Angella Johnson: VIEW FROM A BROAD
`You’re going to train with the Springboks? Lucky cow!” was the general outcry when I told a group of female friends over lunch that I was spending a day with the national rugby team.
Some of them (the white ones, that is) wiggled pleasurably in their seats. “Oooh, that Percy Montgomery is divine. And sooo gorgeous,” gushed a redhead, who should be old enough to know better.
“I want Stefan Terblanche’s autograph,” cried another. “Did you see his four tries against Ireland? Imagine being surrounded by all that testosterone and male power.”
Ah well, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
I had wanted to get up close and personal with the team. You know, bending down in a scrum and sticking my hand up someone’s nether region (it’s a power thing, OK). But the team’s public relations man Alex Broun, a pleasant Australian who wears gold Calvin Klein sunglasses, had other ideas.
“I think you’d be rather distracting,” he piped. “They’re in the middle of a test series and need to stay focused. In any case, I can’t see you doing tackles with the lads. Can you?” (I imagined myself being flattened by a 95kg boulder like James Dalton.)
Er, maybe I could just do some light stuff – like catch a ball or two during the outdoor session. Then we could go to the gym and pump iron together afterwards. (I wondered if they would let me in the showers.)
Broun acquiesced and I arrived at the training ground at St John’s College in Houghton, Johannesburg, at 10am on a Monday morning, ready to grapple with the mighty Boks,
There they were in the distance, a sea of beefy bods chasing an odd-shaped ball and beating the shit out of each other (well that’s what it looked like to me). Broun called it drilling and warned that it would intensify as the three-hour session progressed.
I was pumped. Eager and anxious to take my place with the team, to show them what I was capable of. Hey boys look at me! I grabbed a ball and started my session hoping to impress them enough so they would let me join in.
First I had to get the hang of the oblong ball which was surprisingly light. “You’re a natural,” proclaimed a member of the coaching staff when I artfully kicked it into the air.
It took only three tries (excuse the pun) before I booted the ball over the post. Goal!, I squealed. Erm, that’s apparently a conversion. Which so impressed Bok technical advisor Jake White that he declared me a contender for the first South African women’s rugby team.
You mean women really do play this game? I asked. “Australia and the US were in the world finals recently,” he said.
But I want to play with the boys, I cried silently, and looked across to see if the Bokkies had spotted my potential.
No such luck. They were too busy grappling each other. Well, just have to work harder. Let me do a tackle, I pleaded with the support staff. Broun showed me how it was done.
Basically you lunge at a 1,5m free-standing punch bag as though your life depended on it and wrestle it to the ground. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, let out a huge roar and thought of the guy who cut me up on the road the other day.
Ouch! I came down with a spectacular bump clutching my right mammary, which in my enthusiasm had been unceremoniously crunched. It stung like the dickens – for you guys out there, that’s like getting a swift one in the cojones.
“You’d probably need to strap them down out of the way,” suggested Broun sheepishly. (Sounds just as painful if you ask me.) “Women who play tend to be flat-chested.”
I looked across to see if any of the Bokkies had witnessed my humiliation. The green and orange clad figures were engrossed in a melee (it still looked like they were beating the crap out of each other).
Yipes! What was I thinking? This kind of male power I would much rather watch on TV.
Fortunately, coach Nick Mallet (God bless him) was not about to let a girl interrupt his training session. Apparently the team did not do well in their last match.
Pardon my stupidity, but didn’t they win? I later asked Mallet.
“Yeah, but they didn’t play aggressively enough. There’s a fine line between violence and aggression. I’m not sure they understood it out there on the day, so they held back.”
Mallet certainly had the dictionary out this time, as he barked orders to the team like Genghis Khan preparing his Mongols for a particularly nasty scrap. “Knock it, don’t caress it,” he bellowed at Dalton, who then rushed a huge tackle bag as if it was lunch he had to catch and kill.
The bag (the same one that walloped my right breast) was propelled about 1,5m. “That’s it, you’ve gotta put your arms around it and hug it,” screamed Mallet in a booming voice. “Work it hard. I wanna see more aggression.”
I had by now given up any dreams I had of impressing either Mallet or his team and stood transfixed on the sidelines watching the action. It was pretty awesome stuff. I felt privileged to be so close to what amounted to a national treasure.
But as for the shower thing, forget it! These sports stars were kids. Pumped up into huge playing machines with Arnold Schwarzenegger bodies and the heads of little boys sticking on top.
Between them they could not squeeze out enough sex appeal to fill a teaspoon. But then again I’m in the geriatric bracket when compared to their average age of 25 years.
Heck, the gangling Ireland match hero Terblanche even wore steel braces in his mouth – seems he got hit with a cricket ball. They made him look a little goofy and like he should be in the ninth grade.
I was on the lookout for Montgomery, or Monty as the 22-year-old fullback is affectionately known. For those of you non- rugger lovers, he’s the big blonde thing who strips down to his smile in a popular television advert.
I’m sorry to have to report that those blonde tresses were artfully created by some expensive stylist. Come to think of it, young Monty himself is something of a blank canvass – just waiting to be painted on.
He and Terblanche were persuaded to help me with my weight training in the gym. We talked about girls – you know the kind of stuff young lads banter about. “It’s hard to have a relationship when you’re on the road so often,” explained Monty.
“Many of the guys have steady relationships from school and a couple are married, but the ladies have to be very understanding or things just don’t work out.”
As was amply demonstrated by the desolate look on Mark Andrews’s face. The lock had been dumped by his girlfriend four days earlier. “You could say I met her through rugby and lost her because of it,” he stated enigmatically, then walked away.
At the end of the day I felt a little more knowledgeable about the game. But was no closer to understanding what made the players tick. Actually, they largely ignored me.
This was not female territory. I had intruded on the sacred inner male sanctum and it made them uncomfortable. This was no place for a woman – and certainly not a grown-up one. I decided to skip the showers after all.