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The sideCarel AlbertsWe’re sitting in the dressing room, all 24 of us except for Coach. It’s hard to say where he might be. It’s quiet. Really quiet. When it’s this quiet you can feel the big noise outside in the walls and the floors, even though the game’s over. Personally I don’t really like it when that happens, because people who know little or nothing about the game get to perve over some famous guy in the side and call him something stupid like Percy, when by rights he should be called Percy Montgomery, because he’s always been called that. My name, on the field or in the pub and here in the dressing room or on tour is Doepie. That’s the kind of name where the guys do a little job on your real name, or in my case, my surname. The other famous example is Rassie, for Johan Erasmus. That Claude Meyer guy, who I personally think should commentate only in Australia, started calling him Johan Erasmus some time ago when he got tired of saying things like “Rassie” and “just shaving the upright” and “the Newlands ground is heavy underfoot”, everything in this guttural drawl like he drinks too much. Claude’s about as riveting as that guy in the Amstel ad who says “Bu’ furst -”, in that stupid Cape Town imitation of London English. To get back to my name among the guys — my surname is Du Plooy. I’ll admit Doepie is not a great name, but neither is Du Plooy, and it’s better than Bloepie, who’s this roly-poly guy in one of the provincial teams. I’m a true descendant of the French Huguenots, who were terrorised for their legitimate religious beliefs in Europe. I’m sure they spell Du Plooy totally differently over there. It’s weird, the things people call you when you’re starting to get their attention: the newspapers call me stuff like “mercurial”, “cunning”, all sorts of things, because I’m basically small and dark, and I like to run the ball and trick the other guy into doing something awful or stupid. They should call me Bag-of-tricks or something, the way the boxing guys or the runners give themselves descriptive names like Philip The Time Bomb Ndou, just like that, except mostly with “The Time Bomb” in inverted commas in most papers, for the average reader. I’m telling you all of this because I know not everyone reads rugby all the time. My gramps follows rugby like crazy, and it drives him insane, the crap they write in the papers and the double crap you have to listen to when you watch the game, and the balls all your friends can talk when you watch the game. But then again, not even the really good commentators or rugby writers make sense all the time, and you’re bound to slip up sometime, or fall into some comfortable routine, where you start calling things the same thing every time they cross your line of sight, or you start patterning your comments and reports, and comment only on the things you always comment about, ignoring something new or brilliant in the game. Some commentators and writers make a totally different kind of mistake, like that Castanza guy, who’s got himself in everywhere. He is so neurotic about saying something stupid or hackneyed that he comes up with these incredibly irrelevant things, like “Bobby’s dummy would have made the Mona Lisa break into a belly laugh”, or “Joost’s sidestep was as beautiful as the small of Kate Moss’s back”. I don’t know if he really said that. Probably not. I get it from a friend of mine who watches all the games, despite the pain it causes him. Guys like Castanza are entertaining enough, if you don’t have to read or listen to them every Thursday or every Saturday of every year that God sees fit to give us, or if you think people with flashy words are what sells newspapers. The trouble with guys like that is that they’re too showy and wordy, and I’ll grant you that I’m probably alone in saying that, but that just goes to show what crap informed rugby players and rugby lovers like my gramps have to put up with. In the end Gramps hooked up to the Net, even though he was probably crapping himself about it, it being such a new and strange thing for him, and him being such an old codger. The Net’s good for getting dope on rugby if you’re into that sort of thing, and most people I know are, even though you don’t have to be to know it can be a beautiful game when you run the ball. It’s the first time I’ve seen Cappie like this, and it worries me a little, but not too much, because I know he’s got it, that special thing that always makes you get up and do something totally splendid or risky. That thing that also just makes you stand out when you walk onto the field — you could be doing anything, taking your mouth guard out or something. Just in the way you look at the field and the opposition, and turning back and everyone’s eyes are on you — then you know someone’s that special. You know the kind of person I mean. The Sun writer once tried to say something about it. He called Cappie “purposeful and surveillant”. I’m not sure “surveillant” is a real word, but that sort of says it. But it’s also the fact that your eyes are already on him that goes into it and how he is. Even when he’s down like this you can’t help looking to him for something, anything, when the chips are down or when there’s an argument or something. I’m not saying we’re a bunch of boys who can’t think for ourselves or anything