Our performances on the pitch made an interesting first season with the Lions, and even though we didn’t win anything in 2010, I felt we’d got a lot done in a short space of time.
As I have already pointed out, the guys were fat when I took over, so we put them through four weeks of conditioning at King Edward VII School. I created a six-week block for the training, which would take us up to the beginning of the Currie Cup, and then I left Wayne Taylor, the conditioning coach, to oversee the programme while I headed back to Perth. I had to attend to a few things regarding my kids’ schooling.
When I returned, it was immediately evident that the conditioning programme was getting results. We had a few trial games before the start of the Currie Cup, and I attended the match against the Boland Cavaliers. The game was played in Wellington, and it was my first exposure to the coloured community’s passionate and humorous support of rugby in the Cape. The guys in the crowd were hilarious and kept shouting out ‘Mitchell’ this and ‘Mitchell’ that, making it hard for me to focus on the game. They were very eager to engage. I suppose they were particularly interested in me because of my history as an All Black coach. New Zealand rugby teams enjoy massive support in the Western Cape.
From the beginning, I knew that turning the Lions into a successful team was going to be a huge challenge. What bemused me was the arrogant attitude I encountered in the union officials. They seemed to expect results, as if they had been living in a void since the 1990s, which was when the Lions had last tasted any significant success.
It almost seemed as if they believed the team could win no matter who was playing for them and regardless of the recruitment. Clearly, some of those people were still dining out on the Lions’ glory days of the mid-1990s, when, as Transvaal, and with Kitch Christie as coach and François Pienaar as captain, they had dominated the Currie Cup and won the Super 10.
To me, it was as if the management lived in a dream world. They may have had grand ideas, but there were no concrete plans with which to back these up. Although it is great to dream big and chase success, it can’t be done if you don’t have processes in place to achieve your objectives. The bottom line was that when Dick Muir was there and then, when I joined, the Lions were just not a flash union in any sense.
The Lions’ under-20 side was a reasonable outfit, and there did seem to be some talent coming through. But it all seemed so haphazard, a hit-and-miss affair. Too many players were being contracted and I quickly became frustrated with the mechanics of working with such a large squad.
I was flabbergasted when I discovered that there were no fewer than 120 players on contract. That was a heck of a lot of food bills, and many of those players weren’t even playing. I kept telling De Klerk and the chief executive, Manie Reyneke, that they had to cut the number of players. Something had to be done, I told them. We couldn’t keep holding onto all the players, as many of them weren’t productive, and we needed to bring some new players in.
At the Western Force, I’d had just 33 players on contract, and some of them were part of the training squad of the Australian National Academy at the time. But at the Lions, I had these long lists of names, and they were all my responsibility. These guys all drew wages and had a right to medical care, physiotherapy and other welfare benefits. In addition, all of them deserved feedback on their progress – or lack of it – and they needed to be given a meal when they had been at work throughout the day.
I tried to explain to De Klerk and Reyneke that elite-level rugby was about aiming all the resources at the individual and doing your best to optimise that person. Having too many players made that impossible. We had one doctor for 120 players and two strength coaches. How was that going to work? I came up with my own plan, a way to get around the problem, but nothing came of it.
The cost structure of the coaches was up the pole as well. Dick Muir’s salary was still on the wage bill and he was still part of the union, and yet it was becoming clear that we wouldn’t be working together. It was daft. The bottom line was that as the president of the union, De Klerk needed to make the hard decisions and be a mediator, but he seemed reluctant to assume such a role.
All of this just confirmed my view that an elected official and high-performance sport just don’t go hand in hand in this professional era. There comes a time when that elected official has to start playing politics to retain his position, when the rugby and the interests of the players, coaches and others who are relying on him for direction start coming second.
When I started off, I ensured that all 120 players on the Lions’ books reported for work. At the same time, though, I made it clear to the officials that they would have to do a human-resources job on some of them. In other words, we had to find a humane way of offloading the excess.
What became obvious to me was that we needed a recruitment officer. Mac Hendricks was the operations manager, but he couldn’t fulfil both tasks. So I spoke to the highly regarded Ian Schwartz, who was responsible for much of the recruiting during Heyneke Meyer’s time with the Bulls and was an important, but largely unsung, part of that union’s success during the past 10 years.
Ian was prepared to make the switch from Pretoria to Johannesburg, and that was the time when Robert Gumede was coming on board, so I thought the Lions would be able to give Schwartz what he was asking for. But they didn’t.
Then I spoke to player agent James Adams. He was keen to move into a different role, but that idea got sliced too. Eventually, we got Nico Serfontein from the Bulls, but only because Gumede funded that contract. The Lions officials wanted success but seemed reluctant to spend any money to get it. Serfontein wasn’t even a recruitment officer as such. He came in to take over the junior section in a kind of director-of-rugby role.
Although the 2010 Currie Cup season didn’t go that well, there were some promising signs. We had started out with a backlog in training, so success was never going to be immediate. In our first match, we beat the Leopards easily enough, but then got done 32-0 by Western Province at Newlands. That experience was a natural part of our development and growth. It was good for us to get a wake-up call, and we started to get going after that.
