plainly and without apology: what we do here is not content. It is custodianship.
Grit Sports was never meant to be a passion project that lives and dies on the enthusiasm of whoever is holding the pen that week. It was built to be a vault a place where the voices of South African sport, especially the ones the mainstream press walks past, get written down properly, get remembered properly, and get passed on properly. That is not a metaphor. That is the job.
The administrator who used sport as a weapon
Start at the top, with the man who ran this country’s Olympic movement for nearly a decade Gideon Sam. Before SASCOC, before the presidency, before the title, there was a boy raised by his grandmother in Alice, Eastern Cape, later reunited with a mother who kept the family fed out of a two-room shack in Strand that used to be a milking stable, working a tin factory job and selling liquor illegally on the side just to keep her children clothed. That is the soil Sam’s leadership grew out of. What turned a coloured schoolboy in apartheid Cape Town into one of the most influential sports administrators this country has produced wasn’t talent on the field — it was the discipline of the committee room, learned as a junior sitting quietly at the back of Wednesday club meetings, absorbing how seniors ran, organised and compiled reports. He would go on to use sport as a tool of resistance long before Nelson Mandela’s famous words on sport’s power to unite gave that idea a global stage. Sam’s story is a reminder that legacy isn’t only built by the athlete on the podium. Sometimes it’s built by the person in the boardroom, fighting bureaucratic battles nobody claps for, so that the next generation has a structure to compete inside of at all.
The woman who had to earn a seat that was never offered
Then there’s Motshidisi Mohono, Katlehong-raised, protected fiercely by a father determined to keep her and her siblings out of a township environment that swallowed so many of her peers whole. Long before she became the first woman to anchor a Rugby World Cup final broadcast on local television, she was a girl told, implicitly and explicitly, that leadership in sport wasn’t built for people who looked like her. She didn’t wait for an invitation. She turned a dare an audition for SuperSport’s Lady Rugga competition into a career that put her shoulder to shoulder with legends of the game she had to prove she belonged in. Her message to the next generation is simple and unsentimental: don’t feel like the world owes you anything. She wanted to pioneer that path deliberately, for every girl who assumed a seat like hers wasn’t on offer. That is legacy work. That is a light left on for someone still finding the door.
The goalkeeper who turned injury into instruction
And then there’s Sanani Mangisa a Mthatha-born only child, raised by a single mother, who went on to earn more than a hundred caps as the SA women’s hockey team’s first-choice goalkeeper while completing a BCom at the University of Pretoria, because, as she put it herself, a sportswoman in this country cannot afford to only play. In 2013 a ruptured Achilles threatened to end all of it. Instead of retreating, she rebuilt her body over six hours a day, discovering that what she’d once called hard work had only been a fraction of what her body could give. Her parting words to the next wave of black athletes carry the full weight of everything that story cost her: be prepared to work twice as hard as your opposite number. That sentence is not a slogan. It is a debt she paid in a rehab room, being passed forward for free.
The sacrifice behind the sacrifice
But it’s worth saying plainly what it actually costs to put a piece like this in front of you at all because that sacrifice doesn’t end with the athlete. It runs through the two of us who make Grit Sports happen. It’s the research Phila Bitterhout puts into every interview before a single question is asked. It’s the nights without sleep recording, then editing on an old PC that could take six hours just to render one section. It’s doing that on top of an actual full-time job, showing up the next morning having not slept, because the edit had to be finished. It’s completing that edit and then still having to sit down and do the write-up going back and relistening to a full fifty-minute interview to make sure it gets told right. It’s editing the photographs and building the cover image for every single article. It’s optimising every piece for search, publishing it to the website, to YouTube, to social media, and then doing the unglamorous work of promoting it so someone actually sees it all of it, between two people. Not forgetting the core group of contributors, Sanani, Chulu, Andile, Tobi, Phiwe, we will forever be indebted to you.
Why put ourselves through that? Because it had to be done, and it had to be done by us.
Why none of this can be allowed to fade
Put these three next to Chiliboy Ralepelle and Silusapho Dingiswayo, and a pattern becomes impossible to ignore. None of these are stories of talent alone. They are stories of a mother selling liquor illegally to keep a roof up, a father standing between his daughters and a township’s worst outcomes, a goalkeeper rebuilding tendon and mindset in equal measure, a sprinter borrowing school desks to simulate hurdles he’d never seen in person. Sacrifice is the connective tissue of every single one of these stories — and sacrifice, unlike a trophy, doesn’t announce itself. It has to be written down, or it disappears the moment the person who made it is no longer around to tell it themselves.
That is the legacy question, and it is bigger than any of us on this masthead. Every kid in a township or a rural village who is currently doing what Dingiswayo did, what Mohono did, what Mangisa did improvising, absorbing quiet discipline, rebuilding after a setback nobody televised deserves to know that somebody like them made it, and that the making of it is written down somewhere permanent. Representation isn’t inspirational posters. It’s evidence. It’s proof of concept, delivered in the specific, stubborn, unglamorous detail of how somebody actually did it.
So when I say Grit Sports can’t be allowed to die, I don’t mean the brand. I mean the responsibility underneath it to keep collecting these stories before they’re lost to memory, to keep giving young writers the platform to go find them in Mthatha and Katlehong and Strand and everywhere the big publications don’t send a reporter, and to keep insisting that a hooker from Tzaneen, a goalkeeper from Mthatha, a broadcaster from Katlehong and an administrator from Alice all belong in the same permanent record as any Springbok captain lifting a trophy under lights.
The scoreboard resets every weekend. This doesn’t get to.
