Kick those Bok detractors under the table

It is often said that children are like sponges and it is for this reason that I would disagree with all those negative naysayers who believe the Springboks’ World Cup triumph will have no lasting positive effect on the country.

The incredible, miraculous story of captain Siya Kolisi is evidence enough that major sporting victories do provide inspiration and do make a difference. The new pride of the nation spoke in the build-up to last weekend’s final about the impact South Africa’s 2007 World Cup title made on him as a 16-year-old watching in a Zwide tavern (another indicator of just how rough his own childhood was).

“I remember what it did for the country and seeing people come together over sport,” Kolisi said. For a young man who grew up in deprivation it provided fresh impetus to his drive to use rugby to escape the township.

From running around barefoot with an empty stomach on dusty fields, Kolisi has now scaled the greatest heights of rugby and written his name into immortality. If he can do it, so can others.

And those others will come from the hordes of youngsters chasing after the Springbok bus this week as the world champions embarked on their trophy tour. And Kolisi will not be the only inspiration. They will see Makazole Mapimpi, who came from a similar background of familial pain and was an even later bloomer, or Cheslin Kolbe, giving hope to the small all over the world. For those who feel out of place, maybe even a stranger in the environment they find themselves in, there is Tendai Mtawarira, The Beast, whose own journey from Zimbabwe to South African hero and legend is similarly inspiring.

Seeing our World Cup winners celebrating the spoils of global success will provide belief and hope, and those feelings can only be good for a nation as troubled as ours. Hopefully these emotions will be accompanied by the lessons that need to be absorbed from the Springboks – those of @KenBorland team-work, accepting one another’s differences, putting a great plan in place and never giving up through all the hard work.

Some of the people pointing fingers at the Springboks should obviously be ignored because they are self-serving, divisive trolls who aim to profit from other people’s sufferings. They may have degrees or doctorates or have mass appeal, but none of them possess true wisdom, humanity or empathy.

There are others who have pointed out that the win won’t miraculously produce a Rainbow Nation until the playing fields are truly level for all our people, until the sort of socio-economic hardships that Kolisi had to rise above have been eliminated.

They are correct, of course, but there is no harm in providing people with a bit of hope and inspiration before we all return to the hard work of nation building and undoing the terrible effects of our troubled past.

Every top sports coach knows that their team is not going to be successful if all they ever do is fitness and drills, they need to love what they are doing and for that to happen there needs to be reward, something to bring smiles to faces.

Which is exactly what the Springboks have done.

Moving forward as Springbok fans, let us never again judge a player by their skin colour, their diction (hey, even the guy who dropped two F-bombs on live TV during the Springboks’ arrival press conference is still a hero) or even their size; let’s just weigh them by their contributions on the field (and listen to those rugby experts who know more than us when they say someone is doing a helluva lot of unseen work).

Hopefully all those naysayers who doubted Kolisi’s merit as a player and captain have now been given the proverbial kick under the table to keep quiet.

Here is a man who has been through the mill and has come out the other side with a broad grin, an untainted spirit and an immense humanity that means he has time for everyone.

Enormous credit too must go to coach Rassie Erasmus. When he took over as head coach on March 1 last year, the Springboks were in disarray and precious few of them would even have been considered for a World XV. But now, just over 18 months later, if a World XV was going to play Mars, a dozen Springboks would feature strongly in discussions.

If I was the selector, I’ll also seriously consider a guy like Matt Proudfoot to be the forwards coach because he has turned the Springbok pack into a topclass unit; a 97% success rate at set-pieces through the tournament is a staggering statistic.

It is a contribution that should also never be forgotten.