Sbu Mjikeliso
[I am a brave mouse],” began the poem Allister Coetzee once recited to school inspectors and his entire Standard 1 class at George Dickerson Primary School in Grahamstown.
“Kyk hoe stap ek deur die huis [See how I march through the house],
“En daar’s niks waarvoor ek skrik nie [And there’s nothing I’m afraid of],
“Vir niemand is ek bang [I am afraid of no one],
“Daar is niks wat my kan vang [There’s nothing that can catch me],
“Nee, daar’s niks waarvoor ek skrik nie [No, there’s nothing that I’m afraid of].”
Young “Toetie” was the one his teacher, Yvonne Valentine, would trust to deliver a performance that would impress the inspectors .
Unrestrained by his small frame, he would deliver the catchy verses with the confidence of a seasoned orator. He was, as his teacher described him, “a star performer”.
“He was a small chap, standing in front of this big inspector . . . I can still picture him in my mind’s eye.
“I chuckle when I compare that memory of him with this man that I see today on TV,” she said this week.
This once brave little mouse, turned on-field giant killer, is on the cusp of becoming the king of the South African rugby castle.
Barring a calamitous last-minute breakdown in negotiations, Coetzee will walk across the brightly lit TV studios on Tuesday as the new Springbok coach. The invites have already been sent out.
From an early age Coetzee was fearless. He was also hugely respectful — something he now commands in the dressing rooms of the teams he coaches.
For most of his life he has had sport coursing through his veins. He also has a love of teaching in his genes. His late father, Phillip “Flippie” Coetzee, was a rugby-mad teacher and a dashing flyhalf for Grahamstown’s Swallows.
His mother, Elma, now a retired teacher, spends much of her time on the edge of the couch watching the teams her son has coached and rooting for them. She has suffered through many of the Stormers’ near-misses.
Phillip was the kind of sportcrazed dad who, when Elma chased the kids to play outside, would get kicked out along with them.
Often when a rugby ball was lying around in their Currie Street home, he’d surprise Allister and his elder brother Leon with an impromptu game of “catch” to check their reflexes — all this while Elma was preparing dinner.
Charles Valentine, who taught Coetzee at Mary Waters High School in Grahamstown, was enamoured of Phillip, so much so that when they were teachers at the school, the pair could not be separated.
“There was always some kind of ball available in that house: from table tennis, tennis, cricket or rugby,” said Valentine. “They used the kitchen dining table as the makeshift table-tennis table while Allister and Leon would play against their father. In the yard you’d often find Flippie bowling to his sons in an impromptu cricket session, if he wasn’t teaching them passing skills with the rugby ball.”
Opinion in Grahamstown is that Flippie might have been a cuttingedge Bok flyhalf were it not for apartheid. “He should have been a Springbok himself,” said Valentine. “He was a brilliant flyhalf. The girls got weak at the knees when they saw him play.
“Toetie followed right in his footsteps — and he resembles
BALL SKILLS: Allister Coetzee knows how to handle a rugby ball — an art he learnt as a boy in the back yard of his Grahamstown home with his rugby-mad father, Phillip, and brother Leon WORD IN YOUR EAR: Allister Coetzee with his old boss Jake White at the time when they combined to bring glory to the Springboks — and South Africa — in the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France his father the most in terms of looks as well.”
Allister captained South Eastern Districts Rugby Union and later Eastern Province and the nonracial South African Rugby Union, which stood in opposition to the establishment rugby organisations of the apartheid era.
His father’s death in a car accident on his way to Port Elizabeth when Allister was in primary school didn’t change the boy’s ambition and attitude.
Born in May 1963, Allister grew up on Currie Street at the social crossroads separating the affluence of nearby Kingswood College private school and the poverty of Grahamstown’s northern townships. His high school, Mary Waters — where his sister-in-law Faith is now the principal — also produced South African Sevens rugby stars Fabian Juries and Rosco Speckman.
The Coetzee siblings followed their parents’ profession. Brothers Leon and Roderick became teachers, as did sister BarbaraAnn, who is the mother of Southern Kings scrumhalf Kevin Luiters.