The players’ fitness levels also started to improve and the style of rugby we were playing soon became an unconscious process. Earlier, the players had been overthinking and that had been their undoing. Getting into a playing pattern or structure is like riding a bike: once you go through the barrier and can do something, you do it without thinking about it; it becomes completely natural. That is why it is important to find a system quickly, stick to it, and repeat it over and over.
I didn’t continue with anything that Dick had established. I had to build the defence from scratch and bring structure to Dick’s approach of trying to keep the ball moving. Off-the-cuff play doesn’t give you the freedom that it is supposed to do, as it only creates lots of chaos. You always have to have shape and structure that you can fall back on.
We inherited a group that over-chased everything. Whereas many coaches spend a lot of time working on the breakdown, I have a different philosophy and I take the team a few stages ahead. You shouldn’t go to ground when it is not necessary – I told the players it was up to the defenders to put us on the ground.
We avenged our big defeat to Western Province by scoring a good win over them at Ellis Park at the start of the second round. And we beat the Sharks at home too. Suddenly, we were right there in the mix, and only had to beat the Cheetahs away to qualify for the semi-finals.
Gumede was fully ensconced as an equity partner by then and we were starting to experience some of the trappings that came with his enormous wealth. We flew to Bloemfontein for what was effectively a quarter-final in his private jet – and I’m not talking about a little Learjet, it was a passenger-sized plane. That was quite an experience. At the back, the plane had the normal seating layout as you might find in any airliner. But, in the front, there were couches and a loo, and, of course a bar, and a bed in the middle. It was like something you normally only see in a James Bond movie, the only problem being that when we returned home after the game, we had to land at Lanseria as opposed to O.R. Tambo, and those who know the two airports will understand when I say Lanseria is not where you want to be when you get back to Johannesburg on a Saturday night.
We lost a close game to the Cheetahs, which meant that the final league match of the Currie Cup, against the Pumas, would be our last in the competition for that year and the result would be of academic interest only. I thought our last match would be a good opportunity to test depth, so I selected a lot of the reserves for that game. The guys didn’t take their chances and we had little motivation to win, so we ended the season with another defeat.
The day after the Pumas match, instead of joining the players at the Vaal River for a day of jet-skiing and braaing, I was called for a meeting with Gumede at his house. I was pleased when I learnt about the meeting, as it suggested that he was at least trying to understand what we needed. Our discussion centred on the requirements of the union, and we also discussed the high-performance model that I had drafted. Gumede gave the right responses and agreed that we should do whatever it takes to help the union become the best. At the same time, though, I had been in many similar meetings and felt like I had seen this movie before, so I wasn’t holding my breath.
Then Gumede asked me something that proved to be very prophetic. He asked if I was safe in the flat where I lived. The timing of that question was quite bizarre because of what happened later that very same night.
I was a bit hungover from the day before – we’d had a bit of a party after the game. So, apart from the visit to Gumede, I’d had one of those lazy Sundays. It was quite a muggy, stormy night in Johannesburg, so when I went down to the kitchen to get some biltong, I left the top window open.
That was the wrong move because, after I went back up to my room and fell asleep, a bloke appeared in my bedroom. It had been the first night I’d ever opened that window. At first I thought it was my flatmate, Wayne Taylor, horsing around with me. It was dark and someone had grabbed me from behind.
‘Tails, Tails, what the fuck are you doing?! Leave me alone, Tails.’
But it wasn’t Wayne. ‘Fuck, what is going on? This is for real,’ I thought.
I was lifting the guy who was trying to hold me down as I tried to get out of his grip. That was when the other guy came in.
I felt sudden pain. ‘Jeez, that hurt!’ I thought, ‘but I will deal with that later.’ I didn’t know at that point that I had been stabbed. It was like being at the bottom of a ruck and connecting with a boot stud.
Once I was fully awake they flipped me over and told me to settle down. They tied me up very tightly with cellphone cable and one of my ties, which they had taken from the cupboard, and some wire from a lamp.
I pleaded with them. ‘Don’t kill me! I have children, and don’t kill my mate – we are foreigners. Just let me know what you want.’
They found R800 in my pocket and couldn’t work out why there was nothing more. They also took the cellphones.
‘Where is your mate?’ one of them demanded. ‘There are two cars in the garage. Where is he?’
It crossed my mind that it could be all over for me, but at the same time I was thinking to myself that I was too young to die. I tried to roll over and crawl to see if Wayne was okay, but couldn’t get to him. I was tied up too tightly. I later discovered that he had come to the door but had decided not to let the scene escalate into a double-hostage situation, so he’d scaled down the drainpipe and into the garden. The guard at the gate to the complex was asleep. Wayne rang Pierre Dormehl’s partner, Jann Kingsley (Pierre was away on a fishing trip), and her security guys got to us before my own security company did.
I am not sure how long I was held hostage or how long my two attackers were in the flat. It could have been about 40 minutes, perhaps longer. At one stage, when they made me kneel forward on the bed, it crossed my mind that they might sexually abuse me. It seemed the two guys had an established chain of command – one was the laaitie (youngster), who had to fetch things, and the other was the boss, the man in charge.