like that. Cappie’s just that kind of person. He always makes you feel better. A while ago we landed ourselves in hot water a bit, losing a couple of games, actually seven straight games, some against total palookas like The US, and for a Springbok side that is just weird man, unthinkable. I’m telling you this because it is connected to what I’m talking about, in a way. It is not the reason that we’re all so depressed, because in the meantime we’ve figured out how to beat the jinx, but I’m just telling you the way things happened. It started with the losing streak. In most countries, except if you’re in New Zealand or something, where the stock market follows the All Blacks’ ups and downs, losing seven straight games probably doesn’t mean too much. But, if you think about it really, the SA public and also the Boks just haven’t grown up at all yet. We didn’t know what it is to lose, and it will probably take us a while to get used to the idea. My honest opinion is that, during that time, the Boks suffered from depression at having fallen in everyone’s eyes, from gods to overpaid players of an irrelevant sport. Those are Castanza’s words, I have to admit. He was talking sense for a change. So I mean, it was pretty bad. You only had to read the papers and listen to guys in the pub or coffee shop in front of the TV, watching the cricket Proteas, by comparison, winning all their matches, to know what a fix we were in. Take nothing away from the South African public, but everyone’s an expert. Those guys can really rub it in. They love to drag their side through the mud and make it even worse than it is. But we had to face it. We were pretty pathetic. Even so, what makes me laugh is how a guy can sit in front of the TV and yuck it up with his pals telling the biggest pack of lies, hearsay and general crap you’ve ever heard. If you had to listen to any of them, you’d think they knew everyone on the team personally, and were personally responsible for all their triumphs and other everyday activities, everything but their current losing streak, of course. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I actually sat in a coffee shop like that one day, and had to listen to these three guys in front of the TV, watching Polly’s boys murdering the Indians. Each one was cleverer than the next, sounding like they knew everyone on the field’s auntie. I had to smile, but the whole thing made me a little sick. At least they kept me amused, because they all failed to recognise me (I had a cap and dark glasses on) and because all the crap they talked came straight from the papers and conversations they had with people who’d never been on a cricket field. Usually I get most of my fun listening to these guys from the fact that the same story can change so much from one week to the next. But one of these guys told a fairly amusing story: “So, listen, Nantie Hayward runs up to the nets and bowls one to Gibbs, who just lifts every ball over his head and knocks him to hell and away,” he says. “So Hayward brings another one in, but pitches it short, I mean ridiculously short, and almost knocks Gibbs’s head off. He keeps running and stops short of running into Gibbs, looks at him hard and says: ‘Hit that, you bitch!’” The guys were killing themselves laughing, and I must admit, it was pretty funny. Even his imitation of a flat Gibbs accent in response was passable enough. No-one had another story ready the way that guys outdoing each other always have, to try and top the one he told, because it was just too good, and I almost felt some sort of shared happiness with them. They were just having a good time talking crap with their friends. But then one of them made a bad mistake. He asked the guy where he’d heard the story. It was an innocent question and everything, but you don’t ask a guy something like that. It’s like asking a writer whether he got his story from some experience he’d had. The truth is that it really doesn’t matter what you say against anyone in sport in South Africa. The first rule is that it’s all true, even if it isn’t. And nobody has ever defended himself against this kind of thing. We’re too chicken, if you ask me. We can probably learn a thing or two from the odd female administrator or a majority black team. And you could see the guy’s face falling. He even faltered for his words, saying something like “Aw, man, some guys at my club heard it from a guy at the nets …”. But he was fibbing, you could tell. Every sport-loving South African protects his sources and adds his own touches to what he hears. It’s the law. Then their conversation turned to rugby, and against my better judgment my ears pricked up. It was pretty dire. Not only did they not have the slightest respect for me or anyone else on the team, but also poor Coach, who has to please every fickle SA rugby supporter, transform the side, win every match and this with a side that’s just kak in anyone’s books. “I mean, they have the fucking players, right? So why don’t they play them?” This from the first guy who told the Hayward story. And then he went on to discuss that new centre from Border, Lume, a black guy who should by rights be SA Rugby’s new poster kid, the way he looks; compact, threatening but totally lacking any emotion, and the way he knocked some Bok celebrity off his feet in a provincial match one day, running flat and