Sometimes rugby really is the winner

As an antidote to all the things I find abhorrent in the way school sport is going, I list some of the good things I've come across in my nearly finished book on what's wrong with the way we define winning.

Here I retell something I saw one Wednesday afternoon in Joburg

I tried to make a point of reporting on as wide a range of schools as possible in my Saturday Star School Sport days, and that meant trawling around on Wednesday afternoon for matches to go to. The top sports schools play their games on Saturdays and it was easy to cover them. They publicised their fixtures in advance and some of them even had PR and publicity departments who would keep us informed about what was going on. That didn’t apply to all schools and on some Wednesdays I would drive to the various schools in one part of town, hoping to stumble upon some action.

It was on one of those winter Wednesdays that I found myself at Roosevelt High School. They were playing Greenside in a Kudu league fixture. The Kudu league was created by those small schools when they found themselves, in a rugby sense, no longer able to compete with the bigger schools in terms of numbers. The Roosevelt vs Greenside encounter was once a massive local derby attracting bumper crowds, not any more, but at least, I thought, the game was surviving at the two schools.

There were only a handful of matches on the day, and the standard wasn’t as high as what you’ll see on a Saturday, but the field was in great condition, the players were neatly turned out and the games were evenly contested.

When the first teams ran out they were made up, as I’d expected, entirely of black players and there were some impressive physical specimens on both sides. Then the referee appeared and that’s when it became something special – she was a petite white woman with a shock of red hair.

I snapped a few photographs as the game got under way - that’s why I was there – but then I settled back and watched as the conventional rugby story was rewritten before my eyes. Those hulking young men accepted the decisions of the referee unconditionally, they were disciplined and polite and called her ma’am. The ref knew her stuff and was brilliant in her handling of the players. It was one of the best regulated games I’d seen for a long time and I can’t recall a single unsavoury moment.

Rugby is surviving at schools were the demographic makeup has radically changed. Black boys in Joburg do love the game and they can play it well. A woman can referee a mens game very well, and the intrinsic disciplines imposed by the letter and the spirit of the laws of the game are observed, no matter how different the players and the official may be to each other.

I can’t remember who won the match, but the game of rugby came out pretty well on the day. Don’t tell me it’s not a great educational activity.

No cricket this week, so Morgan's spending his birthday at home

 

If it wasn’t for Covid-19 I’d almost certainly be at the Khaya Majola cricket week today watching and reporting on the cream of our under-19 talent. It turned out not to be, which means I got to spend the week before Christmas at home, something I can’t remember doing for a very long time.

That’s one good thing I guess, and another one is that two of the giants of the week, Niels Momberg, CSA’s director of youth cricket, and Morgan Pillay, the permanent organising secretary of the tournament, won’t be working on their birthdays. It was Niels’ birthday on the 17^th and it’s Morgan’s today.

Ordinarily, they would have be at the festival this week, as they have been every year, for years. Let’s hope the year off will refresh them both and keep them coming back for more. The Khaya Majola Week is an extraordinary tournament, the jewel in the crown of school sport in this country, and having administrators like these two in charge of it makes it that.

Morgan is by 100 miles the best sports administrator I have come across in my 30 years of involvement in school sport. I told him that when I write my book one day he will be in it. Well, I’m on it, and here’s the bit on Morgan:  

I have attended the under-19 Khaya Majola Cricket Week (and its predecessor, the Nuffield Week) just about every year since 1989. At the 1994 week, hosted at Kearsney College I met a young teacher from Pietermaritzburg, Morgan Pillay. He was on the local organising committee, tasked with keeping track of the state of play in the various matches being played around the area, so he worked quite closely with the media who were there. It was the beginning of a friendship which has gone on for 30 years now and in that time I watched Morgan grow into the best sports administrator I have ever come across and one of the most valuable people in schools cricket in the country.

