Touch, Pause, Engage: Exploring the Heart of South African Rugby
Liz McGregor
Jonathan Ball
In 1996, a year after Nelson Mandela had worn Francois Pienaar’s No 6 jersey at the World Cup final in Johannesburg – a magnanimous gesture of reconciliation immortalised in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar nominated film, Invictus – Trevor Manuel, the country’s then finance minister, caused a stir when he declared his support for the All Blacks over the Springboks.
Recalling the incident in Liz McGregor’s latest book, Touch, Pause, Engage! Exploring the Heart of South African Rugby, Manuel says his discontent had to do with a man by the name of Henry Tromp.
McGregor writes: “Tromp had been convicted of manslaughter after beating one of his black farm workers so badly that the man died of his injuries.
“The racial and power dynamics of such a death in the context of the country's history made this crime particularly revolting.”
Yet Tromp had been picked to represent the Springboks. By doing so, the administrators had demonstrated gross insensitivity not only to the victim’s family but to black South Africa at large and Manuel could not let the matter rest.
“National teams must engender national pride, and it can’t be about winning at all costs,” Manuel said.
Clint Eastwood’s film, based on a novel by John Carlin, Playing the Enemy, may have been too simplistic in its portrayal of South Africa’s transition and of rugby as a sport: the real story has been a lot more complex.
However, two books which add both depth and complexity to the story have recently come off the press: McGregor’s Touch, Pause, Engage! and Dan Retief’s The Springboks and the Holy Grail: Behind the Scenes at the Rugby World Cup, 1995-2007. Although McGregor and Retief deal with the same subject matter they adopt different approaches.
McGregor’s, a detailed study that is part ethnographic and part sociological, is perhaps as fine an introduction to the complexity of South African rugby as one is like to get.
The idea to write the book, a process which took three and half years, was suggested to McGregor by her publisher, Jonathan Ball, after South Africa’s triumph at the Rugby World Cup in France in 2007.
“A woman, he surmised, might produce a fresh take.”
Up to that point, and by her own admission, McGregor cared very little about the sport.
And initially, treading water, she set about interviewing past rugby greats until she came to the conclusion that “in order to really understand rugby, I had to get closer to its centre. I realised that I needed to get into the minds and hearts of the players that count, on the field and off it.”
And so began McGregor’s long journey into the heart of South African rugby.
She shadows two teams, UCT’s Ikey Tigers and Western Province, through gruelling campaigns. She also spends a great deal of time with the Blue Bulls in Pretoria; an organisation, she observes, trying amicably to sever their “roots in white northern Afrikanerdom”.
When in 2010 one of their players, Bees Roux, was arrested for allegedly beating a black metro policeman to death, an incident which mirrored the Tromp affair, the Blue Bulls instantly “put him on leave and sent heartfelt condolences to the dead man’s family”.
“This,” McGregor concludes, “sums up for me the new spirit of integrity and sensitivity within the ranks of rugby.”
What does McGregor come away with from her three-year immersion into South African rugby? It is the values she finds embedded in the culture of the sport that most impress her.
“From schoolboy rugby to the Springboks, I found intelligence, humility, decency… I found a conscious anti-racist ethic. I admired the values that were inculcated: of taking responsibility for one’s mistakes; of giving as well as taking; of surrendering individual ego to the greater good.”
The Springboks and the Holy Grail: Behind the Scenes at the Rugby World Cup, 1995-2007
Dan Retief
Zebra Press
Dan Retief’s The Springboks and the Holy Grail is a different book from McGregor’s but no less impressive.
Dense with historical detail – to be expected perhaps from someone who has been a sports journalist for more than 40 years – Retief’s comprehensive book chronicles Springbok rugby, both its high and low points; the successes in 1995 and 2007, the disgrace of Kamp Staaldraad in 2003 and the heartbreak of 1999.
Sports journalism, even at its finest, swings between mania and depression from one Saturday to the next but Retief’s book gives the reader a broader perspective.
On September 11 in Wellington, New Zealand, the Boks begin their title defence against Wales and, as McGregor points out, these Springboks “are not just playing for their country: they are playing to unite and inspire their country”.
And for that, they deserve our support.
l Kona has a post-graduate degree in cultural studies and works in advertising.