Wimbledon Championships

• But in 1971 an 18-year-old university student, Hoosen Bobat from Durban, was excluded from achieving his dream of becoming the first black South African to play in the Wimbledon men’s junior tournament.
• This was due to apartheid, and the collusion of the all-white tennis union in South Africa and the International Lawn Tennis Federation, with Wimbledon toeing the line.
• My book documents the historic 1971 first international tour by a squad of black South Africans who played tennis under the auspices of the non-racial Southern African Lawn Tennis Union.
• In 1973, the union was a founding affiliate of the South African Council on Sport, which popularised the slogan
  No normal sport in an abnormal society.

The issues

• In the book I cover three issues.
• In 1971 South Africa was a racist, segregated and repressive society, based on white supremacy and privilege and black subjugation.
• Thirdly, the book demonstrates the collusion between the International Lawn Tennis Federation and the white South African tennis body.

The arguments

• I make five main arguments.
• One is that, since democracy in 1994, there has been no fitting recognition, symbolic or material, of outstanding apartheid-era non-racial tennis players.
• Certainly, there is less self-organisation of the kind that harnessed limited economic and social capital in black communities to ensure non-racial tennis.
• The commercial media linked to big business were also complicit, devoting print copy and airtime principally to white sports.

Class, racism and patriarchy

• Opportunities in tennis were profoundly shaped by class, racism, patriarchy and other factors.
• There were no “Black” South African players chosen because of a debatable notion of “merit” used by the Southern African Lawn Tennis Union.
• And the tour was an exclusively male affair even though there were outstanding women tennis players and well-established women’s tournaments.

Truth and justice

• Only the truth can put the past to rest.
• We can now deal with our past, establish the truth which has so long been denied us, and lay the basis for genuine reconciliation.

• They are the latest examples of how IBM and Wimbledon are using technology to help fans engage with The Championships on a deeper level.
• The new AI Commentary feature will provide fans watching match highlights videos with audio commentary of key moments, along with captions, which they can toggle on or off.
• The tool has been designed to give fans a more insightful experience when catching up on key moments from matches with highlights videos on the Wimbledon App and wimbledon.com.
• Another new feature IBM will introduce this year is the IBM AI Draw Analysis – the first statistic of its kind in tennis - which uses AI to define how favourable the path to the final might be for each player in the singles draw.