Personal Rugby Reflections
In any case, I watched the All Blacks soundly thrash the Lions squad in wretched conditions down in Kiwi-land, came back to the office to work, and then went back at 2:00 to watch the Springboks pound the Tricoleur (French) in Port Elizabeth. This was an especially satisfying win for Amobokkobokko in light of the fact that the two teams played to a 30-30 tie last week in Durban.
Inevitably, this got me to thinking about my own experiences, modest as they are, playing rugby, which in turn got me to thinking about South Africa. My last blast of athletic glory, if you want to call it that (and I do; construct your own damned narrative if you have a problem with it.) came in 1997 when as the result of a confluence of circumstances I ended up playing rugby for Rhodes University in South Africa.
The first rugby game I ever saw in my entire life came from a rather interesting perspective – starting at right wing for Rhodes’ 2nd XV. Within two minutes of the start of the game, I found myself with this bloated, seamless oblong ball in my hands, running like hell, realizing that I was a good four years too old for this. Fortunately there was not too much time to think, and within seconds two chaps from King William’s Town had pummeled me. Somehow in my apprenticeship I had learned how to get rid of the ball, and while I brushed myself off, checked for missing parts, and let out the requisite profanity, we continued to move down the field and score a try.
Now keep in mind, all through college I had thought of rugby players as being akin to, say, the chess club, or more generously, the Ultimate Frisbee team. In college, these were the former high school athletes who knew they were never going to play a sport in college but still fancied themselves jocks. They drank during their games. We drank after winning NCAA competitions on Saturdays. They were from Venus. We were from a planet that did not suck at sports. I had friends who played rugby, just as I had friends who were sociology majors and friends who were Yankees fans. But these were not the sorts of things you brought up in polite company.
But when I got to Rhodes, things were different. For one thing, the beer was cheaper. For another, a lot of my buddies were athletes. And at Rhodes, as just about anywhere in South Africa, that meant one of only few things. It could have meant track, but the fact is, my track career was done. I was good enough to do well in college and even to compete for a while beyond that. But each torn hamstring made it less and less fun, taking me from being the sort of guy who was a threat to win or place at most any meet to being the guy hobbling around on hamstrings that had each been ruptured once each and knees that looked like my grandfather’s. So instead it meant soccer or cricket or rugby. I had no soccer skills. Not compared to the Africans in my house for whom the sport was religion, except more serious. Cricket season had not yet come. And so the drunk guys with whom I consorted at the Rat & Parrot or Peppers were rugby players. They knew I had been a track athlete, and that in a distant past I had played (American) football.
Well, drunk people can easily put 2 and 2 together and get an answer of “Crazy.” They thought that it was only natural that a guy who had never seen a rugby game in his life and who was four years past his college days really and truly and “ag-man-why-not” ought to try out for the university rugby team. Outside of the US, of course, sports operate on a club level. I had affiliation with the university. And obviously I was insane. So I said yes.
A few weeks later, there I was, starting at the wing, wearing #14 (my football number had always been 41, which means absolutely nothing to this story or the larger scheme of things) and staring out at guys who looked like they wanted to kill. Me. Later I would discover that this perception was accurate. I survived that game, which meant that my teammates came up with a thousand excuses to fill me with beer. I became the regular starting wing for a team that was, while not great, was also above .500 for the year. I had some good moments, like the game where I drew from some deep reserve of my football, past and introduced to South African sport, in one rather impressive run, both the stiff-arm and the hurdle/high-knee. In the game of my life I was nonetheless named “Mare of the Match” because after a 50+ yard run I did not take the try myself, but rather passed to a teammate coming up alongside me as I approached the 22-yard line (rugby thing). So much for selflessness.
