The Toughest Team in Sports?
By Nicolas
Brulliard
(Wall Street Journal, 7/31/09)
South Africa’s rugby players
maul their way to the top; a punch in the scrum
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Just
before a recent game, South African rugby player Schalk
Burger stated his belief that a rugby match isn’t a rugby match unless it
“starts with a bang.”
After less than a minute of play, Mr.
Burger was sin-binned, or penalized, for what looked like an attempt to gouge
an opponent’s eyeballs.
Far from condemning the act that
earned Mr. Burger an eight-week ban, South Africa’s head coach Peter de Villiers suggested that the offended parties “go to the
nearest ballet shop, get some nice tutus and get a great dancing show going.”
South Africa’s Springboks, named after
the graceful and rather docile springbok gazelle, have run afoul of rugby laws
more often than most. But this team’s physical prowess and aggressive mindset
have helped put them at the pinnacle of the sport. The reigning World
Cup-champion Springboks have just vanquished some of the best British and Irish
players in the game, and last week beat New Zealand 28-19 in their first match
of the Tri-Nations, an annual rugby competition for southern hemisphere teams.
A victory in this tournament, which continues through Sept. 19, would cement
their place as the undisputed kings of rugby.
The Springboks have demonstrated their
toughness throughout the last century—sometimes playing with broken bones or
honing their skills by tackling large animals—but the origins of their physical
dominance can be traced back much farther.
In rugby, size matters, especially
when it comes to a team’s pack of forwards. Weight is an undeniable advantage
in a scrum, a fearsome tangle in which players fight for possession of the
ball. Height is a distinct plus in a lineout—where players leap high in the air
to receive a ball thrown back onto the field. South African rugby has long been
dominated by Afrikaners, a population group that has a seemingly endless supply
of large people.
“They’ve got some big old dudes, and
it’s always physical,” said Lee Mears, an English player, after a recent match.
“The South Africans pride themselves in the scrum, so they’re never going to
disappoint you in that area.”
Most observers explain Afrikaners’
oversized proportions with genetics. After all, they say, the first Europeans
to colonize the southern tip of the continent came from Holland, and the Dutch
are among the tallest people in the world.
Raj Ramesar,
professor of human genetics at the University of Cape Town, said there is
little scientific evidence available, but he said genetic selection likely
played a role as only the fittest and strongest specimens made the grueling
boat trip and later thrived in an environment plagued by disease and angry Zulu
warriors. A “sissy” would not have survived the hardships, Mr. Ramesar said.
Locals also credit arduous farm work
for enhancing their inherent physical attributes, and rarely did it get more
arduous than for Tiaan Strauss, who has represented
both the Springboks and Australia. Mr. Strauss, who played much of his career
before the game turned professional in the mid-1990s, said he used to make
extra money by capturing wildebeests and other large antelopes.
“Sometimes you tackle them, but mainly
you sort of catch them by the horn and wrestle them to the ground,” Mr. Strauss
said matter-of-factly.
Mr. Strauss said the activity, while
earning him cuts, bruises and the occasional shoulder injury and twisted ankle,
also helped condition him for the game.
Mr. Strauss’ feat was topped by that
of Andy MacDonald, who wore the Springbok jersey in the mid-1960s. Mr.
MacDonald was tracking a livestock-killing lion when the predator leapt on him,
and he was left fighting off the feline with his bare hands.
“The lion bit off part of Andy’s ear
and clawed his legs and lower body,” wrote South African rugby historian Paul
Dobson in an email. “Andy put one hand into the lion’s jaws and eventually the
lion left him.” Mr. MacDonald received more than 400 stitches, Mr. Dobson said.
While some display their toughness by
manhandling large beasts, others show their courage by staying on the field
after sustaining serious injuries. André Joubert
broke his hand in a tackle during the quarterfinals of the 1995 World Cup, yet
went on to play two more matches—this without taking any painkiller. Mr. Joubert said he suffered few long-term consequences other
than a shortened finger. “I had to change my golf grip a bit,” he said.
Rugby union, the most popular form of
the game, was popularized in the early 19th century. Played on a field roughly
the size of an American football field, 15 players on each side try to score by
carrying an oblong ball over the goal line or kicking it through the goalposts.
South Africa is one of about 100 national teams ranked by the International Rubgy Board. Every four years the top teams come together
to play in the World Cup, which South Africa has so far won twice, in 1995 and
2007.
As soon as the sport was imported to
South Africa by the English in the late 1800s, the Afrikaners quickly adopted
it as their own. They first saw it as a way to get
back at the British for humiliations suffered during the Boer War, but the game
became synonymous with Afrikaner nationalism during the apartheid era, said
John Nauright, director of the International Academy
of Sport at George Mason University.
As recently as 15 years ago, memories
of the Boer War’s internment camps still loomed large in the psyche of
Afrikaner rugby players, said Mark Andrews, a former Springbok forward.
“Whenever you played against England, it was brought up almost as a
motivational war cry that we have to avenge what the English did to our
forefathers,” said Mr. Andrews, who is of English descent. The historical reason was
lost on adversaries: “One guy actually said to me, ‘You guys play rugby like
you’re angry,’ ” he said.
The Springboks have harvested more
than their share of yellow and red cards, reflecting the difficulty for players
to walk the thin line between legal aggressiveness and rogue behavior. Since
2000, the Springboks have received 60 yellow cards and six red cards, while
their direct opponents collected only 25 yellow cards and three red ones,
according to the South African Rugby Union. Cards sanction both foul play and
technical offenses.
Some misdeeds are hard to defend. In a
game shortly after the team’s 1995 World Cup title, 6-foot-6-inch Kobus Wiese knocked out his 6-foot-10 Welsh opponent, Derwyn Jones, with a single punch. When asked about the
incident, Mr. Wiese first denied it ever took place before explaining that he
just retaliated after being hit. Mr. Jones remembers it quite differently: His
team was leading then, and Mr. Wiese saw an opportunity to destabilize the
opposition.
“It’s pathetic because it’s quite
clear that it was a punch from behind, and it was a cowardly punch,” said Mr.
Jones, who noted that he and Mr. Wiese now get along well. “He was a coward for
doing that.”
To be sure, the Springboks are not
always the guilty party. When they toured South Africa in 1974, the British and
Irish Lions’ captain had a secret call for his players to punch the nearest
Springbok. A 1993 game against an Argentinean side degenerated into a 30-man
brawl after a punch was thrown in a scrum.
“We were sort of ready for it, so all
hell broke lose and we had a big fight for about five minutes,” said Mr.
Strauss, captain of the Springboks at the time.
With youngsters starting to play rugby
while in primary school or earlier and a network of schools and academies
preparing them for the professional level, South Africa is assured of a steady
flow of talent in coming years, said Eric Sauls, who
has coached several junior Springbok squads.
For now, though, the task at hand for
the Springboks is to succeed in the Tri-Nations, which includes Australia and
its strong defensive play and New Zealand, which favors running the ball from
all parts of the field. South Africa has won the grueling competition only
twice in 13 years, but it believes it is now ready to take the trophy home.
Last week, by beating New Zealand, the
Springboks snatched back the No. 1 ranking back from the All Blacks. And the
two teams will play each other again Saturday.
“With the team that we’ve got, we’d be
naive to think that we shouldn’t aim to take the Tri-Nations and win it,” said
Springbok captain John Smit recently.