There’s no stopping the comeback king
The air of casual legend surrounding Schalk Burger owes as much to his superhuman feats as to the vagaries of fate, which he has faced up to and beaten more than once, writes Angus Powers
WHEN parts of your body have been dismantled, then put back together piece by piece, you become pretty good at describing the grim medical procedures.
Schalk Burger has just walked in from the pool at the Springboks’ team hotel. With a towel wrapped around his waist, and in T-shirt and flip-flops, Burger is — as usual — completely at ease with himself and the world.
“I basically took off everything that kept my kneecap in place,” he says, describing the knee injury that he suffered in the first match of the 2012 Super Rugby season. He hikes up the towel to reveal a battered left knee. “The patellofemoral ligament, the medial collateral ligament, and the patella and the cartilage wedge behind it that work like a pulley system.”
After the first operation, Burger had no problem running in a straight line, but his kneecap dislocated when he played rugby. A second procedure was required: to sever the patella tendon, which connects the kneecap to the shinbone, shift it 8mm sideways, then reattach it with “three big screws”. The entire process took a year, and at the end of it, Burger was good to go.
However, a couple of months later, during 2013 Super Rugby pre-season training, Burger pulled up with a calf niggle, caused, as it turned out, by a cyst in his back that was compressing two-thirds of his spinal cord.
Burger stands up and lifts his T-shirt to show the scars on his stomach and along his spine where the exploratory cameras were inserted to assess the problem. “The silver lining was that if they didn’t pick up this cyst, the risk was that one morning I could have woken up paralysed,” says Burger. “The good news from the first op was that they found the origin of it: spinal fluid was leaking out and forming the cyst. The bad news was that I picked up an infection which went into the cyst, spread straight into the spinal cord and gave me bacterial meningitis.”
Meningitis — an infection of the meninges, the protective membranes that coat the brain and spinal cord — doesn’t always end well. Most patients recover, but brain damage, paralysis and death can occur. Very few go on to win a 100th Super Rugby cap and to captain the Springboks.
Burger’s ordeal is well documented: the five days in a darkened room, fighting off waves of skull-splitting agony that felt like “someone stabbing a knife in your head” while his wife advised friends and family to say their last goodbyes because “this guy’s on his way out — he’s not getting better, he’s getting worse”.
Identifying Burger’s particular strain of meningitis was not straightforward, but once it had been done and the correct medication prescribed, he pulled through relatively quickly.
But the original problem, the cyst, had still not been dealt with — three more operations and three months of disorient- ing, painful recovery ensued. By the time it was all over, Burger had shed 19kg.
At that point, lesser mortals would probably have been content to slowly pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. But to hear Burger tell it, he had never lost sight of the bigger picture. After getting back on his feet and starting his rehab in the Western Province gym, he engaged his doctor during a routine checkup. “Listen here, partner,” he said, as uppity patients do. “I’m feeling quite good. What are the chances of playing rugby again?”
With no structural damage to his back, there was no reason why not, and so Burger’s third great comeback began. “After being out of the game for two years, I had a plan in mind,” he says. “But people expect you to bounce back and be the Schalk Burger of 2011, which was a bit unrealistic. I had to go back to the drawing board and reset my goals a bit.”
The continuing evolution of Burger’s game dates from 2007, the year after his first career- threatening injury was resolved by the surgical fusion of two vertebrae in his neck. Nowadays, spinal interventions are commonplace in rugby, but back then it was a step into the unknown. Nonetheless, “when Eddie Jones joined the Boks, he gave me quite a lot of scope to bring in a passing game”, Burger recalls.
“That’s when it kicked off. I always had the passing skills, but at that stage I was pretty direct in my approach. You obviously keep your strengths, which for me are work rate, physicality and probably the intimidation factor. You can’t walk away from those. They stay your core attributes, but you can enhance them by doing some things a bit differently.
“The emphasis for me now is to vary my game: instead of being seen as one-dimensional, to have a few options up my sleeve.”
Burger might be a two-time South African Rugby Player of the Year (2004, 2011) as well as an International Rugby Board World Rugby Player of the Year (2004), but in order to play, he had to be selected.
Throughout his career, Burger has been able to adjust his ambitions to the demands of the coach, and at his fourth Rugby World Cup he will return to the role that he first filled in 2003, that of impact player on the bench.
“When I was younger, I wanted to be the best in my position, so when I started playing professional rugby, my goal was to be the best No 6 in South Africa. That changed quite quickly — I became the best No 6 in South Africa, and then in the world by the age of 21, in 2004. After that, it changed again. I wanted a team environment in which we wanted to excel. I started playing No 7, then a bit more [No] 8. Now I just want to contribute to the team.”
Behind the scenes, Burger is more complex than he is often given credit for. Coaches rave about his intensity at training, his grasp of a chess-like tactical game, and the way his competitiveness rather than emotion drives him through the fatigue barrier.
That such a brute on the field is so unapologetically chilled off it only adds to the aura. “With me, what you see is what you get,” admits Burger.
“It’s pretty upfront. There’s always been a perception that I like having a good time and a lager with mates — and that’s
A perception that I like having a good time and a lager with mates — that’s basically who I am
basically who I am.”
Burger is a throwback to a simpler age: a one-team man (despite, freakishly, never winning a trophy with WP); a player who’d rather connect over a locker-room beer than via social media; and a Springbok great who got distracted from a “magnificent” cricket career.
It was so perfectly random, the way it all began. In his first year at high school, Burger played first team cricket for both school and club, and by the time he matriculated, was a contracted cricketer. But at university, he couldn’t say no to a game of inter-residence rugby and he soon found himself on the train to Bloemfontein for an intervarsity rugby tournament. The rest is history.
So, if he knew then what he does now?
“I’d probably pick cricket!” laughs Burger. “That would have been easier on the body!” He’s joking. Sort of. The truth is that cricket didn’t stand a chance. Burger didn’t choose rugby. Rugby chose him. Like all legends, it couldn’t have been any other way.