Os du Randt is worried about his weight. Not because his wife is chirping him, or because his back is sore, or because he can’t get into fashionable clothes anymore. He’s worried about his weight because this is a World Cup year and, ”if my chance does come I want to make sure I’m not too heavy to take it”.
For the record he’s currently 126kg, which is actually 4kg lighter than he was when he played his last game for South Africa at the 1999 World Cup, and just 1kg heavier than he was at the 1995 World Cup. But when he made his Springbok debut in 1994 he was 114kg and you get the feeling that that’s where he wants to get to again.
He was always big. Jacobus Petrus became ”Os” at the age of 14, when one of those rites of passage ceremonies that still litter the game at all levels failed to get out of hand. The first team was supposed to hold him down and shave an area rather more delicate than his lantern jaw. They couldn’t keep him down because he was too strong. As strong as an ox, in fact.
The legend of Os began at Adelaide Gymnasium, about 150km from his hometown of Elliot in the Eastern Cape, and first showed itself to the television viewing public at the 1988 Craven Week in Durban. He played for North Eastern Cape against Stellaland and made his presence known from the opening whistle.
”They kicked off badly and I caught it on the 10m line. I ran through the whole team and got tackled just before the line, so I offloaded it to the flank and he scored. I was accustomed to doing that sort of thing at school because I was bigger than everyone else, but it was kind of unusual at Craven Week.”
So unusual that Hugh Bladen, who commentated on the game, noted the name and remembered the incident vividly when Os made his Test debut six years later. ”Guys were either just bouncing off him or being dragged along,” he said. ”It was just incredible.”
Now Os remembers things like that somewhat reluctantly. It’s because of what has happened since he made his comeback last year, after retiring at the age of 28 in 2000. I asked him whether he liked to dig out tapes of his exploits during his mighty prime. He said, ”I’ve promised myself never to do it again! You can see such a huge gap.”
So what went wrong? How did he reach the stage where retirement was even an option? ”I got injured during the Super 12 in 2000 and I started battling with my knee. At that stage my mind was tired — tired of rugby — and I decided to give it a rest. So I went properly into farming to build up the business and if a rugby programme came on the television I’d turn over to another channel. In retrospect that was as important as not playing, because I cleansed my mind of the game.
”I’d reached the age where I started picking up injuries and watching any rugby just made me think I must have been mad to put my body on the line like that. Anyway I slowly started to come back to the idea of playing again, I had a chat with my wife about it and she wasn’t too shocked! So I went into Bloemfontein and spoke to Piet [Kleynhans] and Harold [Verster] and they were keen to back me and it just happened.”
Imagine how long Piet and Harold had to think. The finest loosehead prop this country has ever produced wanders in from the farm. He hasn’t yet turned 30 and he wonders whether they might be interested in letting him try out for the second team.
This time I was in the commentary box and I remember the look of the Free State Merit A team hooker’s face when Os came trundling off the bench in the second half. His name was Clutch Grobbelaar and he was probably thinking, ”My mates are not going to believe this.” He was probably also wondering how he could stretch his arm far enough to bind such a massive man.
The scrums went Free State’s way after that, but it was a trademark Os tackle that brought the crowd to life, reminding them that scrumming was always a given, but what marked Os out was his play in the loose. Now that his comeback is about nine months old that’s what is frustrating him most.
”Two years out of rugby affects your confidence and that spills over into the technical side of the game. You end up doing silly things, running bad lines. Afterwards you analyse the game and realise, hell, you were just wasting your energy there! But I’ve set myself some goals and I know where I want to be. I’m quite happy with my scrum work and if you put Mark Andrews behind me in the scrum right now I reckon we could take on anybody. It’s now really just a question of match fitness; making tackles, running with the ball.”
Ah, Mark Andrews. Only nine months older than Os but having moved to Newcastle in England, Andrews is apparently unavailable for the World Cup this year. Both men were born in Elliot on the old Transkei border in 1972. Given that the farming town then had a population of about 5 000, the fact that it produced not one, but two World Cup-winning Springboks is rather less likely than the next pope asking to be called Ebenezer.
”Mark went to primary school at Selborne in East London, so we never played rugby against each other, but our families knew each other. My father’s family has been in Elliot for many years. Du Randt is originally French and I think Venter, my mother’s name, is Dutch. We had a cattle farm. We had sheep when I was young, but on the old Transkei border there was so much stealing that we stopped and just did cattle and vegetables.”
It is well known, of course, that you can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. When his rugby success had built up some spare capital, Os bought his own farm in Theunissen, 100km north of Bloemfontein. He farms vegetables and beef cattle and drives in to train with the Cheetahs most days.
It was while losing himself in the minutiae of running a business that things started to improve. The famous knees were no longer encased in leather strapping and gradually the pain went away. His return to rugby was, as much as anything, an attempt to complete the return to fitness.
”My first goal was to lose some weight and I did that. When I began my comeback, playing for the Springboks was the furthest thing from my mind, but as I started to get back into it towards the end of last season I thought, well why not?”
The short answer might be to say that he’s not playing well enough, but for those who remember him in the mid-1990s it’s hard not to believe in the seemingly impossible. After all, he wasn’t even a regular in the Free State team when Kitch Christie plucked him out of obscurity to make his Test debut in 1994.
”I spent the season on the bench and it wasn’t until Ollie [le Roux] got picked to play against England that I got my chance. The first game I ever played for Free State was against the South African Barbarians in Sasolburg. I scrummed against Willie Meyer and I did all right, so when Ollie came back they started rotating us.
”The big breakthrough was when we played Transvaal in the Currie Cup and I came up against Balie Swart. We demolished them in the scrums and Kitch was there as coach of Transvaal. I think that’s when he made up his mind.
‘I don’t think it’s possible to explain how you feel when your name gets read out in a Springbok squad for the first time. I was so young, but I remember about three months previously Danny O’Neil said to me, ‘If you keep on playing like this you’ll be playing in the World Cup.”’
Os made his debut against Argentina at Boet Erasmus (as it then was) in Port Elizabeth on October 8 1994. It was Christie’s first Test too, having taken over from Ian McIntosh in August. The Puma tight five was as good as anything in the world and they had mastered the notorious ”Bajada” scrumming technique.
All of which meant little to Os — or Pieter as he was erroneously dubbed in the programme — for he was part of a front row that could lay claim to being South Africa’s best ever. His hooker was Uli Schmidt — unchallenged in Springbok history — and his tighthead was Tommie Laubscher, the Western Province farmer who used to lift up a cow as a party trick. The number seven flank, incidentally, was a certain
R Straeuli. The Springboks won 42-22 and Os became a fixture in Christie’s run of 14 successive victories.
It is not lost on the big man that there is another Test against the Pumas in Port Elizabeth this year. ”I actually thought about it the other day and how funny it would be if it were to happen again. Rudolf [Straeuli] was in touch at the start of the season, but he’s been a bit quiet lately. I don’t blame him because I haven’t been playing particularly well, but there’s still time.”
Os won’t make Straeuli’s first Test squad of the year, but he is not wrong about there still being time. Time not just for him to get fit and find his form, but also for others to reverse that process. It has surely not been lost on Straeuli in this injury bedevilled Super 12 season that he is unlikely to be able to pick the same team two weeks running. In other words, it maybe a fanciful notion for Os to make it to Port Elizabeth for the Puma Test, but Perth could be a different matter.