DOUBLE World Cup-winning Springbok captain Siya Kolisi and coach Rassie Erasmus have formed a great partnership since 2018. AFP
Image: AFP
This last week’s furore in South African cricket over the Eastern Province Warriors’ failure to meet transformation targets got me thinking about how rugby, ironically, has been the trailblazers in local sport.
I say “ironically” because during the apartheid era, the Springboks were regarded by many as the poster boys of white supremacy.
The lilywhite Boks were hated by large factions in this country and understandably so. Until 1992, only whites qualified for the Springboks and if you were not white, why would you support a team that excluded you?
To this day there are many South Africans who still cannot bring themselves to support the Boks. In the Western and Eastern Cape there are All Blacks supporters clubs who turn out en masse to support the Kiwis when they play here. The All Blacks have long enjoyed this fanatical support because they were the one team that was capable of beating the Boks in South Africa.
This is perfectly understandable and the Boks can only hope that actions speak louder than words. As the team continues to show happy integration, the numbers of the “Cape Crusaders”, as they call themselves, will diminish. We will find that the children of the Cape Crusaders will support the Boks as their parents schooled in a very different South Africa die out.
Why wouldn’t the youth support the Boks when it is the likes of Cheslin Kolbe and Kurt-Lee Arendse scoring tries for a team captained by Siya Kolisi.
But transformation in South African rugby had a rocky start. The 1995 World Cup was won with Chester Williams the sole player of colour. The famous photograph of Joel Stransky’s winning drop goal has Chester blocked by a pole and white players make up the foreground.
Four years later, there was still an absence of black players in the Boks and in Cardiff in 1999, SA Rugby CEO Rian Oberholzer flew to Cardiff to tell coach Nick Mallett that his all-white team to play Wales was unacceptable (wing Breyton Paulse had been dropped).
SA Rugby brought in strict transformation “quotas” and representative teams had to adhere.
At the time, the word “quota” was a swear word in some quarters and an embarrassment in others. No black player wanted the “quota” tag. All rugby players wanted to be selected on merit, yet there was a period when SA Rugby diluted the dreaded “quota” reference by rephrasing it to “merit with bias”.
Those were uncomfortable times but SA Rugby stuck to their guns and 20 years later South African rugby is the strongest South African sport by a country mile.
The Boks have won three World Cups in the era of integration. Twice the Webb Ellis Cup has been raised by a black African captain in Siya Kolisi. In 2019, Makazola Mapimpi scored the first try by a Springbok in a World Cup final and he received the ball from Eastern Cape colleague Lukhanyo Am.
It is astonishing how far South African rugby has come from the dark days when only whites qualified for the Springboks.
Before 1992, the Springboks drew on a white population of about 4-million. Now they represent 65-million and the team is getting better and better.
The joy of transformation is that it opens the sporting doors to all in this country. When I drive through a township and I see youngsters passing a rugby ball between them and not kicking a soccer ball, my heart soars. I have nothing against soccer but witnessing how rugby has spread across the dust and grass roots in this country is simply wonderful.
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