40 years on - who stands out in my schoolboy rugby memories?

At the newspapers they call the Christmas period the silly season. It’s that time of year when the papers are thick because of the extra end of year advertising that came in, but the news is thin because everyone was going on holiday. So, we’d fill those pages with reviews, “best of the year” lists and top 10s etc.

And that’s what’s going on now of course, with all sport suspended due to the Covid 19 virus, and the online media feeling obliged to keep updating their sites. TV, likewise, is supplying glut of replays of fabulous matches gone by.

I, as a compulsive bloviator, can’t resist joining in and I thought it would be fun (for me anyway) to look back on my 40-odd years of watching schoolboy rugby and draw up  a list of the best players I saw in that time.

It’s a dangerous undertaking, I know. There were many good players that I never saw play, and I only attended a specific type of school game – the Joburg English, or non-league schools, and a smattering of the Afrikaans schools at festivals and such. There’s also the issue of a fading memory.

So, here’s my completely subjective list for, what it’s worth.

1 Heinke Van der Merwe (Monument). He was the Monnas captain during a very successful era for the school and I remember one year reporting that he scored 13 tries for them, as a prop, and two more at the Craven Week. He played five Tests for the Springboks, but never really became established and went on to a long and illustrious career in Ireland and then France.

2 James Dalton (Jeppe). He turned out to be one our most successful international players. While his power and effectiveness as a Test player was amazing for someone who was relatively small, I recall that as a schoolboy he was regarded as huge. He was one of the first schoolboys to go full out on weight conditioning and it showed. He was undoubtedly the best schoolboy hooker I ever saw.

3 John Smit (Pretoria Boys’ High). Although he went on to play over 100 Tests as a hooker, he was a prop at school. Even then his leadership quality was evident and Boys’ High was a feared opponent, hardly ever beaten by any of the Joburg schools. He was a powerful scrummager, but also useful with ball in hand.

4 David Copans (Highlands North). Yes, I’m biased – I coached him – but “Oaf” as he was called - was devastating in the games we played. He was a big man, with great skills and unstoppable 10m from the tryline. He was an allrounder, one of the few local schoolboys who played for the province both at the Craven Week and at the cricket Nuffield Week.

5 Ivan Labotsky (Monument). You could pick any number of Monnas tight forwards from the 80s and 90s, but Labotsky is one who sticks out for me. He was massive, powerful and altogether intimidating on the field. And absolutely charming off it – quiet spoken, respectful and polite – as so many of the Afrikaans players I come across are. He was in the Transvaal team that won the main game at the 1989 Craven Week and I was surprised that he didn’t go on to play at a higher level.

6 Nigel Pickford (Jeppe). Out of position – I think he was an eigthman – but he was a Jeppe captain in the golden Jake White era and typified the type of rugby that those teams played, which was streets ahead of anyone else at the time. He was a great leader and a uncompromising forward.

7 Chesney Thomas (Highland North). Definitely out of position, but only because my No.8 is the best schoolboy player I ever saw. The oldest of the Thomas brothers – Lee and Gareth also played Craven Week – was in a class of his own at that time. He was regarded with awe by just about everyone involved in school rugby.

8 Johan Van Niekerk (KES). As I said, if I was pushed to name the best schoolboy I ever saw I’d have to say Big Joe. He went on to win over 50 Test caps and everyone could see that coming. He was a step ahead of all the others, strong, fast and intelligent. I wrote at the time that he would cross the advantage line every time he carried the ball, and he had the ability to do that at international level too.

9 Freddie Botha (Athlone). In the late 1970s and early 1980s Athlone Boys’ High was a dominant force in local schools rugby. They beat everyone, including Monument, and the Botha brothers, Freddie and Vic, were very much at the heart of their success. Freddie was a great scrumhalf and it was a travesty that he didn’t get selected for the province, but it was almost impossible to get the nod if you were at an English school in those days.

10 Jamie White (KES). He was stereotypical of the King Edward flyhalves in his period – smallish, elegant and highly skilled. He was an excellent distributor and was the catalyst for countless tries within the KES pattern of those days. I do recall that he was something special, however. He had a devastating break, usually saved for late in the game, and I remember him dropping one or two match-winning goals.

11 Jaco Louw (Linden). Someone asked on social media last week who the fastest wing you ever saw was, and for me it was Jaco Louw, without question. He scored many tries at school level and went on the play senior provincial rugby. He was too slight to go all the way to the top at a time when strength and conditioning was still quite primitive.

12 Wandesile Simelane (Jeppe). He was among the first of the new breed of black players who dazzled with his guile and footwork. He was the talk of the town in his matric year and made the SA Schools team. He was also a deadly accurate goal-kicker, something not many seem to remember these days. It’s just a matter of time before he really kicks in as a professional player and I believe he is a future Springbok.

13 Kennedy Mpeku (KES). One year younger than Simelane, but cut from the same cloth. As a schoolboy he had it all and was a key player in arguably the best KES side in 20 years. He also made the SA Schools team and will undoubtedly be heard of again.

