Rugby World Cup 1999: Being a supporter

BUSINESS DAY, 8 OCTOBER 1999

I DON’T KNOW IF you have noticed, but suddenly there are a lot more Springbok supporters than there were a week ago. I bumped into a colleague on Monday morning. “Hey, hey,” he said, giving me a strange wiggle of the eyebrows, “the Boks are looking good for the finals.”

I looked at him with some confusion. “But weren’t you saying on Friday that we have no chance?” I asked.

“Hey, no man, we’re on track. Mallett’s got the right plan.” He breezed off down the corridor, happy in his own punditry. It was the first of many such conversations this week. It is most peculiar. In recent times a positive word about the team was as rare as a modest word from Geoffrey Boycott, but one decent result in the opening game and all of a sudden the flags are flying again. It is a staggering turnabout; by the time we beat England in the quarter-finals, critics of Nick Mallett will be as rare as former supporters of apartheid.

Last season, when the Springboks were chasing the record for consecutive test victories, everybody was a fan. The expert gentlemen of the press were calling Mallett “Saint Nick”; bars were packed on Saturday afternoons. Then we started losing.

Suddenly Mallett was the worst coach since John Williams; suddenly people started saying, “I’m not going to wake up early for the game” or “I’m playing golf on Saturday.” Frown at them, and they would say, “What’s the point? We’re going to lose anyway.” The point, of course, is that supporting a team means supporting them through bad times as well as good. It is sharing the bad times that makes us deserve the good times, and makes those good times that much sweeter.

Amid the fluffy memories of face paint and Francois Pienaar and jumbo jets in ’95, it is easy to forget that before the opening match against Australia the prevailing mood was one of pessimism at worst, resigned good will at best. Nor is such fickleness confined to the playing field. We were all pleased to share in the warm and fuzzy good times of the ’94 elections, all quick to claim Nelson Mandela as our own, happy to paint ourselves as stripes in Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation. Then, at the first knock-back, at the first dip of the rand or lurch of the ship, we throw up our hands and whine at dinner parties and talk darkly about leaving for – oh, the irony – New Zealand. We are, I am sorry to say, fair-weather fans.

I am not decrying our right to criticise and complain. One of the great joys of sport is that it is the only arena in which we are every one of us experts. But the right of complaint should be balanced by the duty of commitment. Without commitment we are not supporters, merely fans, and fans are a dime a dozen. Remember all those phantoms who suddenly emerged before the ’95 final with enthusiastic opinions about how to stop Jonah Lomu or what position Mark Andrews should be playing? Where were they six months before, when the All Blacks were trampling us in rainy Carisbrooke at 4am?

It is often said (although perhaps only by me) that every rugby nation has the team it deserves. We should give thanks that one of the glories of being South African is that we so frequently have a team so much better than we deserve.