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The peculiar rugby relationship between New Zealand and South Africa

23rd January, 2015
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Brodie Retallick has been the victim of a number of concussions. (Source: AFP PHOTO / Michael Bradley)
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23rd January, 2015
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Rugby helped shape male identity in New Zealand. Perhaps due to the All Blacks’ sustained international success, it even shaped a national identity, the notion of ‘New Zealandness’.

Rugby has been called the Kiwis’ greatest religion.

When I visited in 2011, I was able to confirm this theory. Everywhere I went, I saw fields in good repair, and boys were playing the game, supervised or unsupervised, with great skill.

The colleges’ games were well attended, and everything about the national team – including Richie McCaw’s foot – was fully analysed.

From the moment we set foot in the Auckland airport until the night we left, we felt blessed rugby saturation. Admittedly, the World Cup was on, but from the time when miners and villagers first adopted the game, rugby has had a home in New Zealand.

In Greg McGee’s searing critique on the role of rugby in New Zealand, a local coach tells a player “This is a team game, son, and the town is the team. It’s the team’s honour at stake when the team plays, god knows there’s not much else around here.”

This continues. In 2011, we could easily join a match in small towns, the locals only needed to see a few basic telltale signs of skill. However, when the South African connection was realised, the welcome was total.

Apparently, spontaneous scrums tended to break out in Cairo streets or London pubs when South African and New Zealand troops met each other in World War Two.

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It is still that way. An able-bodied South African who meets a guy from New Zealand immediately starts looking for a way to test him. It was no different in the small towns between Auckland and Wellington.

It was if they recognised kindred spirits in rugby-mad South Africa. Every time an All Black is interviewed before a Test, I notice them commenting on how good it is to be in a rugby-obsessed culture, even if it is hostile.

But of course, the relationship between South African rugby and its counterpart in New Zealand has many levels of respect, enmity, political sacrifice and attack, as well as fables and folklore.

New Zealand was – and is – the most important rugby rival against whom South Africa could measure their prowess.

Thus, the withholding by New Zealand of rugby contests with the Springboks emerged as the most powerful leverage point in using sport – but most critically, rugby – as the fulcrum of change within the National Party’s infrastructure, attitude towards apartheid and encourage international re-engagement.

South Africa and New Zealand shared a common attribute. In both lands, they shirked off the power of the Crown with rugby shoulders, but in profoundly different ways.

Rugby was a crucial element in forging a national male identity, but in South Africa, this was almost exclusively a ‘white’ male identity.

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For both nations, rugby was not just a game.

At the core of the “hard way” that the All Blacks and Springboks play rugby was a passion to be better than, and separate from, the British.

Kiwis fought the Boers on behalf of the British just before the defining 1905 tour to the U.K. South Africa learned to love rugby in the midst of the Boer Wars.

In both places, rugby was essentially compulsory in schools for many decades.

In New Zealand, it is a fair question to ask if the national rugby union is stronger than the national ruling party.

Afrikaners in particular had much of that almost religious zeal towards rugby; but given the devout nature of Afrikaans people during most of the 20th century, we should say rugby was a ‘second religion’.

Dr Danie Craven talked about rugby as having a ‘sense of belongingness’. And this is an accurate way to put it.

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Both of these great rugby nations, who tended to own the first two ranks in world rugby for more than a century, were bound together in a rivalry that featured hard-fought tours, boxers as props, broken legs and noses, last-minute kicks to win or lose, and an abiding, but oft-tested love for each other.

But this marriage had always been unpopular in some parts, even as far back as the 1920s. New Zealand’s 1840 Treaty of Waitangi included Maori in the wider society. South Africa’s increasingly rigid race laws – especially after 1948 – collided with Kiwi sensibilities.

But for a long time, the two countries danced an odd dance. In 1921, the ‘Boks played the Maori All Blacks in New Zealand and won by a point. A South African reporter wrote he was “sickened” by white spectators cheering the Maori players.

And perhaps because that win was too close for comfort, and would have cut against apartheid theories, Maoris were excluded from selection on tours of South Africa for many succeeding decades.

In 1956, the country of New Zealand did not use protest as a weapon against the Boks. Rather, all Kiwis united in the goal of revenge for South Africa’s humiliating victory in 1949.

Indeed, for almost any Kiwi, almost the entire conception of South Africa was in a rugby context, and so it was for South Africans. Maybe wartime service would have been the second item they would have thought of each other.

In the sixties, the relationship became strained, to say the least. Anti-tour petitions and protests formed around the issue of Maori exclusion from tours (as Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd put it, “they have to abide by South Africa’s local custom.”

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South Africa was barred from the Olympics in 1964 and 1968, and then expelled in 1970. But truthfully, it was the prospect of not playing the All Blacks that drove more change than any other sporting exclusion. The cancelation of the 1967 All Black tour was an earthquake in South Africa’s rugby community.

Verwoerd was assasinated, and his successor, John Vorster (a former rugby boss in the Eastern Cape) allowed Maoris to tour South Africa in 1970.

New Zealand had its own concerns about the stain of the relationship with Springbok rugby. Was it worth risking membership in the Commonwealth Games? Was it good for New Zealand to sour relations with the other African countries?

Trade between New Zealand and South Africa was negligible in those days – rugby was the glue. Yet South Africa named one of its most senior diplomats, Peter Phillip, to serve as Consul-General, not in London, but in Wellington.

In rugby, South Africa was still a dominant political force as they remained a key member of the International Rugby Board. At least rugby was still alive. This only served to bestow rugby an ever more “mystical significance,” as Norman Middleton put it.

When the 1974 tour was cancelled, it sent a cold chill through South African rugby. The reformers worried that even modest change would be too late. The dead-enders dug in. But then the 1976 tour of South Africa by the All Blacks made it seem like the marriage was not on the rocks.

And then came 1981.

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A poll had it 49-42 per cent against the Boks coming to New Zealand, and the images of barbed wire fields and the cancellation of the Hamilton Test and the violent protests and police beatings brought the relationship to the edge.

We were shocked, watching it. I hoped it would help things get better, but I was amazed and embarrassed. And my New Zealand friends tell me they were so torn.

Until 1992 there were no official tours. How we missed the All Blacks and how this period eroded our skills. Doc Craven admitted it. It was obvious.

The 1986 Cavalier tour was not sufficient. We knew it was not the real thing. Test series between the two top teams had always been the unofficial championship.

With the possible exception of Wales, it was only in these two countries that rugby was culturally central.

The 1981 rupture was like an ugly divorce. Inside each country, there were sub-divides.

The relatively unexpected decision of F.W. de Klerk to reform rugby in South Africa, beyond token players or half-measures, and the subsequent (messy but needed) democratisation of the Rainbow Nation was a balm to the rugby faithful on both sides.

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When we old guys cherish the spectacles of the Ellis Park matches in 2013 and 2014, we are moved by much more than the rugby.

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