14 James Moss (Parktown). He was probably not far behind Louw for pace and scored many tries for Parktown in what was a golden era for the team. He went on to play many games at senior provincial level.

15 James Small (Greenside). Although he would go on to become one of SA’s greatest ever wingers, James Small played fullback at Greenside. He was a top athlete at school and a gifted ball-player. He was a troubled youth, I remember, and it was his coach at Greenside, Deon Visser, a gifted man-manager who reached great heights in education, who kept him on the straight and narrow. Greenside played the big schools in those days, and they were competitive mainly because of James Small. He single-handedly won many games for them.

Looking at that list, I realise I have not done the more recent players much justice. I guess I’m too sentimental, or maybe it’s that Alzheimer’s tendency to remember the distant past more clearly than the recent.

Certainly loosies like Hacivah Diyamani, Travis Gordon and Evan Roos wouldn’t be out of place in that company. Neither would backs like Tyrone Green, David Carey or Madosh Tambwe.

But that’s how I remember them. Let’s pray that we’ll be making new memories this season still.

Let's get back to educational values - even if it means losing rugby games

There have been three fairly widely reported incidents lately that have fallen right into the lap of a serial whiner about the state of school rugby like me.

First there was the very dodgy granting of bursaries to primary schools players in KZN, then there was the BBC report on steroid use in our schools and now the story of 17 and 18 year-olds playing in the under-13 primary schools Craven Week.

Cleverer people than me have identified what you need to be a successful sporting team.

You need talented players, obviously, you need good coaching, you need good facilities and equipment and you need regular quality competition that allows you to test your players and systems against good opposition.

You would expect professional sporting setups to meet all those requirements. They are all important, and the 1^st two – players and coaching – are generally the difference between the champions and the rest.

In a school rugby context those things are not always guaranteed – not in the vast majority of cases anyway.

In the past schools took in their grade 8s and set about coaching them to be the best that they can. That applied to everyone you played against, and the playing fields were even. Coaching was usually the difference, and given that the available talent was quite randomly distributed it was accepted that even the best schools would sometimes have a poor year.

Greater exposure in the media (and I confess to have played a role in that); the introduction of satellite television with its hunger for 24 hours of sports coverage and then the advent of social media, meant that the results of school first rugby teams became national news. National rankings followed and winning became more and more important.

At around the same time the professionalisation of rugby at national and provincial levels trickled down into the schools. That was a good thing, rugby-wise, but the investment it required made winning even more important.

Of course you play sport to win, and schools have a duty to prepare their teams and players to have the best possible chance of winning. But to what ends do you go?

If you cannot meet the requirements for success, do you accept it and work hard at competing anyway, or do you do what it takes to meet them, even if it means cheating?

Schools are educational institutions, nothing more, nothing less. And educational values demand of them to be ethical and unscrupulously fair in all they do. If you don’t behave that way, you have no right to be in a position where you are influencing and moulding young people.

Once you make winning your dominant value, however, then you are saying that it supersedes educational values and you will do what it takes to win. It means if you don’t have the talent, you go out and buy it from other schools via bursaries and other financial incentives. Then you ensure that you have the best coaching by employing men who have experience at senior provincial level, paying them million-rand packages, at the expense of the parents or out of trust funds or donations which would be far better used in redressing the dire inequality that exists in our schooling system. Likewise, you spend millions on building facilities that are only used by a small sector of the school. And you stop playing your neighbours and design elite national leagues and festivals that include only those who think like you and are prepared to throw money at rugby like you do.

In the highly competitive world of recruitment you start signing up 11 and 12 year-olds, before anyone else can get hold of them. You turn a blind-eye to the gargantuan physical proportions of young players, pretending to believe the bogus birth certificates that indicate they are playing at the right age level. And, at worst, you encourage players to bulk up by using performance enhancing drugs or, at best, you turn a blind eye to that once-slight boy who has gained 10kg of muscle in a short period of time.

Probably worst of all, schools exploit the inequality and poverty that still exists in the country. A bursary to a good high school can be a way out for an impoverished family, and a Varsity Cup or provincial contract can lead to unimagined riches for poor black boys. In the name of transformation and diversity those sorts of players are targeted, and the talented ones are plucked away, and we are told it’s being done for altruistic reasons.

It’s easy to see how those poor families will fight tooth and nail for those opportunities. Is it surprising that some of them might manufacture birth certificates or that the boys may be tempted to take steroids in an attempt to get a foot in the door?

It’s all about winning, and attempts to justify what is going on as educational or child-centered personal development are dishonest.

The Lance Armstrong justification of “everyone is doing it” is quite common, and I’ve been asked what I would do to stop it. I can’t do a thing, except to carry on whingeing about it. But the principals of the schools can. They are responsible for everything that goes on at their schools (including the money spent in the name of the school by old boys and trust funds). They all have to say no more! And they have to mean it and act honourably from then on.

It's not impossible. It’s actually what they are being paid to do.