I have no interest in rugby or rugby shirts, clothing that seems to have been designed for superhumans built like wardrobes.
The world cup has passed me by. The only match I watched was the quarterfinal in which South Africa lost to Australia. As I researched this article and read up on the game, I chanced upon a sports book, Foul Play: What’s Wrong with Sport? by Joe Humphreys.
Quoting a sports hack, Humphreys writes: “The game of rugby is almost totally devoid of skill; it is a game of brute force and speed — This is a sport for gay, middle-class cavemen — it’s a useless game. If it were a better game, like football, more people would be interested in playing it.”
Your average mortal will never attain the hulking physique of the typical rugby player. Yet hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of shirts (both fake and genuine), principally modelled on the rugby-playing caveman, must have been sold.
Every description of fan wears the shirt, male and female, those with potbellies, scrawny arms and sagging shoulders.
But I guess when the shirt has the same significance as that of a flag, every other consideration (including sartorial) doesn’t matter.
I must point out that South Africa is one of a few countries in which interest in the game is organic, unlike states like Russia that are making a calculated effort to catch up.
And to some extent this applies across the colour line. In the Eastern Cape, for instance, the game is passionately followed and played by blacks.
When the above vaguely homophobic statement was said, the sports journalist Humphreys was quoting — hadn’t seen the hundreds of thousands of black South Africans decked out in the green Springbok shirt.
Bok day
On Fridays, bank executives take off their dark suits and don the green. Ditto ambitious mid-level managers, ditto tellers. The Springbok shirt is something of an equaliser, unifying the high and the low in support of this most middle-class of pursuits.
My inquiries suggested that some companies buy shirts in bulk and expect employees to wear them on Fridays as a team-building exercise. If you don’t come in green, you have to come dressed formally. Not much choice if you come to think of it.
Shirt-wearing also serves a nation-building purpose, as per Nelson Mandela’s famous gesture did in 1995 and later Thabo Mbeki, with notably less impact.
When I bumped into Neo Letele, a BComm student at Wits, he was wearing the shirt while pouring over books at the Wits Theatre.
“I started to like rugby in 1995,” Letele explained. Asked how he negotiated the shirt’s history, he drew my attention to Mandela’s embrace of the garment in 1995.
“In the past, it represented white sport, but that’s backward. As the young generation, it’s our duty to get over the past, ” he said.
Letele, born in the mid-1980s, spent his formative years in Lesotho where his South African grandparents had sought refuge.
He is aware that supporting Bafana “was seen as a black-man thing” but points to the hundreds of thousands of white South Africans who supported the football cause. “Was it [the support] fake?”
But the response to a column by City Press‘s Percy Mabandu emphasised our divided legacy.
Mabandu wrote that, as a black man, he has never felt “welcome as a [rugby] supporter”. A reader, Pierre Celliers, wrote back: “Percy, you’re much safer at our rugby games than I am at your soccer matches — Rather support what you’re familiar with. Stick with your kind. Go support Kaizer Chiefs or Pirates.”
Older black South Africans I talked to do have problems with the shirt. One told me that he wouldn’t wear one “for the same reason I don’t wave the [old] South African flag and that I don’t sing the Afrikaans and English part of the national anthem”.
He remembered that when he was standard five, “every morning we were made to recite Die Stem and were beaten if we could not remember the words. There’s no way I am going to identify with an anthem that represents my oppression.”
Mfundo Nene, a young recruitment professional, told me he loves wearing the shirt for aesthetic reasons. “I wear it because it’s a successful team. I like the way the team plays.”
Like most black people, he initially saw himself as an outsider, but now says: “Our kids must see that wearing this shirt is not elitist.”
If he could, he would go back to playing rugby, if only to counter the view that “football is our game”.
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