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Mister Wong
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I have suffered dreadful flashbacks with all this rugby hoo-hah that’s being going on. Right up front, I should point out that I am not one of those people who drape themselves in the Springbok colours, dress up like Bakkies Botha and paint my face to resemble a South African flag. The only people who can get away with face painting are children and the mentally retarded.
From an early age, rugby never made sense to me. Growing up in Durban, I went to an all-boys school, primary and high, where scoring a try in the inter-school games was far more prestigious than doing well in maths or science. Not that I ever did.
For a long time, I thought Victor Ludorum was the name of the first team’s tighthead prop.
In primary school, playing rugby was compulsory. The only children who were exempt were polio victims and boys who showed obvious signs of being girls trapped in boys’ bodies. Even then, the freaks were obliged to report to the field every Saturday morning in full school uniform to cheer and squeal and rattle their calipers.
The fact that I was fit and healthy counted heavily against me. Press-ganged into a try-out for the second team, I steadily made my way down to the seventh team, a pack of uncoordinated misfits whose idea of sport was smoking behind the bicycle shed.
The entire idea behind the game mitigated against my instincts for survival. Here. Grab this stupidly shaped ball and run as fast as you can towards a white line hundreds of metres away. Along the way, fifteen insensitive little ruffians are going to try to get the ball away from you by any means possible. This includes slamming you to the ground, kicking you in the nuts and raking your face with studded boots.
What fun. What a glorious way to spend a balmy Saturday morning in Durban. Of course I would rather be having my internal organs trampled upon than catching soft, warm waves at South Beach.
Surfing, needless to say, wasn’t a school sport. It was a sport for dope-smoking, class-cutting, girl-chasing delinquents. My kind of sport, if ever there was one.
Things have changed. That very same school won the SA Schools Championships at Nahoon Reef two years ago. I could have been a contender.
Instead, I went from primary to high school nursing a broken elbow and a lifelong hatred for all things rugby. I would have been a fool to continue the pretence.
By the time I left, my primary school coach was deeply suspicious of my inability to hold on to the ball for longer than five seconds – less if a player looked as if he were about to tackle me.
In high school, I quickly noticed that the boys were considerably bigger. I felt like I was the only one who hadn’t grown up. Still do, come to think of it.
In high school, we were at least given a choice of sports. Rugby, though, remained holiest of them all. But since the school wasn’t co-ed, I never had to worry about impressing the girls with my speed, agility and courage in the face of almost certain death. So I chose tennis.
I was an aggressive player, blasting forearm drives straight at my opponent’s head and smashing my racquet against the court whenever I blew an important shot. It was the perfect sport in which to assert my masculinity without the risk of getting beaten to a bloody pulp.
Then I went to the army. Oh, boy. Sports days were on Tuesdays. Or Wednesdays. I can’t remember. I can’t even remember who we were meant to be fighting against.
And there it was again. My nemesis. The one day of the week on which you get a break from learning how to kill people, you spend getting mauled and stomped by human Uruk-Hais.
Ben Travato
For months I carefully avoided getting roped into playing. I used similar techniques to avoid being sent to the border. Then, one day, curiosity got the better of me and I sloped over to the field to watch the medics load one of the players into a chopper.
I was spotted. Too late to run. A creature, half-man half-bear, barked at me in a harsh guttural tongue to come and play. It wasn’t an invitation.
I was barefoot and the ground was like cement. By the end of the game, I was ready to join Umkhonto we Sizwe. The only thing that stopped me was a fear that they, too, played this abominable bloodsport.