Apparently I did not become a real rugby player until Tri-Varsity weekend, our equivalent to homecoming, against the University of Fort Hare. Until just a year or two earlier, it had always simply been “Intervarsity Weekend” (“Varsity” being a name for “University”) against the University of Port Elizabeth, but with the fall of the apartheid regime it was decided that it would be ok for the young African men of Fort Hare and the young men or Rhodes to meet on the sporting field and especially to pound the hell out of one another on the rugby pitch. Progress manifests itself in interesting ways, and so it became a three university affair. In our game at the Rhodes Great Field, Fort Hare played us a lot tougher than we expected. Late in the second half we were up by something like 12-7. I had the ball and had a run that took me to within about five yards of the try line, at which point I got beaten like a hippie at a Hell’s Angel rally. In the process of my bludgeoning, someone from some obscure angle (they are all obscure angles when you are twisted and turned and are upside down and if, I am honest, crying for my or at least someone’s mother) kicked me square in the face. It was like the prom scene from Carrie. There was blood everywhere. And these days, especially in South Africa, when you are bleeding during a sporting event, they take you off the field, no questions asked. But the team cannot replace you. The woman was trying to cut a neat strip or tape for my wound. My teammates, meanwhile, were entreating me to get back out there because, well, rugby is tough enough at even strength, never mind when they get a man advantage. I took the tape from the trainer, tore off a large piece, placed it over my eyebrow and forehead, and continued playing (Yeay me!). In the locker room a few minutes later, after the win, I was told that I was finally a real rugby player. (Yeay me, again!). Then I went and got a bunch of stitches. That made me popular. And we all want to be popular.
Two more stories on this walk down memory lane. These are a bit grimmer than the sepia-toned reminiscence.
The head coach of the Rhodes rugby program was a man by the name of Frans Erasmus. This name means nothing to any of you. But in South African rugby terms, he is a giant. He played for the South African team that played a squad of world All-Stars during South Africa’s period as a rogue nation. He was capped as a Springbok many times. He played in the scrum, as a prop, where he was a powerful sparkplug of a man. He was not as tall as I am, but he weighed 300 pounds, and it was a solid 300. He was a barrel, and his days in the scrum are still the stuff of legend. His nickname was “domkrag,” which basically means “jack,” as in the hydraulic lever with the power to lift your car. The nickname was a double entendre – first because he was a mechanic by trade, but second, and most evocatively, because he seemed able to hold other big men in the air almost on his own in the scrums. He also spoke very little English. And almost none of it to me, who he referred to as “the fucking American.” It was not, from what I understood, a term of endearment. I learned Afrikaans in my time in South Africa, mostly for reading and research and in any case not well enough to understand Frans as well as I would have liked. In any case, as the season came to a close, Coach was having guys on the team over to his house. I had not gotten the indication that I had been invited, and so when he said “Hey, American – are you coming?” I tried to demur. “Well, fuck you then.” I ended up at Frans’ house, a gorgeous home in the hills overlooking Grahamstown. When Frans had been over in Japan for the World XV, he had gotten some sake that had never been touched. We touched it. Intimately. Then out came the witblitz, Afrikaans for “white lightning.” Egads. It was a night not to remember. Consequently, there are parts that I don’t. But after that night, Frans seemed to like me. Or at least he used fewer expletives referring to me in my presence. Again – progress manifests itself in interesting ways.
That story has a tragic ending. Not even a year after I first left Grahamstown (and retired from rugby), Frans’ wife died tragically in an automobile accident. Frans never really recovered. A month or so later, Frans Erasmus died in an automobile accident on the same corner where his wife was killed earlier. Police ruled it an accident. I guess I will always wonder, though.
And then, of course, there was always the issue of race. Rugby has a long history of being associated with Afrikanerdom. It is a sport for boers, or so many believe. My teammates and many of my coaches were drawn from the Rhodes student body. They were white. My fellow wing went on to do graduate work in economics at Cambridge. Another did his PhD in pharmacology at Rhodes. They got to know me, and they got to know that my work was on race in both the US and South Africa. It did not take long before they gave me the nickname “kaffir.” It is hard to capture what “kaffir” means, except to say that it is a lot like “n-----,” but worse, given the South African context. It is an awful, shameful, ugly word. At one point, rather Pollyanna-ishly, I’ll admit, I asked them if they had to keep using “the k word.” That did not help my cause in the locker room, though I think they genuinely liked me, even if they always sought (and found, curiously) reasons to take the piss out of me. At the end of-year banquet, I was honored to receive an award for my time on the team. Unfortunately, making the link between the US and South Africa, they called it “The KKK Award,” which was written on the certificate. I do not have a certificate to honor my rugby playing in South Africa, as much as that experience meant to me.