Naas Botha speaks to Julia Beffon about life a decade after his last Currie Cup final
Ten years ago Naas Botha played in his last Currie Cup final, leading his Northern Transvaal team to victory over Transvaal. That 1991 victory was his seventh, with two more shared titles, in a remarkable 16-year career that saw the blond flyhalf contest 12 Currie Cup finals.
His rule in the provincial and national number 10 jersey coincided with the isolation era he played just 28 Tests when the All Blacks were called the Cavaliers and the Currie Cup was king.
Provincialism was the name of the game and the man who was “Naas the Baas” in Pretoria was derided in other centres. Only Percy Montgomery in recent memory has so divided public opinion, been the man rugby-mad South Africans love to hate.
Saturday’s final between Western Province and the Sharks is likely to be one of the few Currie Cup matches this season that attracts a huge crowd. But Botha disagrees that the competition that used to be the Holy Grail of South African rugby has been devalued by the Super 12.
“We really need to look at them as two separate competitions. Super 12 is more of a regional competition, whereas the Currie Cup is more like the old tradition, more of a home-town scenario. It’s about local players even now with the professional era where you’re born, and so on.”
“The Super 12 should be at a higher level if it’s not then there’s a problem with the Super 12. If you look at the Currie Cup and the Super 12, it’s two different standards.”
He would like to see the season restructured, and a return to strength versus strength to raise the local standard. “We need a Currie Cup of six teams maybe stretch it to eight. The other teams can still play in the B section and have a system of relegation. The four better teams should form the nucleus of the Super 12 teams. There should always be something to play for and at the moment [in the early round of the Currie Cup] we are just playing.
“In each of the past couple of seasons one of the lesser-known teams has beaten one of the better teams without its Springboks and they say ‘I told you, the structure works!’ But if the better team plays with all its players, it will always win.”
He gives the South African Rugby Football Union credit for looking at how to reorder the season, and the man who famously claimed “the Currie Cup is not won in May”, now believes maybe it should be.
“We must start the season with the Currie Cup and then go into the Super 12 and then the end-of-year international tour. If we start with the Currie Cup we could see which younger players are coming through and are playing well. At the moment we’re starting with one of the better competitions in world rugby and we can’t really introduce younger players because you don’t know if they’re going to deliver and it’s all about winning.”
(Botha seems to have forgotten a certain 19-year-old who was put into the Bulls side in 1977 before he had played a game of club rugby …)
The restructuring should not extend to dismantling the traditional teams, however. “You must remember rugby is a religion in South Africa. Don’t stuff around with religion you see what’s happening now in the world!”
These days he’s still in the public eye as co-host of Boots & All, and he provides pre- and post-match expert television commentary on most international and provincial matches.
The Botha of old has mellowed, the defensiveness that often expressed itself in petulance has all but disappeared. The 43-year-old model Naas revels in his television career and his life away from the field. When we meet at the Supersport offices in Randburg he is on his cellphone organising yet another celebrity golf day, and he and his wife, former long-jump champion Karen Kruger, are often called on to lend their famous names to charitable causes.
The Blue Bull also displays a new shade of green: “The only sad thing for me about life is that we’re destroying our own planet. Who’s killing everything in the sea? Us. Who’s killing each other? Us. We should look after this place.”
Botha shows none of the bitterness of many players from his era about missing out on the financial windfalls of full professionalism.
“I had my chance, I used it and I loved it. I loved every second of it. When I went to the Dallas Cowboys in 1983/84 I experienced what it is to be a professional player and in my last six years I shared my time between South Africa and Italy … you can’t really get closer to a professional than that.
“I’m a great believer that the guys who are playing well should make millions but the guys who don’t play well shouldn’t make a cent out of it. There’re too many guys [playing now] making a bundle of money who don’t really deserve it.
“We don’t have 300 professional players I don’t think any country does. We should have professional players and semi-professionals and the semi-professional would have to play really well to become pro and get paid. At the moment we just pay.”
In the years since he retired rugby has undergone many upheavals, from professionalism to a switch to more of a running game. Botha does not think that much has changed.
“When I was playing we also played around 40 games a season club and provincial. People say now it’s a harder and tougher game. That might be so, but the players are more physically prepared for the kind of game they’re playing today. Nutrition plays a major part. We had steak and chips before games and you can’t get more wrong than that.”
What he does rue is the decline in basic skills in South African rugby, and blames this for many on-field injuries. “If you don’t have the skill, you’ll always have contact and if you have the skill you don’t have to take half the contact. Week in and week out we see guys getting tackled because they don’t have the skill to get the ball away and put another player in a better position.”
The Bulls were famed for their 10-man rugby. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was enormously effective and Botha says the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
“A number of coaches tried to change the game, but there are a number of things you need to do first. When you’re under pressure you need to kick well. I don’t understand why people say the game has changed so drastically. A number of the rules have changed, to try and make it more attractive, but it isn’t a different ball game. A lot of coaches tried to make it more like rugby league and a lot of basic skill went out the window and now they’re trying to rectify that problem. Now, suddenly, tactical kicking is back.”
Botha’s kicking was a god-given talent, but he honed those skills by practising for hours daily a chore scorned by many modern flyhalves. “They’re professional, they think like professionals and I can’t say that if you think like a professional you’re wrong, can I?” he laughs.
The condition of the once-mighty Bulls is no laughing matter, however. “Things started going wrong in about 1992/93. There were people in there who were not there for the game, they were there for themselves. They should never have allowed it to hit rock bottom. It was bad management, or at least bad decision-making. As the old saying goes, ‘n vis vrot van sy kop af [a fish rots from the head down]. There were too many bad decisions. They were too worried about losing power.”
The newer, relaxed Botha can still offer the olive branch, though. “I played for them for 17 years and I still live in Pretoria, so why should I turn my back on them now?”
Botha was dragged into the limelight when he was asked to kick a rugby ball into the Big Brother property. The ball was to be signed by the housemates and auctioned for charity, but the action backfired when the housemates wanted to keep the ball.
He blames the organisers for making a bad call on that issue but finds the public’s response to the show fascinating. “On a psychological level it’s very interesting and on a marketing side even more interesting I think it’s more interesting than we thought it might be. But if I put myself in that situation … I might have survived a week and then I would have drop-kicked somebody.”
With quality pivots in such short supply in South Africa at the moment, Springbok coach Harry Viljoen probably wishes he too could call on that trusty boot.