He has been the permanent organising secretary of the Khaya Majola Week since 1996. It’s an honorary position – he doesn’t get paid anything more than expenses for doing it – and he has kept his real job as a mathematics teacher all along. The tournament is just a week long, but organising it is an all-year affair, so it’s amazing that he has found the time to do it for so many years.

 He has fine-tuned the running of the event over the years to the extent that it runs like clockwork now. The wheel isn’t re-invented every year. Morgan’s personality and his unique style of leadership – he is incredibly demanding, but makes those demands with so much charm that it’s impossible to say no – is what makes it work. 

Morgan’s birthday, December 18th, always falls slap bang in the middle of the week, so he’s never home for it. He says it’s tough being away from home, but then he does get to spend his birthday every year surrounded by great friends and in the service of the youth.

Happy birthday Morgan Pillay – a sports administrator who is in it for the right reasons, as is Niels Momberg. Oh that there were more of them in cricket!

The real lessons to be learnt

Here’s something I wrote early last year. It’s the next in my list of things to think about in a year when there has been no real school sport

 

Good men, not good players. That's what it's really all about

I, like many I guess, didn’t know why the running out of Jos Buttler at the bowler's end by Ravi Ashwin in the Indian Premier League recently is called a “mankad”.

So, I Googled it, and found out that this type of dismissal was named after Indian bowler Vinoo Mankad, who dismissed Australia’s Bill Brown in this fashion during the second Test in Sydney in 1947. It was the second time he got Brown out in that way on that tour and it caused a mighty uproar. The name stuck after that.

I’d never heard the term before, although I have come across incidents where backing up batsmen have been warned by the bowler for stealing a few yards and I always thought the laws of the game required that to happen before the batsman could be dismissed in this way.

It turns out that there’s nothing in the laws, or in the MCC guidance notes on the Spirit of Cricket, saying that there has to be a warning, so the dismissal in the IPL was perfectly legal and that’s the end of it.

It’s not really the end of it though, is it? Cricket, in particular, is a game that teaches life lessons all over the place, that’s why it’s such a good sport to play in schools.

The expression “it’s just not cricket” is what that’s all about and although it may be an old-fashioned concept with a bit of a paternalistic, colonial tint to it, the principles behind it are not.

It means just what the mankad debate is all about – sometimes the right thing to do is not governed by the laws, but it is the right thing to do. If you don’t do it it’s, well, just not cricket.

Cricket’s a good game for teaching values to children, but any game will do the same, it all depends on the way it’s coached and managed.

I firmly believe that the real reason we include sport in the school curriculum is to develop the young people involved into good human beings who can go out into the world one day and make a positive contribution.

It may be that they do that as professional players, but that’s incidental, that’s not the reason why we run sporting programmes at schools.

Any teacher or coach responsible for the running of a school sport programme who doesn’t have in mind that the most important task is to teach children to behave honourably and according to the values and ethics that are included in both the laws of the game and the ephemeral “spirit of the game” is not, in my opinion, doing his or her job.

And a cricket coach who teaches a bowler to mankad a batsman, or for that matter, tells a batsman that it’s OK to steal a yard backing up because there’s no chance that he will be mankaded, should be fired.

Let’s send young people out into the world who do good because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s just not cricket to do otherwise.

Can I add an example from the weekend past that, for me illustrates what I’m talking about?

 I was sent a copy of an e-mail to the principal of a school congratulating his boys on their behaviour at an airport on their way back from one of the weekend rugby festivals. I won’t say which school but the name wouldn’t surprise anyone who, like me, spends a lot of time among schoolboys in Joburg.

The players, just hours after what must have been a devastating, narrow defeat that afternoon, sprung to the assistance of two different mothers struggling with babies, prams and bulky luggage in the strong wind, and cheerfully saw them on and off the plane and onto the airport bus.

There were no real losers in that team – they have been taught, and they have learnt, the more important lessons that, in this case, rugby is meant to teach.

 

A different Top 10 this year

It’s the first week of December and this is the time, in other years, when in my newspaper days I use to publish my list of top school sport achievements of the year. I carried on the practice once I’d left the papers – putting it out as a blog once the sporting year had ended.