Rugby ran parallel to their professional lives.
Lavender Valley, the ground where Swallows played their club matches, was the beginning for young Allister. It would lead to the Stade de France.
In 2007, Coetzee would reach one of the pinnacles of the game. As the Springboks’ assistant coach, he would stand shoulder-to-shoulder Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.sundaytimes.co.za with the rest of the team following South Africa’s second World Cup triumph in Paris.
A former Swallows teammate, Barend Mentoor, 64, who today runs the club from his house on the corner of Frere and Stanley streets, remembers the rugby beginnings of the precocious young scrumhalf who was never awed by his older teammates.
Coetzee was reportedly 16 when he made his debut for Swallows; Mentoor was 11 years older.
This disparity in age possibly explains why Allister is not afraid to select fresh blood for his teams. Young talent flourished during Coetzee’s two Currie Cup-winning seasons at Western Province between 2010 and 2015.
“Toetie was a youngster when he started playing with us, perhaps only just 16, but he was dangerous,” said Mentoor. “I was an inside centre at the time and he was a nippy little scrumhalf. I can never forget the times he used to go to the blindside and take on the opposition flankers, sometimes fending them off with his palm on their faces, before passing to the winger next to him. He had amazing strength.”
Strength is certainly what he’ll need as he approaches one of the hottest coaching seats in sport.
At some point during the coach’s tenure the propellers can stop midflight — as they did during predecessor Heyneke Meyer’s term when the Boks crash-landed in their opening World Cup game last year against Japan.
Allister is being entrusted by South African Rugby with improving transformation and also making the team strong enough to win the World Cup in 2019. He will be aware of that mission. He began his playing career in a time of segregated rugby. After Swallows, he played for the Port Elizabeth clubs Harlequins and Wallabies in the nonracial Eastern Province Union, which defied the law and was open to all races.
He was an obvious selection, as scrumhalf and captain, of the nonracial national team.
As Stormers coach, he made transformation look easy. Among the talented black players he brought in were Siya Kolisi, Nizaam Carr, Scarra Ntubeni and Cheslin Kolbe. At times, the Stormers fielded as many as 11 black players in a match squad of 23.
That didn’t mean he neglected talented white players. Eben Etzebeth, Frans Malherbe and Steven Kitshoff were also his selections. When he became the first black coach of a province after unification — the Mighty Elephants in 2000 — the team’s home union, Eastern Province, was still deeply divided along racial lines.
Its life president, Harold Wilson, recalled: “As a coach he had to contend with tensions between the black, white and coloured players in the team — tensions that were a byproduct of the segregated era.
“But because of his levelheadedness he managed to get the players focused on one goal and from there he built himself a good reputation as a coach.
“I believe he is going to do something revolutionary [as Bok coach]. He has to transform the attitudes that preside in rugby so that players are judged purely on their rugby and not on the colour of their skin.”
Wayne Julies, who played under him in the South African under-23 team in 2000, said Allister’s role in the 2007 World Cup-winning dressing room was to keep players calm and focused.
Desmond Booysen, who played with him in the nonracial teams of Eastern Province and Saru, said Coetzee was a “flamboyant” player who “could do anything at any time”.
“He could box-kick with either the right or left foot, dive left and right and do reverse passes. There was no ‘last-feet’ law when we played, so he had to make brave decisions in a trice to avoid big flankers coming for him.
“We need that extraordinary excitement to return to South African rugby. We still play a dinosaur brand of rugby and I’m so tired of watching that.
“Millen Petersen [former Saru coach] used to say that the criteria for getting into the Springbok team was a tape measure and a scale: if you were over 2m tall you were a lock and if you weighed more than 120kg you were a prop. That kind of concept was meant to keep smaller players on the outside.
“He must be able to come in and change that.”
Somebody wake US soul singer Sam Cooke and tell him that a change is, finally, gonna come.
We still play a dinosaur brand of rugby . . . He must be able to come in and change all that