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.

Agents keep out!

I was quick to pitch my two cents worth into a Twitter discussion this week on agents and schoolboy rugby players. My initial reaction, without really knowing what it was all about, I admit, was that I have never been so afraid in my life.

I’ve tried since then to find out a bit more about what’s going on, and although I still don’t think I’ve got the full picture, I’m still horrified to hear what’s going on, and that there are people debating how best to use talented 18 year-old rugby players as a source of income, for schools and rugby player agents.

I got to hear about it – as is often the case when it comes to what’s really going on behind the scenes – via the online content of colleague and friend, ruggas.co.za.

He posted an excellent piece about something I was not aware of: World Rugby has a regulation that says a “development fee” must be paid when players between the ages of 17 and 23 are transferred between clubs. It stipulates that 5 000 pounds per year that the player was developed by his previous club must go to them in compensation for his being whisked away as an already developed player. That’s a lot of money and the intention is clearly to encourage clubs to develop their own players, not to poach them after others have done that job.

Starting to ring bells?

SA Rugby, which is obliged to follow World Rugby’s rules, has introduced a more thrifty version. When a player is recruited out of school, R1 000 per year must be paid (for a 1^st XV player), R3 000 for one who has played in the Grant Khomo Week, R5 000 for a Craven Week player and R10 000 for an SA Schools player. It’s happening, Ruggas says, but the problem is that the money is going to the provincial unions, not to the schools that actually spotted and developed the players.

If the money went to the school, and was allocated according to the number of years that the player attended the school, it could encourage schools to develop their own talent, not buy it in only in the senior years.

Read the piece - http://www.talk.ruggas.co.za/?p=1153 – it’s illuminating.

The debate this week followed a suggestion that schools should employ agents who would, as I understand it, have the sole mandate over their players and would split the profits made out of getting them contracts with the school. That money can be used to further improve the school’s rugby programme and, it’s suggested, for bursaries to drive transformation.

As I said, I don’t fully understand the financial and legal arrangements and implications, but I can see how, if the World Rugby development fee rule is followed, and given that it will be in the agent’s interest to retain “his” talented players, this can be a disincentive to poaching.

I’m not sure I understand it, but I am certain that I don’t buy it. We are talking about 18 year-old children, remember, and the process starts much earlier. Some say, unbelievably, that there is even “contracting” of players at 12 years of age when they leave primary school. I know that the grade seven year is a major shopping window for rugby bursary-offering high schools.

The answer is simple – keep away and leave the schoolboys alone! Let them leave school, then start treating them like professionals. The “head start” that our excellent school rugby setup is supposed to give us is proving to be myth – if you look at the SA Schools and national under-20 team results – so stop justifying these obviously uneducational and unethical practices in terms of that.

Schools do need money to develop players, especially players from disadvantaged backgrounds, but that should be the responsibility of the sports and education departments. When we start seeing the professionalisation of child players as a source of funding, we are in deep trouble. The best schoolboy coaches teach rugby skills and techniques, but they also want the boys they coach to become good human beings. They don’t need potential earnings and income for the school to be part of that. That isn’t what sport at school is there for.

Quotas and affirmative action are not the same thing

Affirmative action is necessary and justified. It’s accepted as a valid way of giving those who never got the opportunity to reach their potential, unjustly, a chance to make up the shortfall and compete on an equal footing with those who were given every chance to develop.

And in apartheid South Africa, the injustices done weren’t limited to the exclusion of individuals, they were there in everything required by a developing athlete – the education system, coaching, fields and equipment, nutrition and medical support etc.

To expect players from that kind of background to organically come through the ranks simply because those practices are no longer legal, was never going to happen.

So, affirmative action (AA) was applied in sport, and in other areas like employment law, and it was the right thing to do.

Let’s clarify what affirmative action is supposed to mean. In the classical sense, it's about identifying potential in places that have been overlooked in the past and then, as the words imply, taking actions which affirm that potential so that the previously disadvantaged individual has every chance of making it to the top.

Quotas, on the other hand, are something else entirely. In the SA sports selection context, they are there to make it compulsory to include a specified number of players who are not white in a particular team.

Affirmative action is about potential and growth. Quotas are about selection and reward. Sure, selection is part of AA: when faced with two players of equal ability, you are justified in choosing the disadvantaged one, and you are even in your rights to choose a player of lower ability, if you believe he has potential, but has been denied the opportunity to develop to that level.

Eventually, if everyone is doing their job properly, it shouldn’t be necessary to impose a quota at higher representative levels. The players who have been on the AA programme will be able to make teams on their own merits.

And that’s happening all the time. The examples at Protea cricket and Springbok rugby level are obvious. The stars of those teams are not the white players, most of the time. Now not all of those players went through the AA process. Some are from wealthy middle class families where their parents did what was required to let them thrive, others were from poor families where great sacrifices were made to help them succeed. In other words, they were just talented sportsmen who, like everyone else, put in the work, got the support and deserve the rewards.

But that isn’t always the case and many others have made it to the top because they got help along the way in terms of bursaries, extra coaching and, yes, selection above white players who were better than them at that moment.

The problem is that the keyboard warriors on social media, and some others in the wider community, very often regard all black players as quota players and all quota players as undeserving of their selection.

I heard a strange confirmation of that equation on the radio the other day when a professor, advocating for justice in cricket said “the way they play these days you’d think the white players in the Protea team are the quota players.”

People who believe that are accused of being racist, and they generally are. If AA has been implemented properly it should never be an issue – the black players are there on merit, either because they were good enough all along or because they were brought up to speed through an accelerated development programme, which is what AA demands.

But, if the players of colour are there simply to fill the quota and keep the suits happy, and they haven’t been brought along properly, we shouldn’t accept it. And, if they then can’t do the job, then those who are running the show must take the flak.