THE THICK END OF THE WEDGE
IHAVE to confess at the start of this that I don’t often watch Free State (or what they now ridiculously call The Cheetahs) play rugby. I’m a Natal (now absurdly called The Sharks) fan. Why can’t just a few things stay the way they were?
Anyway, Free State beat Natal with a depressing regularity so I often have to avert my eyes. But they have of late been reportedly playing well, so I watched the game on Saturday between Western Province (sigh, The Stormers) and Free State, hoping the Free Staters could beat Province and thus make life easier in the Super 15 for Natal.
It was, as anyone who watched will confirm, a wonderful match, with just the result I was hoping for, which made it a somehow even better game. But, also somehow, the result wasn’t the point.
The point, for me, was the black rugby talent on the field, and it got me thinking how negligent the government has been of black participation in our three major codes (let alone the lesser ones): soccer, rugby and cricket. Siya Kolisi, the brilliant Province flank, Burton Francis, a fourth-level stand-in flyhalf who kicked Free State to victory with a confidence that would rival that of even the great Patrick Lambie, and, best of all, a Free State prop called Trevor Nyakane, who demolished his opposite number scrum after scrum — these men are evidence, just the tip of the iceberg, of the depth there is to SA’s true sporting talent.
Former Wallabies captain John Eales was once asked which team, if he could choose, he would most like to coach. “The Springboks,” he immediately said, adding that there was so much sporting talent in this country that it was almost beyond normal measure.
He saw what we too often don’t see. Perhaps distance helps.
That fact is that our rugby and cricket teams are constantly at or near the top of the world in their codes. And both are fed, mostly, by a handful of private schools and those public schools that have retained their disciplines.
But now try to imagine a country accustomed to winning in all three big codes, including soccer. Imagine the effect on the people. Whites know what it’s like to beat the world at rugby — is there anything more delicious or calming? Now imagine the South African soccer side getting to the semifinals of a Fifa World Cup, let alone a final!
Instead of trying to dismantle elitism in schools, the state should be encouraging it and spreading it. Imagine selecting 50 new, mainly rural, South African schools in a programme to produce a generation of sporting power.
The pupils won’t all go into professional sport. Some would become nuclear physicists or, God forbid, journalists. But if we can produce the sport we do from, what, 20 schools now, imagine what another 50 would do if they were properly resourced?
There are soccer and rugby fields to flatten (cricket pitches can be dropped in or the game can be played on a mat). Really tricky that. Sports masters to appoint. Groundsmen to cut grass and paint lines. This is not difficult stuff. President Jacob Zuma had them built at the back of his own house and didn’t even know it had been done!
The point is that there are a lot of rural boarding schools around the country where poor people scrape money together to send their children. Companies could help. In my day at Umtata High School, we had English cricket professionals come out in our season to coach. They still would if they were invited, I’ll bet. We used to go and play, in freezing early morning games the horrors of which I will never forget, rugby in Ugie, Maclear and Matatiele. Those boys could place-kick off frost-hardened ground, 35m barefoot!
What the government needs is a plan to lead the world in three sports. It is easy to implement and we have the talent to do it. I cannot wait for a mostly black Springbok team to thrash the All Blacks. Especially at Newlands. For Bafana Bafana to beat England at Wembley and a black Proteas captain to demolish Australia at the Wanderers. I know colour is not supposed to matter but it does, in sport perhaps most because that is where we measure ourselves most visibly against the rest of the world. Fifty schools, raised to new heights by a little care, attention and funding. That is all it would take. We let so many young people down by not trying.