I have to think about breathing all the time, sometimes I forget
Chris Burger’s fatal injury in a Currie Cup match 40 years ago today changed rugby for good,
● Captain Quenton Steele heads the command and logistic information systems at the SA Navy and when he goes to bed he is plugged into a ventilator so he can sleep peacefully.
Steele, paralysed from the top of the shoulders down after breaking his neck during trials for a Cape Town rugby club in March 1998, can’t breathe automatically.
“I have to think about breathing all the time and sometimes I forget,” said Steele, who at night is plugged into a ventilator through a tracheotomy, a surgical hole in the throat. “I breathe with my shoulder and neck muscles.”
Steele is one of 107 beneficiaries on the books of the Chris Burger/Petro Jackson Players’ Fund, which turns 40 next month.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the illfated Currie Cup match in which Burger, the Western Province fullback, suffered a broken neck in a collapsed maul in the final moments of the game.
The spectre of tragedy already hung over the Bloemfontein ground that day after the shock death of Free State prop Rampie Stander from a stroke two days earlier.
Play stopped for 10 minutes as WP team doctor Augie Cohen arranged for a door inside the stadium to be unscrewed and used to stretcher the fallen Burger off the field.
Back at their Monte Vista home Burger’s wife, Riana, mother to their 18-month-old daughter Esmaré, listened on the radio.
When WP captain Morne du Plessis got to hospital that evening, he was told Burger was going to die. The player was still conscious and they spoke.
The WP Rugby Union arranged for Riana to fly to Bloemfontein early the next morning, but as she was preparing to depart her church minister arrived to inform her that her husband had died about 4am.
The shell-shocked WP team gathered for breakfast in their Bloemfontein hotel. “We were all together eating, and suddenly we were sitting and there was this space, and it was Chris’s space,” recalled livewire flanker Rob Louw, one of the stars in SA’s 3-1 Test series win over the 1980 British Lions.
At the Villager Rugby Club, where Burger had played a key role in them winning the national championships earlier that year, coach HO de Villiers, the former Springbok fullback, wanted to pull the team out of a league fixture on the Monday, a public holiday. “I phoned [Riana] and she insisted that what Chris would have wanted was that we go ahead and play and win.”
Villagers ground out a narrow victory over Defence that day.
“We won on sentiment and determination,” said De Villiers. “There were some hard nuts in that team, but we were all very emotional.”
Less than two weeks later Du Plessis, De Villiers and other players and ex-players founded the Chris Burger Players Memorial Fund.
Forty years later the fund — which merged with the Petro Jackson fund from the coloured federation during unification in the early 1990s — has spent more than R50m assisting more than 500 players with lifechanging injuries, says GM Gail Baerecke.
Support includes anything from
I phoned Riana and she insisted that Chris would have wanted to go ahead and play and win HO de Villiers
Coach of the Villagers team in 1980
wheelchairs, custom fit to cater for each individual’s injury, and monthly stipends to inviting recipients to rugby matches and offering moral support.
“When I had my injury Morne du Plessis came to see me on a regular basis in hospital,” recalled Steele, a married father of two. He is one of the fund’s many success stories.
Amos Mzimeli, who broke his neck in a tackle in 1990, established a community centre in his home village at Mooiplaas in the rural Eastern Cape to assist other disabled people, training and helping them to find employment. His beneficiaries total 129.
Wentzel Barnard, injured playing for the Paul Roos Gymnasium under-16 A school team in 1984, drives the Maties para-sport club, the pride of SA’s Paralympic team.
JP Lugt, paralysed in an inter-residence match at Stellenbosch in 1992, owns a company selling and distributing deli products.
The fund, working with SA Rugby, has also culled injury numbers through the BokSmart programme which, among other things, educates coaches and referees.
Since 2009 it has led to a 63% reduction in spinal injuries in school rugby and a 52% drop at club level.
Innovating safer scrum laws led to scrums dip below tackles as the biggest cause of catastrophic injuries.
For Riana, who remarried in 1984, and daughter Esmaré Burger Wells, the August 31 anniversary of Burger’s death has fatefully turned into a family celebration.
The oldest of Esmaré’s two children, named Christiaan after her father, was born on that day in 2011. “He was due only in September, but I had to have an emergency Caesarian,” said Burger Wells.
After 40 years, tales of hope and triumph have risen from the Chris Burger tragedy.