Well, there was no sport for most of 2020, and now that the kids are slowly beginning to go out into the fresh air again, I think many of us have been forced to relook at our priorities and think about what the real role of sport at school should be. Is it really about winning matches in the short term? What do you lose along the way when you have that attitude? And won’t it be great to be playing competitive games again, win or lose?

So, no list of achievements this year but why not a list of the top things we should be doing to get back to values-driven, educationally based practices in school sport? What are the things we should do to make developing young people our goal, through the medium of sport? How can we call ourselves winners, even when our teams and individual athletes lose?

All of that is exactly what I’ve been on about for the last 30-odd years and, being a scribbler of words by profession and hobby, I’ve written enough to bore a battalion on the things I’ve seen and liked, and those that make me mad.

So, I’m going to bore you some more with 10 previous pieces. Publishing a collection of old columns and blogs is quite a common practice. I swore that when I finally write that book I’ve been threatening I wouldn’t do that. But this isn’t a book, and I’m embarking on the exercise, as always, mainly for the relief of my own boredom, especially this year when the SA Schools water polo tournament won’t be ending in Cape Town this week as it was scheduled to, and the Khaya Majola Week isn’t starting on Monday.  

Here’s the first of 10, written for the Saturday Star in 2015

1 The little things make the biggest difference

There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I used to cover provincial swimming. It mainly involved going to the national aquatic championships each year and something happened at one of those that came to mind while dealing with the reaction to my chirp last week about the ranking of the top schools in Africa.

In those days the nationals would conclude with a compulsory formal dinner attended by all the swimmers and at which prizes were handed out.

There was a donated trophy for the winner of every championship race. I’m not sure that they still have those cups, but I do know they no longer have that presentation dinner: a combination of rising costs and the poor behaviour of the swimmers, schoolkids, mostly, who tended to drink too much on a night when the tension of all that training and competition was lifted, put paid to that.

It was tradition for all the competitors to wear their “number ones” to the dinner – provincial blazer and tie for the boys, skirt and blazer for the girls, including green-and-gold blazers for those with national colours.

I sat there watching swimmer after swimmer go up to collect their trophies, without a single one bothering to collect their blazers from the chairs they had draped them over before meeting the dignitary making the presentation – not even those fabulous green-and-gold ones that they probably didn’t get much opportunity to wear.

Then, at a table next to ours, a young man heard his name being called out, donned his then-Northern Transvaal blazer, neatly buttoned it up, straightened his tie and went up to have his hand shaken. I had to ask when he came back: “What school are you at?” His reply: “Pretoria Boys’ High.”

It doesn't sound like a big deal, I guess, but looking back, the incident epitomises the sorts of things schools like that insist on. It was Pretoria Boys’ High that time, but it could have been any one of a number of the traditional schools I have interacted with over the years.

It’s an insistence on doing the basics right, and it plays a big part in the success those schools enjoy in everything they do.

I’ll give you another example. I was asked a couple of years ago by SA Rugby to take a former Australian international player to visit a local rugby school. He was a retired teacher over here to watch the Wallabies, and he wanted to get a feel for local education and schools rugby.

So I arranged for him to visit Jeppe High School for Boys. His wife, also a teacher all her life, came with us, and on the way back to their hotel much later she expressed her amazement that every schoolboy she came across throughout the day had a polite “good morning, ma’am” for her. You don’t get that at Australian schools, she told me.

It’s an educational version of the “broken window” policy at work – take care of the little things and the big ones will take care of themselves..

Pupils who take pride in their appearance and who have had the importance of good manners drilled into them will find it easier to do what’s required to succeed on the sports field, in the classroom, and in every aspect of  life.

It ought to be one of the categories that are evaluated when they draw up those “top school” rankings.

“Are the pupils neatly dressed and do they greet you?” Discover a school where you find that and, I’d wager, they do most of the other things properly too.

Next time: don't be arrogant, nothing lasts forever.