A FLOW TO THE GAME
Magic is rare in pro rugby these days — it’s hiding in fervent schoolboy games, writes Luke Alfred
SPORT’S marriage with the seasons ended some time ago, but every so often it is possible to glimpse a new romance. Autumn, for example, brings the start of the schoolboy rugby season — and with it the sort of quickening of the pulse that Super Rugby lost when it tried to convince us there was something emotionally satisfying about turning tournaments into bloated conferences.
Unlike Super Rugby, schoolboy rugby seems to answer our yearning for sporting innocence. It is played on a human scale, by people we know and feed, and manages to satisfy our appetite for pageantry, courage and explosive action.
On Sharpeville Day, Joburg school Jeppe hosted local rivals St John’s. The fixture doesn’t have the cachet of, say, a Jeppe versus King Edward, but there has been some needle to it. Two years ago, a punch-up erupted between fathers on the side of the field at Jeppe. It was not apparent whether this was all about different interpretations of the tackle law, or about class warfare by alternative means: the toffs of St John’s having a go at the ges of Jeppe — or the other way round.
Whatever. Last week the action went off without a hitch. Fathers kept their powder dry
It is here, in the comparative neglect, that the nobility of the sport is most pronounced
and, as ever, the fixture managed to attract the usual quotient of Lolitas in denim shorts, mothers in gigantic Italian eyewear and young men with varying opinions on how to wear a baseball cap.
But this was just the teeming activity on the surface. Rugby at Jeppe always has another dimension, embedded in the very core of the sport in this country.
Jake White, the World Cup-winning coach of 2007, studied and taught there.
The March 21 match was played on Collard field — named after a former first XV coach, Jack. He did the business from 1942 until 1961 — apparently without illusions, intellectual or otherwise. A plaque on the side of the field bears the inscription: “May all the bonefaces of succeeding generations be inspired.”
That plaque is recessed into naked rock of the gold-bearing reef — and in a completely down-to-earth way, Jeppe is Johannesburg. There is a railway station called Jumpers, the name of a mine, not far away, and everywhere there is evidence of the history of gold. Boys and former boys and masters at Jeppe seem to know this, if only instinctively.
Old boys and members of former first XVs come to watch the current first XV. They chant a war cry with the school when games are over, and are actively involved in this part of school life.
Many of these old boys look dressed for Ibiza, and have biceps of a size most men would consider acceptable for their thighs, but this shouldn’t be held against them. They are here, doing their thing in plimsolls and low-riding shorts.
Jeppe was one of the original Milner schools, along with King Edward VII and Pretoria Boys’ High — modelled on English grammar schools and established with the purpose of educating the young men of the vanquished Boer republics.
And Jeppe, like St John’s, is made of local sandstone. Both schools and their fields are part of the historical geology of their city — its tale of plunder and lust for gold — in a thoroughly tactile way.
South African rugby is a game of competing foundations: the emotional foundation laid by Madiba in wearing Francois Pienaar’s jersey that special day at Ellis Park (just down Apollonia Avenue) and the vexed foundation of pre-democratic South Africa, which continues to define the game, whether we like it or not.
In that tradition, rugby is a game of the land. In the great Book of Rugby Knowledge, we are told that only boys who come off the land can become Springboks. There is, according to the “book”, a stint in a Stellenbosch University koshuis on the path to the fabled green jersey, plus a mandatory meeting with an Oubaas Markotter or a Danie Craven. Boys cannot come from cities or townships if they want to be Boks. They simply walk off the land like giants, to be seen by the great sages of Stellenbosch on the way to being summoned into the select order of men.
Rugby has its fluvial element. A good game is said to flow — and the sport percolates into the strata of everyday life in South Africa.
Like football, rugby flows into the imagination and structure of feeling in this country. Parents watch their sons play in the under-14B team, hoping they will go further in the seasons to come.
The cameras are out, the ambulances are parked on the side of the field, and the shouting and slightly hysterical screaming tell us that all this is meaningful.
Teams on the cabbage patch, in the early morning, shouldn’t by rights attract any interest — but it is here, in the comparative neglect, that the nobility of the sport is most pronounced.
The teams clap each other off; fathers hug and pat their sons, mothers fret that their boys will be injured but allow them to play all the same. We seldom see such unrefined spectacles in everyday life anymore. And they will play themselves out through the winter, in towns and cities across the land.
It so happened that Human Rights Day at Jeppe ended in a 24-18 victory for the home side. But the passing parade mattered as much as the scoreline. Jeppe had a great many coaches. They all wore black suits and sported short haircuts. They gripped their walkie-talkies with a fervour that suggested they saw these gadgets as passports into the afterlife.
A certain type of woman hovered around the edge of the field. They sported panama hats and floated like soft, haughty goddesses above the sound and the fury. And there were ice-cream-faced little girls in pink pinafores who only wanted to run away from long-suffering mommy and daddy and did so time and time again.
They were all there and when the final whistle blew there was a feeling that no one — not winners or losers — wanted it to end. There were more war cries; there was more milling about, more soft emptiness and deflation. No one could remember where the time had got to, or where they had started, or what it was all for.
This is schoolboy rugby and, thankfully, the season was only just beginning. LS