Growing up in the birthplace of the Bounce wasn’t enough to instill a fondness for rugby. So what was it about a move further south that ignited a passionate love affair with the game?
By Max Benson
Egg-chasing. Overweight posh boys groping each other. Rugby league with two more idiots per side. Those were the easy gags growing up in the north of England. But the problem wasn’t really what rugby was, more what it wasn’t: football or cricket.
That was a northern hemisphere winter and summer neatly mapped out for many of us. One season finished, another began. Throwing another ball into the mix just wouldn’t have worked. Especially one that didn’t bounce properly.
Being forced to play on a frozen December pitch by a dim-witted, substitute PE teacher was probably the final straw. Blood and swearing the result of a farce of a match between big lads and refuseniks.
Before that came a decade of watching the Five Nations on the BBC, which frequently felt like England and Scotland just booting it from one end to the other. So why not stick to football?
2003 and Jonny Wilkinson’s magic boot briefly threatened to turn an ignorant head, but the World Cup excitement really stemmed from beating Australia at something, anything. God knows we couldn’t do it in the cricket.
Ten years later, South Africa happened. First visiting, then moving to this invigorating, madcap country cracked open a window on a fresh sporting landscape.
A handful of Stormers games at Newlands set it off. The results didn’t matter, although a fix of live sport on a Saturday afternoon certainly did. It felt like a surrogate home and a thoroughly pleasing culture shock to see working class, ‘normal’ people at a game of Union. We had League for that back in Blighty.
This is not to say rugby was mere replacement therapy. The Afrikaans in-laws – Blue Bulls fans, the lot of ’em – saw to that.
Family time over Christmas and by the braai meant conversation inevitably slipping towards sport. And so the learning process continued, in no small part due to their kind patience met die Engelsman.
Thankfully, it wasn’t an entirely Bulls-focused education (can you imagine?) as new friends shared stories of the Sharks, the Cheetahs, the running rugby of the New Zealand franchises and more.
Super Rugby became a weekend breakfast staple with Xola Ntshinga and funny old Oom Naas Botha forming an unlikely double act on the telly.
Context met intrigue and created something easily powerful enough to stick in the mind. Out of a new home at the far end of Africa came a new sporting love and why not? There was room for it now. Besides, the football here is crap.
It’s sport, so there’s pious nonsense to cut through. “There are no rich and poor people on a rugby field,” a senior rugby official once said to me.
If a game is good enough, it doesn’t need anyone’s help mythologising and aggrandising it. And rugby is more than good enough. But none of that drivel was a turn-off. All part of the education, more like.
Volunteering, then working, for a development academy, in every capacity from coaching to transport to tutoring to cooking meals, has helped no end. Learning the basics of the breakdown at the same time as a bunch of pre-teen Xhosa kids from Khayelitsha. Except they were doing it in their second language on an empty stomach. And still at twice the speed of this son of a colonialist.
Falling for rugby has shone a light on the elitism, inequality and – hey, let’s call it what it is – institutional racism that persists in South African sport. Well, it does mirror society.
Those that fight and wail at the provision of proper access to a game, which no body owns anyway, for the ‘other’ 85% of the population are governed by fear, pettiness and conservatism. That dirty word ‘transformation’ isn’t the problem, they are.
But this is about love, not hate. And these things can only swirl around the mind if you’re passionate – about your new home and your new sport.
There’s still much to study about the game with the odd-shaped ball. But South Africa is a great place to do it. The best teachers were always the ones madly in love with their subject, weren’t they?
- This article first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes. The opinions expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of BrightRock.