coming up straight with just the smallest hint of a nudge of the hip. I can’t even begin to describe the natural understanding of the game that goes into something like that. If only someone would give him a chance, the guy was saying. I had to agree with him. It made you think about what’s happening with transformation. A lot of guys, guys like the bunch of lawyers in the coffee shop I mentioned, are coming round to this kind of argument now, calling the rugby administration racist, but I think that lot, the rugby administration, I mean, is just scared of anything new, whatever the colour. Something had to be done. Everyone hated us. I wouldn’t ordinarily listen to a bunch of old-school lawyers who are afraid of competing against new guys coming through who haven’t been admitted to the bar, and are allowed to appear in court anyway. That’s what the bastards were talking about. But it seemed to me that the pressure at the time was just adding up. Everyone in the side could feel it, especially Coach, who was about to be fired. And I was pretty sure the guys would listen to what I had to say. I hadn’t played my 80th test match for my country for nothing, even if people thought I was getting a bit slow in the legs. “Long past his sell-by date” is maybe a familiar expression. If it makes you want to throw up, too, I apologise. When I said that thing back there about us not being a bunch of kids who can’t think for ourselves, this is true about quite a few guys in the side. Cappie’s not bad, he’s sort of a marketing genius, if you ask me, just judging from the new strip he’d negotiated for us, all sleek and black, in the provincial side we’re both in that he also captains. And all the attention it got us from the sponsors. But the cleverest guy on the team was Dan Booysens. He was one of those players whose name always gets used along with their surname, on TV and everywhere, except between us, and there is an exception again. To us he was just Dan, because he’s earned the right, like some football players in Brazil and Europe have, to be known by their first name in their own backyard. Dan was practically a rocket scientist. I’m not stupid myself or anything, before you get the wrong idea — I have a Masters in History, for some stupid reason, but nothing like Dan. Dan was going to help us out with this thing. He sort of showed himself to be a kind of spatial genius, in my book, when I first saw him distribute (that’s another newspaper word, for passing the ball) and lift the ball over the other side’s heads and grubber (roller-kick) and kick for touch. I was convinced when I saw him go for a drop goal all of bloody 45 metres out one day, 10 metres from the touch-line, and when someone, I think it was that scavenger George Smith, threw himself at his kicking leg, he just pivoted around and used the other leg and kicked the ball so sweetly and impossibly lightly and lightning quick, that it practically disappeared from sight for a moment and when it re-appeared, it just hung there over the cross-bar for a bit and dropped over. I swear, he was like Naas Botha just a little bit in that way, but with every game he became something more, something else. He developed into some kind of rugby mutant monster or something, a true original. He always did the right thing. And he wasn’t even in the side at the time. It was a Super 12 match. It was up to me to point out exactly who and what we had in him before Coach recognised the need to give him a chance. But I don’t blame him. Coach is under a lot of pressure, and sometimes it’s hard to see the wood for the trees in a situation like the one we were in. But there’s more to Dan’s story than his rugby savvy. (The Independent newspapers call it tactical nous. Not once, but all the time.) He sort of cut his teeth as the team intellectual after putting up his hand at a brainstorm after practice, and asked Coach something about the placing of the back three players. Coach just looked at him, and said, in Afrikaans (and Coach never speaks Afrikaans, even though he’s Afrikaans himself, when there are English blokes around), “I want you to take some time over the weekend to figure out what we’re going to do about Nathan Grey”. Nathan Grey is this battleship of a centre, a goddamn Australian and a really steely guy to wrestle down and keep from getting the ball away. “Who knows what you might come up with?” Coach said, and smiled, a little tired. But Dan went away and came back with this really simple plan. It sort of involved the solid guys on the team, of which I’m one, even though I’m the smallest. I’m a bit like Gareth Edwards in that way. I could run right through you even if you were Jonah Lomu, because you wouldn’t expect it, and because I’m built like something that’s built out of teak. Even if you do expect it, you’d still bounce off me if you didn’t take care to wrap me up properly. Anyway, the plan involved having a number of these guys available always, to hit him up hard, and another bunch of scavengers lurking around every corner, sort of standing off the loose and watching out for the ball runners who get hit up, and then wresting the ball from them. Simple. And it worked. It worked because the best sides in the world have big bastards like Nathan Grey in their sides, and they don’t like to kick the ball away, and they also like to get it to the outsides