When a schoolboy’s golden ambition turns to crushing disappointment, it can take a while to get your motivation back on track. But sometimes, looking back, you can see how a change of plan can change you for the better
I had always done well on the rugby field. Starting in late primary school, my relative strength and speed gave me the confidence to bash and weave through other boys en route to the tryline, or throw my body into tackles and compete with everything I had for the oval ball.
I loved rugby. It was a big part of who I was. I loved the honest sweat that saturated my rugby jersey, and the sting of grazes and bruises in the shower afterwards. I loved the camaraderie, the affection we had for each other, and the intense competition in close-fought matches.
I played for our school 2nd team in Std 9 (Grade 11). The next year I would play for the 1st team. Or so I hoped. Before the season started, my parents took me and my sister on a dream trip overseas, something they had been saving and planning for a while.
They saw it as part of our education, a gift they were giving us. I realise how privileged I was. Before we left, the rugby coach pulled me aside and whispered: ‘Come back fit. We won’t appoint a school captain until you return.’
I would miss the first week of the season, but was buoyed by his words. And I did come back fit. Very fit. I had the unique motivation to go running every morning of our overseas trip, before the rest of my family awoke.
Through the waking side streets of Paris and Rome I would cannon, my senses open to the strange world I was passing through. In the fading early half-light I saw a world beneath the tourist world that was laid out for me later in the day. I saw things alone, accompanied only by my steady breathing and the sound of my feet hitting the ground.
My parents hired a small car and we slept in very modest places, usually found the day we needed them. We reached Ireland, land of my forebears, and I ran and ran and ran, along thin country lanes with sleepy sheep as spectators, indifferent behind old stone walls.
I ran through Sligo, home of the Blarney Stone, I ran through beautiful Kerry and along the curve of Galway Bay. I saw so many things in that month of quiet mornings.
Traders in thick gloves drinking coffee with their morning cigarettes. Bakery vans loading, newspapers being delivered, fresh flowers on the pavements. In South Africa, I suspected, they would have been stolen. As I saw trust expressed in the world, I started to trust myself.
When I returned to school, a boy who had decided to try matric again and stay for an extra year at school had already been made the rugby captain. So be it. I didn’t think I’d make a good captain anyway. It released me.
But then a younger boy who also had his holiday training regimen, lifting bales on his father’s farm, had installed himself in the position I had been dreaming of. There was nothing to do except say goodbye to the dream of playing for the first team.
At first, I was irritated that I’d been given this incentive to train. But then, on the odd occasion that I did play for the 1st team, through chance or injury, I learnt that I preferred the 2nd team games. They didn’t have the same pomp and self-importance, accompanied by the vanity and seemingly absurd pride in wearing a special white scarf.
It seemed puffed up, whereas the 2nd team was more down to earth. I’m not sure if this wasn’t something I felt I had to see, to come to terms with my disappointment, but I do know for sure that the rugby was less formal, and a whole lot more fun.
It took a while to get over my dream, nurtured for so many years. One day, while I was nursing an injury, the school nurse chatted to me. She told me that I had left for overseas as a boy, and come back as a young man.
She’d seen a change in me, a maturity and a perspective she could only attribute to my having been in the world. And she was right. My rugby dream had inspired me to soak up the world I’d been shown, to run right into it.
When I came back, instead of burying my head in a ruck on the field, my eyes had been opened to other ways I could be in the world, no longer subject to the bounce of an odd-shaped ball. I wonder if my parents ever knew what they’d really given me, with that incredible gift.
Leave a Reply