The Bulls man has opted to hang up his boots and change careers.
Lizo Gqoboka has called time on his career. Picture: Lefty Shivambu/Gallo Images
Lizo Gqoboka, the Bulls prop, who played twice for the Springboks, has called time on his rugby career.
The 36-year-old said this week, “I think it’s been long coming. Most of my early thirties and the past four years especially, with all the injuries I was getting back-to-back, I knew it was really getting close.
“But I was so grateful to finish here, with the Bulls.”
He added: “I just felt that it’s time, you know? I knew I was always on the edge, but I just had this knowing now that it’s time, at 36. I’ve had a good run. I’ve had a really good run, and so I think my heart is just full with gratitude and contentment.”
Few current players can match the distance Gqoboka has travelled. Raised in Mount Frere, he did not pick up a rugby ball in earnest until he was 19, starting out as an eighthman before eventually settling at prop. Before that, life looked very different.
“Where I come from, in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape, I was taught everything in isiXhosa. I only learned English in university,” he said. “I mean, back home, people laugh when I say the first time I had a pizza with a topping, I was in varsity, and I didn’t even know they existed.”
He worked loading trucks at 15 and later at a funeral parlour at 17, jobs he still speaks about with affection rather than bitterness. “I still go there and greet some of the people who still work there. Crazy, amazing loyalty.”
Even as his rugby career took shape, Gqoboka kept working, completing a business management qualification in Durban and later holding down a full day job at a construction firm building a bridge in Pinetown, training and playing club rugby in the evenings.
“I couldn’t tell you the difference between a prop and a hooker when I started,” he admitted. “I had never watched rugby before I played it. I just took the ball and ran fast because I played soccer and did athletics. I think that’s why I was picked, because I didn’t know what I was doing.”
It was a former EP Kings connection (Robbi Kempson) who first spotted something in him and helped convince Alan Solomons to hand him his first professional contract.
From there, Gqoboka built a career that took him through the Stormers, a stint at Montpellier, and finally more than a decade as a first-choice prop for the Bulls.
Of all the honours, one stands above the rest. “Definitely playing for the Springboks, representing my country. I think that’s the biggest one for any player.”
Ministry, he says, will now move from the background of his career to its centre. He has recently completed a second degree, this time in theology, and preaching has quietly run through his entire playing career.
- With assistance from the Bulls media team. For the full story of Gqoboka’s rugby journey click here.
