Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Dawie de Villiers, the Springboks’ miracle man
Rudyard Kipling could well have had a Springbok rugby captain in mind when he wrote his immortal poem “If,” which suggests that if a boy is to become a man he will have to keep his head when all about him are losing theirs, be equipped to meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same; all the while keeping the common touch, even if walking with kings.
More specifically, Kipling could have been inspired by Dawie de Villiers, who displayed all those attributes while leading the Boks in many epic battles with the All Blacks; while simultaneously performing ministry in the Dutch Reformed Church; and then going on to be not only a government minister for the National Party in the apartheid era but then also in Nelson Mandela’s government of national unity.
De Villiers was born into those vocations in 1940 in a village deep in the Karoo. His father was a politician, his family deeply religious and rugby mad. When the family moved to Cape Town, De Villiers just about grew up at Newlands, either playing for junior teams there or watching every Western Province game he could.
His rise to rugby stardom was textbook and perhaps the most remarkable feature was that the blonde scrumhalf sped up the ladder as quickly as he did. A schoolboy star, he progressed to Stellenbosch University to study theology, where he was spotted by Mr Rugby, Danie Craven, and fast-tracked into the Maties first team, and by the age of 21 he was playing for Western Province.
The next year he made his debut for the Springboks and by the age of 24, after just three Test matches, he was the Springbok captain, a position he held for his 22 further Test matches, until his retirement in 1970, aged 30 and after having led South Africa to a magnificent 3-1 series win over an All Blacks team that the world had believed was unbeatable — they had won 40 consecutive games, including 17 Test matches until they were shocked by De Villiers’ Boks in the first Test at Loftus Versfeld.
But it was at the beginning of his career that his miracle-making first began. On tour with the Boks in England in 1962, he crocked his knee so badly that doctors told him he could never play again.
He was at peace with the news because his long-term goal was to be a dominee in the church. While continuing his studies, he helped Doc Craven coach the Maties teams, and then slowly he started jogging again in the mountains around Stellenbosch and something magical started to happen.
Craven, noticing De Villiers was getting increasingly agile after some months, sent him to a tough, old Scottish surgeon who treated the knee and then sent him back to Craven with a note saying “good to go”.
And Craven, no sissie himself, told De Villiers: “Excellent! You are playing on Saturday.”
And not long after, in 1965, Craven threw De Villiers into the deep end by making him captain at a time when the Springboks were enduring their worst losing streak since they lost their first matches in the 1890s to Great Britain, when they were still finding their feet in rugby.
To exacerbate the pressure, the Boks were on their way to New Zealand for a four-Test series against an All Blacks team in red-hot form.
The Boks had lost five Tests in a row before landing in New Zealand, under the darkest of clouds — this kind of losing streak just did not happen to a team that was so used to dominating world rugby. In the first Test, the Boks did superbly to lose just 6-3 in De Villiers’ debut Test as captain but he was injured for the second Test, won handsomely by the home team.
To make matters substantially worse off the field, in the build-up to the third Test, back in South Africa prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd proclaimed that Maoris would not be welcome in All Blacks tours to South Africa.
The Boks had just played the Maoris in a midweek game and had enjoyed their generous hospitality, so Verwoerd’s words could not have been more poorly timed, and their young captain had to calm both his unsettled teammates and their wrathful hosts.
So going into the third Test, at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, the Boks were facing an eighth consecutive defeat as well as being submerged in a diplomatic crisis.
De Villiers was back at the helm but at half-time, the Boks were behind 16-5 (in modern scoring this was the equivalent of 20-6), and a second-half massacre appeared likely.
But this was where De Villiers rose to the occasion. He spotted that the usually grim-faced All Blacks had broken into laughter when one of their ungainly props had marked a high ball and now had to try and kick it into touch. De Villiers pulled his team into a huddle and told them: “They think they have won. They are complacent. They are laughing. We are going to run the ball now, we are going to throw caution to the wind and cut them to shreds.”
With his blonde head bobbing everywhere as he cajoled his troops into frantic action, the Boks engineered a thrilling comeback, the big centre John Gainsford scoring two tries and two more went to the nippy wing Gertjie Brynard.
At 16-16 with a minute left on the clock, the All Blacks conceded a penalty near the touchline but well within the range of kicker Tiny Naude, the ironically named lock forward. A crowd of 53 000 Kiwis went silent. Brynard took the muddy, leather ball and used his jersey to clean it as best he could. The rest was up to Naude.
