Jake baby: apres moi, le deluge

Jake and that morning-after-pill

Quite aside from the sheer joy of being on the winning side for a change what was most enjoyable about our recent World Cup Rugby victory was the pure honesty of the final.

In old fashioned terms a couple of tons of meat crashing together leaves little room for evasions, vacillation, procrastination, duplicity or any of the other ailments that characterise life in the globalising fast lane, not to mention life in a sport form that is being compressed via a political agenda into recalcitrant transformation.

It is possible that there is huge resistance to transformation in the sport of professional rugby. It is equally possibly that impatience is driving the agenda faster than those to be transformed can keep up with. What is not in doubt is that two merit based teams crashed into each other last weekend at the Stade de France in St Dennis and we the wildly ecstatic audience watched, what a German colleague described as, a game of “barbaric beauty” in which no quarter was asked and none given.

And so to the celebrations and the joy and the national feel good factor that is already evaporating under the relentless pressure of rising interest rates scrum-crashing with the same brutal ferocity to which we were witness last Saturday against the immovable object of declining pay, and unwavering financial commitments.

Well done the Bokke.

For a brief moment we were able to leave this synthetic world to watch a sanitised version of all our histories. We could remind ourselves about where we had come from and what we had had to do to make our Darwinian entrance onto this makeshift stage. And it was eighty minutes of glory played against a host of agendas.

This was the game played by the children of those who built the greatest empire the world has yet seen and we watched it at its ultimate apotheosis.

And so now to the next…. And return to the bull terrier dragging its unwanted teeth against our trouser turn-up, dragging the fabric: forcing us to change our walk.

What will happen of course will be a gradual return to the agenda which has not gone away and wont do.

So… the next question: Does the venerable “Coach of the Year” walk away from it all as he has threatened to do. His contract is about to expire and his job was advertised last week and we love the idea of human sacrifice so why shouldn’t he go. On the other hand we can sacrifice him anyway, sooner or later his team will lose for whatever reason and then the fickleness of this moment will become evident. We can keep him on as a lackey slave and eviscerate him when he stumbles

Last week, before the final event, a woman at a school final assembly for school leavers, on the east side of Jozi, read out what she claimed to have been the Venerable Coach’s matriculation preliminary exam essay answer, circa 1981. Apparently she had been the coach’s educator then, back then, before when the coach was a learner: a simple Jeppe* schoolboy. Why she happened to still have his essay a quarter of a century later was not dealt with by her bedazzled audience.

In this essay, “My Dream”, he is alleged to have envisaged doing just what he did last Saturday night: watched ‘his’ team, that he coached, win the World cup. This week a letter to the citizen from Coach Jake White’s former Headmaster spoke of the same thing… this man’s dream.

So what happens when you wake up, knowing that this thing to which you have ridden for three decades or more has been achieved. This thing that has driven you since the earliest days, even before the competition became a reality; when the idea of a World Rugby Cup was still only a glimmer in the imagination of a rugby crazed school.

An old Koan referred to by the Zen masters of antiquity talks of the moment of one’s greatest triumph being simultaneously the instant of one’s greatest failure. For Coach Jake White that moment has now arrived and passed by and the real question [for him] is “What next”.

Logic suggests that he would now seek to be the first coach to get back to back victories in the World Cup. Set against that objective is the truth that the next four years will be unbearable for any national coach in the beloved country. His very success will stand as naught against the weight of ideological commitment to the racial folly that has been our undoing for so long, that it is the only thing we know how to do. The politics that have apparently almost torn rugby apart over the past decade are set to intensify now… once the hullabaloo has died down and the last ticker tape paper parade has been washed down a passing stormwater drain.

The ultimate logic is that we will now enter a weakened state with key players going away. The second team, which looked most ordinary against the Tongans and was soundly beaten by New Zealand and Australia during the offshore leg of the Tri-nations will struggle to find form… For White the game is over. It is now that “back to the drawing board” thing again, and painstaking reconstruction as a new vision is somehow cobbled together again.

Jeppe and Lord Milner.

Alfred: Lord Milner ran the four colonies of southern Africa that emerged from the war of 1899-1902 for eight years until Union. He was High Commisissioner and a hard taskmaster who left a legacy in the form of the so-called "Milner" schools and an education system based on the Milner ethic: service and dedication to one's country the empire and one's fellow person..

