Springboks’ Rugby World Cup win shows anything is possible

The original Springboks team to win the Rugby World Cup in 1995, had only one black player, Chester Williams.

South Africa captain Siya Kolisi celebrates with his team and the Rugby World Cup trophy after their victory over England in Yokohama. Picture: Getty Images

There was a time when Bryan ­Habana sounded as much like a Springbok winger to South Africans as Barack Obama did to Americans when they were pondering who could become president.

It was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel prize winner, who came up with the name “Rainbow Nation” to describe his native South Africa, perhaps overlooking the fact that the one colour conspicuously missing from a rainbow is black. Certainly when it came to the Springboks, traditionally the symbol of white supremacy in that troubled country, black was an easy colour to overlook.

The original Springboks team to win the Rugby World Cup in 1995, the one Nelson Mandela chose to honour by wearing the green No 6 jersey to mirror the South African captain, Francois Pienaar, had only one black player, Chester Williams. Or, as they chose to put it more discretely, one “person of colour”. Mandela was always a showman, a man who recognised the power of imagery, but he went way out on a limb that day by endorsing a rugby team that black South Africa traditionally had always hated.

A young lad at the time, Siya Kolisi has vague memories of that long-ago final against the All Blacks. He thinks he might have watched it in a Port Elizabeth tavern because his family didn’t own a television set. He was four at the time, and sorting out his own genuine recollections from all those iconic images seen replayed on television so many times down the years does his head in. But even the four-year-old recognised that something momentous was taking place.

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By the time the Springboks made their next World Cup final, in 2007, there were six persons of colour in the squad. Two of them played in the final, Habana and JP Pietersen.

“When I named six black players in the squad, everyone knew they were there firmly on merit,” insisted the Springboks coach of the time, Jake White in his aptly ­titled autobiography In Black and White. “Peace had broken out in South African rugby. It was an unfamiliar feeling but a huge relief, nonetheless.”

If it was peace, it was an unruly, volatile peace. As much as White supported the quota system and the political objectives of transformation, there were many times when he was criticised for weakening his side by selecting a black player over a white. Ironically, however, his greatest trial came when he was threatened with losing his job if he did not select a white player whose family was very well connected with the African National Congress hierarchy, Luke Watson.

Even when White considered the black players selected were the worthiest he could find, imagine the disdain with which it was ­received by the white community. And in the final analysis, with it all on the line in the World Cup final, he chose 20 whites and two blacks.

On Saturday night, there were six players of colour in the Springboks starting side: the two wingers, Cheslin Kolbe and Makazole Mapimpi, centre Lukhanyo Am, two front-rowers in The Beast, Tendai Mtawarira and Bongi Mbonambi and the man in the middle wearing the same “6” jersey that Pienaar and Mandela had made famous, the now 28-year-old South African captain, Kolisi.

There was talk – pure, dispassionate rugby talk – that the best thing Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus could do was drop ­Kolisi to the bench and install Francois Louw in the final, to counter the threat of England’s “kamikaze kids”, backrowers Tom Curry and Sam Underhill at the breakdown. There were also coded references to the fact the ­reserve Springbok hooker Malcolm Marx was way superior to the starting No 2, Mbonambi.

Erasmus chose to ignore those suggestions and it all worked out brilliantly on the night, for the individual players, for the Springboks and for the entire South African nation. Perhaps had circumstances not worked out as they did on the field, he might have been subjected to far more difficult questioning at his post-match press conference.

Yet if the coach was under any strain, real or imagined, he chose to ignore it. When asked about it, he deftly responded by reaching into the Keith Miller handbook, and pulling out the response the great allrounder once gave when asked by Michael Parkinson about the pressure of playing cricket for Australia: “Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, playing cricket is not,” said the wartime fighter pilot. Erasmus responded in similar vein.

“We talked about what pressure is,” he explained. “In South Africa, pressure is not having a job. Pressure is one of your close relatives being murdered. There are a lot of problems in South Africa, which are real pressure. Rugby shouldn’t be something that creates pressure, rugby should be something that creates hope.”

That is what Kolisi and Erasmus and the entire Springboks side, black and white and coloured, created on Saturday night – hope.

There will always be criticism of quotas, whether the quotas be introduced to raise the number of women in the parliament or to create employment opportunities for minority groups. And there will ­always be controversy over them. Why have so many white South Africans, cricketers as well as rugby players, taken to living abroad rather than run the risk of being replaced by someone they consider to be inferior? It is always easy to be virtuous until it is you who is tapped on the shoulder.

But as the Springboks’ victory over an England side that a week ago defeated the All Blacks ultimately proved, the quotas are working. South Africa are well on their way to a 50-50 racial split by the time of the 2023 World Cup in France. That’s not the actual racial breakdown of the South African population, by the way. It’s anything but 50-50.

It’s a story often told but it bears repeating – how a former Australian Rugby Union board member George Pippos of Queensland was visiting South Africa in the dying days of the apartheid era, and asked FW de Klerk, the then president of the republic, how many whites were in the country.

“About four million,” replied the man who shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.

“How many blacks?” Pippos inquired.

“About 28 million.”

Pippos let out a gasp. “Jeez, you’re f-----”

That was how the thinking went back in those days. An Australian prime minister was asked around that time how he thought the South African situation would resolve itself. He considered the question thoughtfully, looking down his long nose, before replying: “Ten million dead.”

That hasn’t happened, principally because of the statesmanship of Mandela and de Klerk, right from the start. Yet the possibility that it could all end in violence ­remains in the background.

But when things happen like South Africa winning the Rugby World Cup, when — as Kolisi put it — everyone in the country works together, anything becomes possible.

Even peace.