History tells us that Naude banged it straight and true and the Boks had won a famous victory that to this day is known as the Miracle of Lancaster Park.
The fourth Test was lost but when the Boks returned to South Africa, they lost just one of their next 14 Tests, including series wins over France, the British and Irish Lions and Australia.
And that brought them to arguably the sternest challenge of De Villiers’ leadership — particularly off the field — the 1970 tour of Britain and Ireland which would present the Boks with a rude awakening as to how the rest of the world felt about legalised racism.
De Villiers’ vice-captain for a number of Tests in the ’60s had been the Natal No 8 Tommy Bedford, and just before this tour, he had returned from a three-year Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.
He tried to warn the Boks that the political landscape had changed significantly in the UK and anti-South Africa sentiment was rife.
Still, the Boks were shocked when on landing at Heathrow, a bus fetched them on the tarmac and whisked them off to a secret location, a hotel that had been specifically reopened and secured to keep them from demonstrators.
And so began the infamous Demo Tour, where the Boks would be harried and hassled at every turn by demonstrators, enduring three months of torment.
The police force did their best but it was not difficult for the demonstrators to harass the Boks — whether it was alarms going off all night to ensure they got little sleep or encampments outside the hotel to make sure the Boks were marooned in isolation.
Barbed wire fences were erected at games to stop pitch invaders but some inevitably got through and players were spat on and verbally abused.
All manner of objects were thrown onto the pitch, from nails to a brass tap that came within a whisker of hitting prop Hannes Marais in the face.
Bedford snuck out of the hotel once to meet a friend in a pub but was recognised and attacked by a woman with her umbrella.
Even funnier was an episode in Dublin involving the famous comedian Spike Milligan, who was a great rugby fan and went to watch the
Boks play Ireland. He was recognised by the demonstrators and coerced into joining them. Grabbing a megaphone, he walked along shouting: “I’m a fascist bastard! I’m a fascist bastard.” Soon his mischief-making was discovered and the megaphone was confiscated. Later he said: “My career as a demonstrator thus came to an end.”
But a number of the Boks did not see the lighter side of the tour and De Villiers, by now an ordained minister, spent much of the tour consoling and encouraging his teammates.
He later said: “There were players who became depressed and anxious and asked to be released to go home and some who froze on the field from the pressure, but I kept telling the guys that we had to finish the tour and go home with our heads held high and our dignity intact.”
It was said that De Villiers had a natural ability to combine sincerity with firmness, while his piercing blue eyes did the rest in disarming the angry and the unhappy.
De Villiers never lost his cool and demanded the same of his players, banning any form of reaction to the demonstrators. The only player known to have lost his rag was combative centre Mannetjies Roux, who kicked one pitch invader in the backside and threw the ball at another.
It was inevitable that the Boks would struggle on the field. Of the 24 matches played, they won 15, drew four and lost five. They never won a Test match on tour, drawing two and losing two.
It was only in the last match, the traditional encounter with the Barbarians, that the Boks played to their potential, the pressure of the tour all but over. At the end of the game, two of the finest ever backs — Gareth Edwards of Wales and Mike Gibson of Ireland — chaired De Villiers off the field, the Boks had played that well.
On return to South Africa, the Boks dusted themselves off for the 1970 series against an All Blacks team that was on a world record run of 17 Test wins in a row, a feat that would be equalled by Gary Teichmann’s Boks in 1998.
Massive underdogs before the first Test, De Villiers looked each player in the eye in the change room and instructed them to “take a moment and focus on one special thing you will do in this match that will be an inspiration for your teammates”.
For centre Joggie Jansen, that moment was his crash-tackle on flyhalf Wayne Cottrell, a demolition that to this day features in the top 10 biggest ever hits.
For De Villiers, it was a try within the first few minutes that came from a brilliant tactic 10m from the All Blacks’ try-line. The Boks had an attacking scrum and hooker Piston van Wyk was instructed to not hook the ball back but nudge it forwards through the All Blacks scrum. He did this perfectly and Kiwi scrumhalf Chris Laidlaw was not expecting the ball to squirt out the back of his scrum, but De Villiers was, and he gathered and dived over.
It was a spark of genius and the lift the Boks needed to beat the “unbeatable” All Blacks 17-6 and complete another De Villiers miracle.
The Boks went on to win the series 3-1, and on that triumphant note, De Villiers retired and in time directed his talents towards politics and the church.
*** Dawid Jacobus “Dawie” de Villiers died on April 23 at his home in Stellenbosch. He was 81.