Three years ago in East London I discovered how hard it is to be Naas Botha. Naas and I had been contracted to speak at a beachfront bar 48 hours ahead of South Africa’s Test match against Canada: the biggest thing to happen in East London since — well, since the discovery of the coelacanth.
We arrived to find our chalk-drawn effigies on the blackboard normally reserved for the menu. Boots & All, Supersport’s rugby programme, was coming to East London and every lunatic and his friend wanted a piece of it. There must have been 800 people crammed into a bar that could comfortably hold half that number and intimate conversation was about as easy as eating soup with chopsticks.
Naturally, the sound system was inadequate: it had been created for guitar plucking crooners to provide wallpaper music to a sparsely populated room. I remember thinking that this must be how the Beatles felt at Shea Stadium, and why they never played live again after that demoralising experience.
Botha and I took our seats on a raised platform, said a few words, realised we were going to have to shout and quietly tore up the notes we had made back at the hotel. The demure discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian team, together with a few lumberjack jokes, had no place in this venue.
What struck me first of all was the abuse. Here was one of the finest sportsmen ever produced in South Africa and all people could do was swear at him. The room was filled with doppelgängers: people who had donned replica Springbok jerseys for the occasion and had left their brains in the same changing room.
An hour of scheduled chat was rapidly reduced to 20 minutes: the crowd couldn’t hear and didn’t care. For all the benefit they got out of having an icon in their midst, the crowd might just as well have burned him in effigy, as though he were the president of the United States.
Botha never lost his cool, signed everything thrust under his nose, and quietly left. It was only later that I worked out why he wasn’t as angry as I was: he was used to it. Botha gets that, or something very like it, every day of his life. He’s been getting it since Buhrman van Zyl picked him to play flyhalf for Northern Transvaal at the age of 19.
Like Lou Reed, Botha has done his growing up in public. He can’t walk down the street, go to a restaurant or fill his car with petrol without being recognised and, frequently, vilified. He’s heard every Blue Bulls joke a million times and these days he tells a few himself. Because he went straight from playing the game to talking about it, Botha is so familiar that everyone knows everything about him. Not.
Botha can deal with the daily abuse because he knows where he’s been, he knows where he’s going and he has the priceless ability to divide his public life from his personal life. It’s rather like the process of lining up a kick at goal: he sees the ball and the posts; the boos of the crowd only take place in a parallel universe.
Botha has often been cited as the first professional rugby player, despite the fact that his career was all over three years before the end of the amateur era. There’s no doubt that he made money out of the game (he wasn’t alone in that, of course), but he still sees a distinction.
‘I always wanted to be a professional sportsman,†he told me, ‘but I lived in an era when that was impossible. The closest I got was in America in 1983/84 when I played gridiron with the Dallas Cowboys. That stint affected my whole way of thinking and after that I always knew that I could fit in anywhere at any time.â€
Two years ago Botha and I happened to be changing planes together at Dallas airport. We stopped, as all tourists must, at the Dallas Cowboys shop and browsed through the souvenirs. If things had been different Botha’s visage might have been among the plastic player replicas and those who think that the buck-toothed boytjie from Pretoria couldn’t succeed in an English-speaking environment are wrong.
He had the misfortune to be hired as the back-up kicker to one of gridiron’s legends Rafael Septien. Tom Landry, the coach of the Cowboys for 29 turbulent years, hired Botha in case Septien broke down, but he hardly ever did in a stellar career and Botha had precious little game time.
In the end he turned back to rugby to get fit for the unlikely call up and played a season for the Dallas Harlequins. Naturally enough, that remains the only season that the club has ever won the national championship and when Botha returned on the Springbok tour of 2001 he was greeted like a returning god.
It is a South African trait to find fault in home-grown products; we are all too willing to believe that the New Zealanders and the Australians are biologically superior at sport. The bully-boys in replica shirts who breath brandewyn fumes over visiting tri-nations supporters have a confidence that is in reality paper thin. You have to leave South Africa to find out who the rest of the world rates. The rest of the world, you won’t be surprised to know, rates Botha rather more highly than many of his countrymen.
In Houston two years ago we went to watch the United States Eagles train ahead of their Test against the Springboks. In other countries in other circumstances we would have been regarded as spies and sent packing, but rugby is a minor sport in the US and the Eagles reward any visiting journalist with smiles, handshakes and an open mind.
We had only been standing on the touchline for two minutes when training came to a halt and the players marched toward us. The forwards were going to do some lineout drills on the adjoining field, but would Botha honour them with a kicking clinic? Of course he would.
He watched South African born scrumhalf Kevin Dalzell kick a few goals with the draw that comes naturally to side of the foot kickers and then asked him if it wouldn’t be more effective if he were to just kick the ball straight?
‘Easier said than doneâ€, said the look on Dalzell’s face. Five minutes later, thanks to an adjustment of six inches in the placing of his non-kicking foot, the ball was soaring through the uprights as straight as a clothes line. I know it happened because I was there.
I was also there at a succession of South African practises where Botha could only stand on the touchline and watch. Harry Viljoen felt that Botha was a negative influence because of the comments he made on Supersport about Springbok performances.
So Viljoen and his army of so-called experts would put the players through their paces and when the bus came to take everyone back to the team hotel, Louis Koen and Braam van Straaten would ask to stay behind to practise their goal kicking. Only when the bus was safely out of sight did the two wander over and ask Botha for help.
These are more enlightened times. Perhaps because he grew up operating the scoreboard at Loftus, one of the first calls Rudolf Straeuli made upon taking over from Viljoen as national coach, was to Botha. The dramatic improvement in the goal kicking of both André Pretorius and Butch James has much to do with Botha’s benign influence.
Despite his recent involvement, however, Botha likes to hold the game
at arm’s length. Just because he takes abuse in his stride doesn’t mean he encourages it. There have been times when he would have put the phone down on certain South African rugby administrators, but last year he listened and ended up as the manager of the South Africa Under 21 side that won the World Cup.
My abiding memory of the final against Australia at Ellis Park was the sight of Botha, standing on the 22m line waving frantically at the Baby Boks’ flyhalf, Francois Swart, who was waiting for a pass from a scrum 50m away. In a flagrant rule violation, Botha had dodged through security and was shouting at the top of his voice to his flyhalf ‘Kick it here!â€
Swart duly did just that, South Africa won the game and Botha lost his voice.
If the consequence of managing that team is to bring Botha closer to the sharp end of the game it will be of immeasurable benefit to South African rugby.
Botha has forgotten more about rugby than many of his critics will ever know. And through it all he remains a gentleman.