Finally, the intruders fled and there was a knock at the front door. I could hear African voices, not unlike those of the men who had attacked me. It was the security people. When they came in, the lights were turned on for the first time since my ordeal had started. That was a shock because I could now see that my duvet was covered in blood. It was my blood!
And I was naked. The whole scene was disgusting. Thankfully, Jann was there to help me. It was like my mother arriving, I was so pleased to see her.
Poor old Tails didn’t know what to expect when he came back. When he got upstairs, he had a stunned look on his face, as if to say, ‘Wow!’ He was more traumatised than me because he felt bad about leaving me. He was convinced the intruders had had a gun, but I couldn’t vouch for that. I was hit with a blunt object, but it could have been a baton.
There was blood spurting out of my leg and a stab wound in my right tricep, which freaked me out quite a bit. I was taken to the Sandton Clinic, and although I felt strong, I was a bit shaken up. I was helped by a Kiwi nurse. My attackers hadn’t punctured the artery and the stab incision was clean. After the wound had been stitched up, I went to the front desk and made a payment. It all seemed so surreal.
Then, while walking from reception back to the car, I just crumbled. It was 4.30 in the morning. I was taken back to Pierre and Jann’s place, but I couldn’t sleep. I had no numbers of the people I needed to phone, as they had taken my cellphone, but I remembered my home number in Perth, so I was able to let my family know what had happened and that I was okay.
I couldn’t phone anyone else, but I did manage to find John Plumtree’s number. He and his assistant coach, Grant Bashford, and the rest of the Sharks team were on a team bus. They were in Cape Town after having played Western Province the day before and were heading to the airport for their return flight to Durban.
The Lions officials responded sympathetically, and De Klerk, Gumede and Ichikowitz came round to see me. But they didn’t really do anything – although I am not sure what they could have done anyway. Gumede told me I could have his suite at the top of the Michelangelo Hotel, a palatial establishment in the heart of Sandton. I accepted – I knew I would be safe there.
I thought I was staying at the Michelangelo as part of an agreement between Gumede and the Lions, but it later emerged that Gumede was charging the Lions for my stay there. Phew! That must have cost them quite a bit. After that, I moved to Melrose Arch and I made sure I got a flat high up in the building. No one could get to me up there.
It was a harrowing experience for me and the trauma lasted for some time. I went through the routine of visualising candles being lit outside my house. For some time, I prejudged strangers near me and was very vigilant.
Apparently the intruders had been bitten by a dog while fleeing from our flat, but they managed to evade security and escape to Alexandra. The window they had entered through was small. We had never been security conscious before that night, but then we never felt we needed to be, as we were living in a complex with a security gate.
I am sure the hit had been planned and that it was not by chance that they’d arrived at our flat. Building contractors had been in earlier in the week, and my car had Lions insignia and branding all over it. The Lions had become more prominent after finishing the season quite well, and I am convinced the intruders knew who we were. That explains why they were so surprised that we didn’t have more valuables in the flat.
Many people ask me if I thought of leaving South Africa after the incident, but I can honestly say I never considered it. It turned out that the guys who had attacked me weren’t even South African – they were Nigerians. I decided I would heal my mind by staying in the country. Something like that can happen to anyone, and I didn’t want to go overseas and have people asking me about it forever. Incidents like that are common enough in South Africa, whereas they are a big thing overseas.
I’m okay to talk about it now, but I still feel a flutter now and then when I get a sudden fright. And the experience has left me a little scarred. It’s not a nice feeling when you hear your heart in your throat.
I look at the event philosophically, because it humbled me. It was like a roadblock for me, something that forced me to take a serious look in the mirror and make the big, important decisions, which perhaps I had been putting off, and also take the time to smell the roses. Life is so short, so it was good for me in some ways, as it heralded a crossroads in my life.
It marked the point when I started moving forward, when I realised I had been selfishly chasing my career my whole life and now needed to take a step back from it.
I have taken an interest in clinical and organisational psychology over the past few years and have spoken to various life coaches. Simon Hurry, whom I used in a project to help me identify the strengths of the players at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where I coached at the start of my current sabbatical, indicated five strengths I possess. Among them are strategic thinking, an achievement-orientated approach and a deeply ingrained sense of responsibility.
While I have been on sabbatical, I have been trying to analyse why I have had such conflict with so many people during my rugby career. Nobody is right or wrong; there is no such thing as right or wrong. It is just about perception; people see things differently.
But I have never been so clear about where I stand and how it all fits together than I was during those 40 minutes to an hour when I thought I might well not walk out of that room alive.
I had just one counselling session after the attack. My wife, Jules, wants me to have another, because I tend to experience a flutter whenever I get a fright. But I am a resilient character and pride myself on my mental strength, which, I suppose, is a bit ridiculous. However, if I didn’t have that strength, I don’t suppose I would have lasted as long as I did in rugby coaching. I feel that my reaction to the attack, and the fact that I decided not to leave the country, was another example of me bouncing back from adversity.