Bok coaches also start their jobs with a smile. Sometimes, the smile stays in place. More often, as the pressures of one of the toughest jobs in sport begin to take their toll, the smile turns to a grimace … before, one day, turning to a smile again.
There are good times during the tenure of a Springbok coach. I know there are. I’ve seen Springbok coaches smile. I’ve seen them wince, scowl, face palm, snarl, scream and shout, but I have also seen them happy.
I’ve seen them rumble fury into that poor little walkie talkie so hard that it is a wonder the person wearing the ear-pieces on the field don’t fall over from the force. But, as I’ve said, I’ve also seen them when all is right with the world, when the weight of the Bok job sits easy on them and satisfaction radiates from them.
Being the Springbok coach is an extraordinary job. It comes with expectations and conditions like few other, overcoming South Africa’s past, building South Africa’s future while South Africa’s present hits you with wave after wave of success and failure. Boys grow up dreaming of playing for the Springboks.
There aren’t many boys who grow up dreaming of coaching the Springboks. But when boys who can’t become Boks become coaches, then it becomes the pinnacle. It is the holy grail, no matter that it is also the poisoned chalice.
New Bok coaches smile when they are announced to the world. New beginnings, bright futures, no more mistakes, new methods, more attacking, less losing, loads of fun and running and other lovely stuff.
The smile is still there after the first game. It hangs around for the June internationals, usually the fun part of the season, before it starts to wane come the challenge of the All Blacks, and then the tour too far at the end of the year to the Northern Hemisphere.
You get to see the whole gambit of Bok coach emotions when you tour with them. In 2001, Harry Viljoen’s smile was as bright as the highlights in his hair until they lost against France on a bitterly cold night at the Stade de France. Those where the days when South African journalists usually stayed in the same hotel as the Boks.
We would see them at breakfast, and in the foyer of the Concorde Lafayette hotel. We would sometimes see some of the Bok assistant coaches across the road in the James Joyce, the Irish bar where a pint of Guinness cost more in rands 17 years ago than it does now. There would be happy faces in the Bok coaching staff.
John McFarland, who earned such respect with the Bulls, always had a smile and a word. Heyneke Meyer was part of the backroom staff in 2001. He, too, could be full of the joys of spring.
A loss to France, a dreary win over Italy in Genoa and a loss to England later, and the smiles left.
His former teammates described Rudolf Straeuli as one of the practical jokers in the Bok team. His smile takes a while to get there, fighting through that deadpan expression. The 2003 World Cup was a tournament of grimaces, not smiles. The paranoia around the team, the schoolboy security measures made it a tough time to be a Bok coach.
I remember walking into a mini-casino that was part of a bar in Manly in Sydney, and seeing a member of the Bok staff sitting at a slot machine, slowly putting coin after coin into the machine. I asked him why he was here so late. He sighed, he needed something to do to dull his head from the oppressive atmosphere. He smiled a little when he said it.
Jake White smiled, even when he was in strife with the South African Rugby Union for another imagined slight or another. He smiled at the media a lot, because he knew how to work them and how important they were to keeping him in the job.
Near the end of the 2007 World Cup, the South African media had drinks with White and his staff in their hotel in Paris ahead of the semifinals. White smiled, but through the pressure of knowing that these next few weeks would define him.
Allister Coetzee was the eighth man to coach the Boks in the last 11 years. He was with the Boks in 2007. He should have been given the job in 2008 when White was told to sling his hook by his bosses. I’ve seen Allister Coetzee smile a lot. He’s not smiling now. But he will again one day.
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