I spent a brief sojourn once at the school called Jeppe High School for Boys, as a relief teacher. I went initially for a month to relieve a man who had taken a team to the Far East, to swim in competitions there. I stayed on at their request for eight months while their business teacher, a lady fresh from the old pre-transformational lesser school system was on stress leave.

The school, almost the oldest in Jozi, was rooted in what was termed the “Milner” ethic. This was a colonialist concept founded in the ethic of ‘service. Milner's idea, and he had allegedly a whim of steel, was that the so-called Milner schools were tasked with producing incorruptible civil administrators, who would graduate to run this end of the Empire and maybe other parts as well. It was a powerful motif and stood this country well over the century between their founding and our new democracy. He, Milner, was himself described by those who knew him as the most incorruptible of men.

No matter how rough the kids that populated my classrooms during that nine month gestation that I experienced working at that school, there was always that latent message in the air, at assemblies and on the sports field, where rugby was the supreme concern surpassing even cricket, which is another obsession altogether. The message of duty, and service to one's fellows.

At Monday’s assembly a victory by the under thirteen’s against a traditional enemy like K.E.S. [another Milner school]would routinely take pride of place in the morning’s litany notwithstanding that some senior had won the national History prize in the annual Olympiade, or the rowing team had swept away all in another national competition. Rugby was the school's exclusive perspective, all others served that need.

And so it became for Coach Jake White and what he would do after the party is over.

Personally I think that the Jeppe ethic makes service to country more important than service to the sport or to oneself. As a result Coach Jake White's own training would call for him to persevere in his task and pace the process of transformation to a winning agenda. He could do this and we could win twice although no one team has successfully defended their title… keeping a winning team on the boil for four years has proved an insurmountable challenge to date. Nonetheless it is possible. He could do it. The odds are immense because the political climate in which he must make impossible decisions, will become more strident. Hobbes could easily have observed that the life of a world cup coach is "nasty brutal and short".

On the other hand the next World Cup hosts New Zealand are looking for a winning coach, and so are the former World champions whom we defeated last week. Ours, Jake baby, was to be scrapped by a xenophobic rugby management that was so intent on unseating him they advertised his job the day before the final. That is a bad omen for the future.

A recurring advertisement for the gambling industry ends with the phrase: "Winners know when to quit". [My own experiences as a student, working Wednesday’s and Saturday’s as an accountant for a well known bookie, the late Hans Stroobach [sic], at the old Loveday street Tattersalls in Jozi generally proved that winners seldom quit, but returned to the racecourse again and again and invariably went on to lose; and I would have to hassle them on the phone for their money].

Logic suggests he should take that job in New Zealand, and take his new friend Eddie and his vision coach and be the first coach to win back to back world cups … That would be consistent with his dream. Reading the media reports on the Internet this week from New Zealand one perceives them to be the same small-minded whiners as the Poms, and our own media for that matter, when we lose. He’d hate the weather and by the time he’d finished his family would have grown-up without him: Against that part of the Milner ethic is that family counts less than duty. On the other hand they [the Kiwis]seem to be a sort of colonial leftover place, quaintly rooted in a time warp where streets are clean and people walk on them without fear or favour: awfully post-Milner, even though he didn't waste much time with the place himself.

Back at the farm though the subjugated Boers of Milner’s day took to playing rugby and transformed the game, wresting it from the grip of the hated “Engelses”; putting us on the world stage. Now the game is under assault again, for a second time. We saw the undoubted fruits of this new transformation in the record equalling tries scored by a man who would never have been permitted to play in the bad Auld days. Plus we may never have made the final at all had it not been for that stunning overturned near-try in the game against the islanders: again by a man who would have been arrested for a pass offence back then for being on a rugby field at all.

In our moment of triumph we can see that the game is to be transformed again; and the iron hand of a man of principle is needed at this hour to steer us through this present storm of prevarication and obtuse duplicity, to achieve the seemingly impossible… Back to back national victory… In a world in which all things are possible… Why not… just do it.?

………………………………………..

And then the postscript after the party pill comes and we find ourselves tangled already in sheets of hubris…. Victory tours and angered fans and racial slights abounding and the buckle of routine response tightens once again on our defences.

Jake… Woody Allen put it best … “Take the money and run.”
Cheers
Blogroidnik Blogospherian.