pretty quickly, so their own big guys are really their Nemesis. Along with improving our handling skills (we handled like school boys), our flat runners and our tricksters like me and Breyton, we actually got some sort of try-scoring rhythm going again, and we haven’t lost a single match since. We drew one against Fiji, will you believe it, and I honestly think we were playing pretty well on the day, so that kind of keeps us on our toes. That’s when Coach got to keep his job and our spirits lifted, and Cappie became the most celebrated captain ever in South Africa, despite having a pretty poor first few runs. Just the way I always knew he would. We got Lume in the side also, and we were becoming pretty well representative of the country’s racial mix, which put one over football good and proper. Anyway, that’s also when, at the end of the 2002 season, we got to go away to Mauritius, with our wives and girlfriends staying behind, on team vote. I guess all the guys who voted for the ladies to stay behind (and I didn’t) had a reason to do so, because we’d struck on something special, and anyway, ten days were never going to be that long. And if they picked up any flak from the ladies they could always say the other guys outvoted them. And it was on a beautiful beach in a black and brilliant Mauritius night, as I walked drunk with something like a new religion in me, and with gratitude and love for my team mates and rum, that I saw the thing. The night felt like the universe was yawning and its heart was falling out and I felt like laughing because I knew exactly what it meant, but I was crying and I tried to walk really quietly and shut up, because the night was cold and still and I could almost hear the parties going on back at the hotel. And just as well, because it meant I didn’t have to surprise Dan and Lume and embarrass them where they were sitting in the shallows, close as brothers. I knew what they were doing. They were talking really softly and I knew what they were doing. The bastards were in love. I felt ashamed at knowing who it was even in the dark, but everyone’s physique is so totally different from everyone else, and after a while you can tell who’s walking past you just from the general footfall in the change rooms or from some general fleeting impression you get out of the corner of your eye. So I knew it was them and I knew what they were doing, and first it made me ashamed, but in this night it was the holiest of the holy things I had ever seen, and I turned and walked away. I spoke about it only to my wife, who’s about the most open-minded girl you can hope to find, and even though I expected her to accept it fairly easily and to have some words of advice, I knew I couldn’t risk telling Dan or Lume her reaction. As always, she surprised me. “I think it’s beautiful,” she simply said. And she’s right. The choices people make are beautiful and true, especially if it’s out of the ordinary. If a man fights for women’s rights, it’s amazing and great, because he’s realised he may be a man first, but more importantly, he’s a person. If Johnny Clegg starts a Zulu band, it’s beautiful. Johnny is about the sincerest person I’ve met. And if people of the same gender fall in love, you can’t very well question their sincerity or the hugeness of their feeling. You have to shut up and look and be amazed at how little you know about your own prejudice and how big things are. I did go up to Dan and Lume after that, and tried to say to them that they should probably be careful (even though I knew I was willing to stick my neck out for them if anything went against them on the team, on account of our liberal Constitution), but I think they misunderstood. Lume, and I have nothing against him personally, was probably a bit more sensitive than Dan, and he thought I was threatening him. He is a cocky little swine, I’ll say that for him. He poked his finger in my chest and said he’d f*&k me up if I tried anything, but my conscience was clear and I just shook my head. Still, he walked away. Dan was quiet and avoided me. He even denied things, which, if you think about it, is pretty sad. But what was I doing worrying about people when they’re dead against themselves? Dan and Lume never spoke again. And not to me either. I was pretty upset with myself for worrying about the bastards and for messing up the team by getting them scared, and with them for being such cowards, but I let it go and just stuck my finger under Lume’s nose again one day and told him to just stick to his job and not to mess up the team spirit. I’m pretty senior in the side and besides, he’d lost any right to make me feel like a doos for acting so tough when I was just trying to save their skins and the team’s. It’s a pity though, because we played a world invitational the very next weekend, that was this afternoon, and someone must have found out something, is my theory, but you’ll say I’m paranoid. It wasn’t the other side. I’m pretty sure of that. It was one of our own guys. And no one saw the fucking thing happening. Eight cameras and no one saw a thing. But when the loose broke around Dan — just his legs were sticking out, Christ knows what he was doing in there — when it cleared out, you could see his head was a bloody mess. I could see he was dead from the way he lay. |
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