0 of 3
A bar in Gonubie, two screens, left and right. Two games, two weird worlds.
I am elated and exhausted at the Boks’ thrashing of the Kiwis in the morning. I watched in this bar. It was noisy and busy.
There were shouts like bulls as the teams smashed each other. It was so intense that amid three or four head injury assessments, even the French ref pulled up with a minor calf injury.
I ponder at how much profound pleasure I took as we came back at the Kiwis, again and again. It was a feeling in the gut, then lower, then all over. Pure testosterone.
Of course I loved the dynamics, our blitzkrieg forwards raised on Grade 1 beef, and our jinking, jiving backs raised on ... kryptonite?
When we okes fire as one, we are in every way, unstoppable.
Our style has moved from bulldozer hits and punches — sheez, those 1970s Bok Tests were like battlegrounds with bodies piling up in the mauls, breaking necks, until we modernised out of that primal carnal pit.
Now we scream for a penalty or yellow card if a tackler’s arm slips a smidgen above shoulder height or the curl of fingers is not there when arms are wrapped around the ball carrier.
We have a beautifully unique style, a spiritual embodiment of all we are want for our nation.
Recently, I had been resigned to the Boks joining the ranks of the rest of the rugby championship teams, where the mighty have slipped and the underdogs have improved their bite.
It’s all evened out. That is simply the gloriously operatic story of rugby and us.
I have had two periods in my life where the Boks have been world leaders, once when they won 17 games in a row and, recently, when we took two world championships. And of course, that unforgettable Madiba win in 1995.
But today we dished out the biggest-ever defeat of our biggest-ever nemesis. The Kiwis. We are back!
I am also enjoying the players’ conversation where they claim agency for what they do on the field, and the coaching team are just that, coaches on the sideline working for the best on-day performance — a little less of Rassie the god, and more of the glutinous relationship that is being kneaded into the Bok dough (indeed, I had an Orb of Norb vegan loaf baking in the oven during the second half.)
I feel privileged to have been a barstool eyewitness to these moments of sporting transcendence, and, honestly, I did not bemoan our loss to the All Blacks earlier this month.
Our fondness locally for the New Zealand team reaches back historically when they broke with hateful apartheid culture and held rugby workshops in our then “black and coloured areas”. It is a deep, loved memory in this city.
I imagined how that 70s team felt having to have “honorary white” status imposed on their Maori warriors? We were sick and we sucked. That is how it was back then, in a lockdown imposed by a vicious, neocolonial rinderpest.
Today a woman, indigenous to New Zealand, performed a waiata or karanga blessing, even before the haka. You could feel the intensity of her prayer. Nowhere can I find her name in any AI programme but she was proper.
I scarfed my steaming loaf with Marmite and olive oil butter and fell asleep.
I awoke shortly after 2.30pm, having promised that I would be back in my Gonubie bar 50m away to watch the women Springboks at 2pm.
It was heading towards halftime and the score was 10-10. I leapt up and raced over.
To a near empty bar.
Six patrons at tall, hefty bar tables, two television screens, one to the left showing the Women’s Rugby World Cup quarterfinals and, on the right, some team in red playing in some country far north. One soccer team was named after a pile of guns.
A 30-something Afrikaner guy to the left, in his Bok jersey, was zoned in on the women’s rugby; two older guys on the right were yakking away but apparently watching the soccer.
At the centre table was a couple: she was into the rugby, he was into the soccer.
Let me not forget to mention the delightful senior who sat under the women’s rugby screen, a big shining earpiece in place, chortling at some show he was watching on his cellphone like some tech-addicted teen.
And as the rugby game teetered, I realised the women were like ninjas, hair and ribbons and plaits streaming, thudding into each other with startling intensity — but utterly silent. Sporting wraiths floating through the cosmos.
This would not do. I loudly discovered that only one guy in the bar was watching soccer — the crusties in the corner said facetiously “we are watching you”.
I turned to the sweethearts in the middle of it and she, of the styling weave and perfect lipstick, said her oke was also watching both games, so it was a 3.5 to zero vote in my favour.
“Sit af daai helse straf*,” I said of the Brit soccer commentary, “and give us the women’s rugby commentary!”
“Hell no,” said the barman. He sneakily pointed to the eating lounge adjoining the bar where a family was watching the soccer and said what about them?
This is Springbok rugby at the world championship! How can you trump that with some over-monied English club football game?
To their credit, we got the commentary — and the family in the eating section got their soccer. All things are possible when you raise your voices.
I protested so loudly that the geezer chortling at his screen moved to the table under the soccer screen.
OK, go and watch your soapie elsewhere, then. Ah, but he had ordered a burger and all rights to him.
This column is all about women’s rugby, and if the build-up was foreplay, I am not sure I would ever make it to any base, but I do want to say that I Love Boobies.
They are coming to Buffalo City at 8am on Saturday, October 11. The evocatively named campaign is a deadly serious attempt to raise money for breast cancer screening for women who cannot get there because of money or social barriers. Breast cancer is terrifying.
Gail Wild, my swim friend, has stepped up with east coaster Aimee de Jager to sell R200 entry tickets to women for the independent campaign. All ticket money goes directly to the women who need it. Call 084-549-0224.
The venue for the reveal is unknown until midnight, and after a little chat on the beach, a picture of the women’s backs is taken and in they go for a goef, packed in or packed out.
“I Love Boobies” does indeed raise a small niggle of safety for the women players. So I asked Perplexity AI and was told sports bras do the job, plus some padding inserts known as flexible encapsulation inserts made by Boob Protect. I am in danger of overwriting here, so let me move on swiftly ...)
So, we lost but I cared not a jot. I cared about what I was watching and experiencing. Wow, those women put in the hammer blows.
They scrag sprinters, legs pumping, boot studs whirring like scimitars on the wheels of those chariots in Ben-Hur. They flow too, hair is either braided tight but with a few streaming ribbons, or tight, dyed blonde short-crops.
So what is it about women’s rugby that makes it stand apart from the guys who support them so roundly?
First, some geniuses decided there was no money or public support for SA women’s rugby and ended it somewhere in the late 2010s.
It only got going again after the lockdown and has been increasingly improving to this awesome point of making the quarters of the world championship. That must have taken effort.
A lack of development of women’s rugby feels like an old hyper-male Neanderthal thing.
Yet, Rassie is a shape shifter, a mind bender, he is no camp staaldraad “troep-sien-jy-daai-blaar” type. And look at how it works.
Women’s rugby, from my sudden epiphany — gosh, this is amazing — is comparable to enjoying a different surfbreak, or another movie style, or book, or moving from squash to padel — it celebrates diversity, intelligence and is deeply moving and engaging.
For me, there is a different flow, a different violence. Yes, like life, it’s meaty, but there is a peerless artistry about it.
You feel so encouraged, so with them on the field, you move with the ball, the tackles, and yet I can sense the different rules of engagement.
I saw not one punch thrown, not one shove, not one obscenity hurled.
These women display more sportsmanship than the men whose name dominates this ethical and spiritual essence of the sport of rugby.
I was lonely in the pub — everyone moved away from the crazy hack — but I was drawn into what was happening on the screen. When it ended, our women embraced in small groups.
They had given everything they had on that field.
Their tears were my tears.
One tiny thing they did not have, which I give to them now with gladness and joy, is my heart.
* “Turn off that hellish punishment.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.