Attack on race quotas shown up on the field

It has been possible during the course of the past week to imagine that there is a rugby god out there who has been jealousy awaiting the opportunity to push the World Cup soccer out of the media spotlight and re-assert the game as the number one talking point in South African sport.

This past roller-coaster week had everything - the highs of the South African under-21s winning the junior World Cup and some impressive play from the Springboks against Argentina; the lows of two seperate punch-ups involving rugby players in Johannesburg nightclubs.

Then of course there was the monumental low of the book, Struggle Rugby, which was so effectively marketed that it hit most of the newspaper front-pages on days when those media might have been looking for news on Brazil and Germany.

Just to ensure that South African rugby had everything this week, the whole Struggle Rugby controversy brought with it a touch of humour - although almost everyone seemed to miss it. Jannie Engelbrecht, former Springbok manager, and Louis Luyt, the man who fired him from his position, are suddenly bedfellows again.

They say there is nothing like a little diversity to create unity, but those who remember the acrimony which followed that fateful tour of New Zealand eight years ago will agree that this one takes the cake.

Not that it was as funny as reading that Luyt had tackled Minister of Sport, Ngconde Balfour, about his weight. No mirrors in Ballito?

Where do we start? Because the others are linked in some way, perhaps we should tackle the brawls first.

The New Zealand under-21s were thrown out of a nightclub, there was a scuffle in the car-park, shots were fired (allegedly in the air, thank goodness).

This was an incident which made for good news copy. But with the exception of the gun bit, which can only have happened in South Africa, and the allegations from the Kiwis (which were of course accepted as fact by their media back home) that there were racial insults being thrown about, there was nothing in the story to really surprise anybody.

Rugby players, particularly the young ones, have always let off a bit of steam after a game. And anyone who ventures to a night-club, particularly in Johannesburg, ought to know that there is a chance he will either see or get involved himself in a punch-up of some kind.

Old-timers might remember the time several members of a Natal team of the 1980s were beaten up in the Bellanapoli night club. The same bunch were also involved in a brawl in Welkom a year or two earlier. And then there was the fight which I was witness to, and which made the newspapers, at the Natal team hotel after they won the Currie Cup at Ellis Park in 1992.

Knowing all of this, however, you would think that the more mature players would shy away from night-clubs that are too public. As with the James Small incident at Cadillac Jacks back in 1994, when the winger was involved in a minor altercation with a waveskier and got thrown off a Springbok tour as a result, the player is usually not the instigator.

There are people out there who resent the hero-worship bestowed on the Boks and who figure that the best way to get known themselves is to get uppity with one of the players.

In this instance it was not a player himself, but someone connected to a player that for some reason is abhorred by many people who live outside of Cape Town.

If my brother was disabled (Bob Skinstad's brother Dan has polio) and he was punched by a club patron would I have done what the Springbok No8 did? Damn right I would have. If Skinstad had put his Springbok reputation ahead of the blood of family I would have been disappointed.

But he is in the public eye, he is a person youngsters are supposed to use as a role-model, so it is also right that there was some sort of sanction from the team management. As Gideon Sam apparently put it at the press conference, his actions cannot be condoned.

Out of mistakes, though, come lessons. The lesson here for the Boks is that they need the same protection after the game from the public that they get when they head to the ground on their bus and head through the car-park to the changing area.

I was at a night-club after a Port Elizabeth test last year where the Boks had an area cordoned off and protected - why was this policy discontinued?

And now we turn to the book. I haven't read it yet, and maybe I won't. From what I have read in newspapers, it appears to just regurgitate the same tired old arguments that I have heard from countless conservative leaning people over many years.

I don't deny their right to have a say. Their views do reflect those of many.

But none of Louis Luyt, Jannie Engelbrecht and Frik du Preez are at this point intimately involved with the decision making processes in rugby at the highest level.

Luyt was once, but then he nailed his colours to the mast by taking no less a personage than Nelson Mandela to court. By believing that this would not have consequences both for himself and the game, he exhibited naivity of the highest extreme.

My point though is that all this moaning about the effects of quotas came in the same week that the policies under attack were vindicated. The under-21 levels in South African rugby have had official quotas for some time now and yet the representative team from that age-group are now the official world champions and had four extremely talented black players in the side that started in the final.

The Springbok senior team had no less than five black players in the 22 that played the first test of the year in Bloemfontein, with three on the field.

Scrumhalf Bolla Conradie would have been my man of the match.

This past Saturday they had four in the squad, and Adrian Jacobs showed with his play at outside centre that he too can shortly end up being listed among the established test players.

That the whole quota thing is not being taken to the most ridiculous extreme under Rudolf Straeuli was illustrated by the team announcement for the next test against Samoa.

Breyton Paulse, the champion black player of the past few years, has been dropped - and for no better reason than that he is not playing well enough.

Up until recently the Springbok teams of the post-isolation era had very few black players, yet with the exception of the 1995 World Cup, when Nation Building was a core element of the success, they boasted results no better than the current team. So what are the complaints about?