What about the example being set, Serena?

Years ago, when the old Transvaal Rugby Referees Society changed its jersey to a harlequin design – black and red squares – the then president of the union, Jannie Le Roux commented:

Julle gedra julle soos narre, so dit is goed dat julle soos narre aantrek – You behave like clowns, so it’s just as well that you dress like clowns.

I don’t know why I suddenly remembered that story from those days when I spent a fair amount of my time running around, blowing a whistle and taking abuse form all sides. But that attitude to match officials reared its head this week with the Serena Williams incident.

Now, I think it’s unfair, but I have a bit of a reputation for being whinger when it comes to referees and, yes, just because the Springboks were awful on Saturday doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to point out that Glen Jackson was rubbish.

Which makes me a hypocrite because I also believe that respect for the match officials and accepting rough decisions are among the lessons that sport teaches which are applicable to other aspects of life.

I don’t watch tennis much – I find it quite boring – and have no idea what the codes they are talking about are, but if a player gets in the ref’s face the way Williams did on Saturday, and he doesn’t take action then he’s a feckless wimp and he should change to soccer where it seems there are no rules against that sort of behaviour.

The player’s struggle past, her gender and race are all real, but they all have nothing to do with it. If that was the case then Makazole Mapimpi should be allowed forward passes because he’s black; Bafana Bafana must be allowed to use their hands (they’d probably still lose anyway) and Laura Wolfaardt should only have two stumps behind her when she bats.

No, the rules are there to govern the game and the players contract to obey them. If they don’t, the umpire has the duty (not the choice) to apply the sanction that the laws demand. No-one has a right to expect different treatment – if they want that they should go and play with themselves. Any game belongs to both opponents and it’s the laws of the game and the vigilance and neutrality of the referee or umpire that’s supposed to ensure that.

What really bothers me, of course, is the effect that incidents like this have on those in the schools who are trying to teach and learn the life lessons that sport is supposed to teach. Someone tweeted, as a joke I guess, that Serena should not be smashing tennis racquets when there are so many children in the world who dream of owning one but probably never will.

It’s actually a good point, as is the one made by Martina Navratilova:

“I don’t believe it’s a good idea to apply a standard of ‘If men can get away with it, women should be able to, too’. Rather, I think the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the right way to behave to honor our sport and to respect our opponents?"

If you behave the way Williams did in front of a world-wide TV audience, including all the kids who want to be you one day, you don’t deserve sympathy and those who are supporting you obviously haven’t thought of the example that’s being set.

And for the tennis authorities to be supporting Williams is sheer madness. How can they ever expect their umpires to make sure that their matches are fair contests again?

They may as well stick men and women in clown suits in the high chairs and let their champions run free.

Let's leave a future in rugby out of it

I’m sure many of you, since you have already shown you are crazy enough to read the nonsense I spew in this space, are also readers, like I am, of Bill’s Rugby Blog, Views from the armchair.

Old Bill, the writer, is incredibly knowledgeable and does massive research into what he writes about (I should be doing some of that), but he does need a good sub-editor – his pieces are often quite long.

Anyway, in a recent offering he says rugby is at the crossroads. “Rugby has sold its soul to the Devil,” he writes, “a deal was made back in 1995 at those crossroads where amateurism and professionalism crossed paths. It was a deal that promised many benefits, in the form of massive broadcasting deals, huge salary packages for the players, and superior quality rugby for the supporters and fans.

“And it is a deal that has not worked out nearly as well as expected.”

And rugby’s at at a place where an offer of redemption versus eventual oblivion is on the table again, he believes. “In essence, Professional Rugby is a failure at the box-office and on the balance sheet,” he says, then goes on to describe how and why World Rugby and all the rugby playing nations are, basically, bankrupt.

It’s a great read:

http://billsrugbyblog.com/rugby-at-the-crossroads/

It’s a failing industry, is his point, so we have to ask why we believe it’s a good thing for schools to be justifying the way in which they are running their rugby programmes in terms of preparing boys for a future as professionals, working in that industry.

And you can add to that the story going around at the moment that South Africa’s rugby companies are looking to cut the numbers of professional players on their books by half.

So, equating school rugby programmes as a way of preparing boys for future careers with, say, teaching maths and science to potential engineers and technicians, is reckless and dishonest.

Tenda Mtwararira is the only current Springbok who has played more than 100 Tests. He made his debut in 2008 – a 10 year career at the top.

Of the other centurions, Victor Matfield went longest – 15 years. Jean de Villiers played for 13 years, Bryan Habana for 12, with Percy Montgomery and John Smit both having 11 year-long careers.

Matfield, of course, took a three year break in the middle. The point is that these extraordinary players were at the top of their careers for only roughly a decade.

And they are the only six, out of all the Springboks in their era. There are provincial and franchise players who last longer, but they earn less and, given the bigger numbers, the odds of making it at that level are even slimmer than for the Springboks.

So, to put dreams of World Cup glory in the heads of 16 year-old is fine, it’s part of the job, I guess. But don’t justify all the shenanigans that go in in schools rugby in terms of preparing boys for long and lucrative careers in the game.

No. Let’s face it, winning is the dominant value and there are schools that are prepared to go to all sorts of lengths to win games and appear at the top of the rankings.

We all know what those lengths are and among the most odious of them is the luring of players who are doing well where they are to your school. It happened last week – and here I confess to being a little partisan – when a grade 11 boy who had a decent Craven Week for the Golden Lions began school at a school that is in the Boland, but supplies players to the Western Province provincial teams.

There was no communication between the schools prior to his move and, I believe there’s an insistence that the school has not given him a bursary. Well, someone has paid to entice him to change schools for his matric year.

In spreading this story I’ve been given a variety of reasons why a player at a good rugby school would want to move after learning the game, along with friends of four years or longer, at the school he was at.

I don’t buy any of them, but the one that really is rubbish is the one that goes that he has a better chance of becoming a professional player if he attends a top school.

There’s a callous cruelty to knowingly making empty promises. Politicians do that, not educators.