I watched the Springboks play rugby against the Wallabies at the Cape Town Stadium last month. I hadn’t seen the Boks play since that tumultuous war against the English in the soaked World Cup semifinal at Stade De France, which Handré Pollard’s nerveless genius snatched from the Imperialists in the dying minutes. So, this was an exciting prospect.
My preparation involved listening to an Antipodean-focused rugby podcast and an SA one in the week before the game. I also watched the Lions edge out the Wallabies in a surprisingly tight series. There had been the usual rugby discussions in the gym, an effective measure to sidetrack our friend who does the instructing. And to spend more time than one should using the bench as a seat on which to sip coffee rather than a mechanism for strenuous weightlifting.
This amount of preparation suggests a level of devotion to the Springboks that I was unconscious of despite my attempts to live an observed life. Though since 2019 I have held the belief that the Springboks represent some of the only positive overlapping cultural symbols that we South Africans have. And so, it isn’t surprising that we worship them.
There appeared to be a surprising lack of excitement in Cape Town about the impending fixture in the week leading up to the match, though I suppose it is hard to gauge the zeitgeist when you are primarily working from home. Bok Fridays, for example, take on a different tone.
My children and I took our dogs for a walk on the promenade on the morning of the game. While a smattering of Bok jerseys was visible around the seaboard, they hadn’t formed into packs of menacing size. I did notice a few red-faced farmers with prosperous profiles, eyeing up the sights on the promenade and marvelling at the constructional metamorphosis taking place in Sea Point. These engorged, veldskoen-shod beasts and their generously proportioned partners provided a fascinating anthropological juxtaposition with the Atlantic seaborders who hustled around them, emaciated by Ozempic, stained with self-tan and pumped with silicone. It isn’t surprising that Sea Point has bred far fewer Springboks than Bloemfontein.
Cape Town Stadium is like an insecure teenager when it comes to staging a Springbok rugby match. Mouille Point hasn’t worked out its formula to accompany the occasion as a whole-day event. Newlands had a well-worn process with the homespun options of Forries, Barristers and even the SAB Brewery to enjoy a beer or two before and after the game.
I suppose you could bookend the match at the Waterfront but preparing for a sacred occasion in a glorified mall among blue-rinsed tourists off the cruise ships seems to me a treasonous option.
We chose Hamilton Rugby Club to absorb the atmosphere before the game. This is the oldest rugby club in the country, founded in 1875. They have sensibly installed a Vasco’s in their bar to fortify the green and gold hordes with beer and hot peri-peri chicken before they file into the neighbouring coliseum to watch their gladiators beating the bejesus out of the opposition. This proved to be a wise choice. It was filled with civilised professionals preparing for the big event by determinedly downing as much booze as they could lay their hands on. I even bumped into some of my school friends at the bar. One of them a very bad egg who habitually stole the communion wine from the chapel. He hasn’t changed.
One would think we should attend an event costing R2,000 a ticket laser-focused and entirely compos mentis, but this was not the majority view. Sobriety would weigh too heavily on frayed nerves. Particularly after the Wallabies had unexpectedly beaten the Boks at Ellis Park.
The atmosphere began to ramp up as we made the short walk towards the stadium amid an excited throng of arriviste Joburgers clad in all manner of bling, sporting enormous golden watches with the price tags still attached, and draped in Louis Vuitton. Their replica jerseys were gold flaked and bedazzled with diamonds.
We surged forward in a wave of collective purpose before merging with a group dressed like rappers and then the discerning Constantia massive, fortified against the weather with Barbour and single malts from grandfather’s silver hipflask. The ladies among them had demonstrably tried to dress down, to blend in with the great unwashed, after the intense pressure, and the cut-throat competition of the catwalk beside a soggy southern suburbs school rugby field that morning.
The idea of a quiet beer in our seats before the game faded when we saw the queue. Somehow a communist/abolitionist has commandeered the wheel of the stadium’s food and beverage supply. The judge, whom I chose to watch the game with, informed me that spending half the game queuing for weak beer in snaking queues defined insanity.
It was fortunate that we had managed to fortify ourselves by the time we reached our lower-tier seats because this was the moment when whoever it was that controlled the music started the cacophony.
If the game stopped for a second for one of Rassie’s water carriers to relay a message to Pollard to kick the donderse ball even higher into the rainy night sky, this light-fingered “entertainer” took the opportunity to play a few seconds of a song, blast off a horn or drown the airwaves at maximum volume with something seemingly designed to annoy anyone over 25.
There is no need for music at a Springbok rugby game after the anthems are over. It is entirely superfluous. We can’t get any more excited. And we are also South African, which means (apart from the Gwijo Squad) we don’t know how to sing at rugby or know any decent songs apart from Shosholoza.
All we want is to be left in silence with our angst to hear the thump of boot on ball, the cheers and the groans of the crowd and the terrifying crunches of 300kg collisions.
My grandmother departed this earthly realm in her mid-90s shortly after she had confided that, having been born in 1911, she no longer understood the world she lived in. I understood this properly, for the first time, after the stadium DJ had been at his set for 10 minutes. In that moment, I pleaded to the good Lord to summon the Grim Reaper, the four horses of the apocalypse, the Tokoloshe, or whoever’s job it was to extinguish my fire. This dystopian future was not for me.
Yesterday an acerbic man of rugby from Noordhoek relayed a story about an under-16D match between Sacs and Wynberg. It was the last game of the season. The scores were level with seconds left on the clock, and Sacs had a seemingly impossible kick from the corner to win. The tension was unbearable. The kick was out of the range of the regular kicker. This was, after all, the U16Ds. And then, in a life-defining moment of carpe diem, a rangy lock forward without any hitherto established credentials or obvious co-ordination, but plenty of raw power, shambled up to his skipper, claimed the ball and booted it over the posts in a swirling and glorious crescendo.
Perhaps the answer lies in the carefree world of the amateur, and watching rugby for its own sake, far from the madding crowd and the manic DJ.
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