The brutal beauty of the rugby

With the 2023 Rugby World Cup just started and the Springboks set to begin their bid to retain the winners’ mantle tomorrow, most supporters’ minds will be going back to South Africa’s previous successful campaigns to hoist the Webb Ellis Cup.

 Funnily enough, I watched each of those three RWC finals in pubs: 1995 in London, 2007 in Cape Town and most recently in a little beach bar in Kenton-on-Sea called Jerry’s on the Dune with a group of game rangers and field guides of my acquaintance.

Rekindling memories of rugby in The Barefoot Capital

This week saw me again in the Eastern Cape seaside village known as The Barefoot Capital of South Africa and I returned to Jerry’s for the first time since 2019 to quaff a Jack Black Lager, both for old time’s sake and as a good luck to the Bokke in the weeks ahead.

While I never rose to great heights – or even mediocre ones, at that – as a rugby player, the sport has always occupied a large part of my heart… probably from the day my mother bore me in swaddling clothes to watch the Springboks play Scotland at Murrayfield in the very early ’60s. (I don’t remember that match but I recall every moment of the time a couple of Saffa mates, living in Falkirk, and I joined about 30 000 other expats in travelling to a freezing Edinburgh in 2008 to watch John Smit’s team win a tense encounter 14-10.

The sellout crowd was split evenly between Scots and South Africans and my highlight was the national anthems when most of the Bok fans joined in singing Flower of Scotland.) It would take nearly a decade between the first and second games I watched. The latter was the All Blacks opening game of the 1970 tour of South Africa, against Border in East London.

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Rugby memories

In particular, I remember the fabulous Samoan winger Bryan Williams coming to address my school. He’d been given “honorary white” status by the South African government in order for the tour to go ahead. I only got to see the game because my mom put her foot down with my father – the only ball game he appreciated was snooker – and said we were going… and Dad be damned!

Jump ahead a couple of years and the nascent rugby flame was kindled and fed at King Edward VII high school in Johannesburg. In five years, I only missed watching one First XV game; I’d been concussed playing for something like the U/15 E side earlier in the day.

I’ve been blessed, both as a paying fan and photo-journalist, to have attended hundreds of matches. I’ve sat in the stands, the press boxes and traipsed the touchlines and in-goal areas in weather both foul and fair.

My best memories of the game, though, come from watching club rugby in Windhoek, Cape Town and Stellenbosch. It’s wonderful watching a flowing game on television but you forget just how tough the sport actually is until you’re sitting or standing just a few metres away from where a wing gets tag-teamed by a couple of cover defenders.

Rugby’s camaraderie and humility

You don’t just hear the whoof!, you feel it. But alongside the brutality of the game are its camaraderie and the humility of the majority of its most exceptional players. I’ve had Bryan Habana addressing me – in his professional pomp – as “Sir” when I greeted him in passing… watched a cross-legged Victor Matfield revelling in the fact of some toddler bouncing a rugby ball off his head at Hamilton Rugby Club in Cape Town.

 Also at “Hammies”, I witnessed two packs of forwards throwing hefty punches at one another when the ref’s whistle blew for full time. They dropped their fists, shook hands and said they’d meet each other for a beer in the pub when they’d cleaned up.

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