According to the report in the Teacher of October 2003 with the headline ‘Shaking up rugby’s racist roots”, black youngsters are being encouraged to take up the game.
Funny world, this.
I saw to it that I kept my four (white) sons out of rugby altogether — for their own good.
During the six years that my two youngest sons attended one of the foremost Afrikaans secondary schools in our city, five or six youngsters had their necks broken or severely injured. One lad is permanently and irreversibly paralysed from the neck down.
During the past rugby season, a boy died in a rugby match in Welkom; a muscular Argentinian player had his neck broken in the Free State Stadium; and a member of a visiting Western Cape schools team suffered such severe skull injuries that doctors feared for his life. And that is just what I heard in passing about rugby devastation in this province.
Then there are the mostly unreported broken pelvises, legs, arms, ribs; and the torn and stretched muscles and ligaments that keep many physiotherapists in business.
Obviously people get injured and even killed in other sports, but then it’s usually because of accidents or fouls. In rugby, you can be broken into pieces while everybody sticks to the rules.
Louis van Ryneveld
Bloemfontein