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Unequal back-yard battles maketh many a Bok

rugby29 June 2020 07:09| © SuperSport
By:Gavin Rich
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Robbi Kempson © Gallo Images

If you are a parent who has ambitions that your most talented progeny will one day be a good enough rugby player to be a Springbok, you might be advised to do more than just search for the best schools and coaches. The biggest advantage your kid might have is to have older siblings.

Just ask former Springbok prop Robbi Kempson. The current director of rugby at the Southern Kings wasn’t the biggest front row forward on the planet during his playing career, but he was one of the toughest. Where did he get that from? He will tell you it came from the many battles he had in his back-garden in Queenstown as a kid with three older brothers.

“My dad worked for the Allied Building Society in Queenstown, and I had three older brothers who bullied me throughout my childhood. But the bullying in the back garden, with the presence of a rugby ball as an excuse for it, probably toughened me up,” Kempson told me in an interview last year.

Kempson is far from alone in thanking the school of hard knocks he progressed through at an early stage of life for his later success. Former Springbok captain Jean de Villiers will tell you that what kick-started his rugby journey was the fact that he started playing rugby at five, two years younger than his contemporaries, because he had a seven-year-old brother.

SECOND OLDEST HAS THE ADVANTAGE

There are many other Boks who will tell you similar stories, and then there is Franco Smith, the former Bok currently coaching Italy. Smith’s father was rugby coach at Sand du Plessis High School and Smith was very young, and small, when he accompanied his dad to training sessions and managed to talk his way into taking part.

“I was fortunate to train a lot with the older boys. They say the second oldest child always has an advantage, because they have to play against bigger kids. They are used to tackling their older brother and always have to fight against the odds,” recalled Smith.

“So my training stimulus came from playing with more senior guys, some of whom were at high school when I was just starting at junior school.”

When you think of some of the more recent Bok brothers, what Kempson, De Villiers and Smith are saying gets underlined. Older brother Willie was already an established provincial player when 20-year-old Carel made his first-class debut in 1980, the same year that Willie played his first game against the Boks. Carel arguably eclipsed anything that Willie achieved on the field.

With respect to Jannie du Plessis, who is no relation to the aforementioned Du Plessis siblings, his younger brother Bismarck was also the more luscious fruit that grew on the rugby producing bush on the family farm near Bethlehem in the Eastern Free State.

Okay, so both the Du Plessis ‘forward siblings’ (the other Du Plessis family produced four backs) were tough as teak, and you can only imagine how hard it might have been for young Bismarck to make headway against his brother in any mini back-yard battles.

MULLER’S TOUGH BAPTISM IN SUNDAY BATTLES

Arguably the recent member of a Bok sibling duo that had it the toughest though was Pieter Muller. The former Bok centre will be remembered mostly as a Natal/Sharks player but it should not be forgotten that like many players who made their name for that province, Muller was a product of the Free State, and more specifically Grey College, rugby factory.

And he was also brother to Helgard Muller, who also played for the Springboks - matches against New Zealand Cavaliers in 1986 and a World XV in 1989 - and was six years older. You wouldn’t imagine that with a gap in age that big, the pair would play against each other often as kids, but according to Muller junior, they did.

“People often forget that Helgard and myself were brothers, perhaps because we look so different. He was blond whereas I had dark hair, perhaps because my mother was blond and my father was dark,” says Pieter Muller.

“There was a six-year difference between us, but that did not stop me playing against Helgard. On a Sunday afternoon, my parents would tend to have a sleep, and myself and Helgard would go to an open grass patch in front of some flats that was on the opposite side of the road to where we lived. We would play every Sunday and I would almost always end up crying.

“Then later on Thabo Thomas (who played scrumhalf for Free State in 1984, when Pieter was in early high school) joined us and got involved, and there’d be someone else there to make it two against two. That’s where I became tough. It would get really hard, sometimes we would get heated and punch each other in the face.”

It wasn’t always the hard physical stuff that the players indulged in though, and Pieter might have developed some of his skill in playing touch rugby with his older brother.

“There was always something going on, if we weren’t playing contact against each other we’d be involved in a game of touch.”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SENIOR RUGBY DEBUT

Pieter played almost all of his provincial and test rugby in the midfield, but it was as a fullback that he first made his name as he turned in a man of the match performance playing for Free State against Northern Transvaal as part of the 1990 test Unions Day at King’s Park.

“I was 20 when I played that first game. It’s a funny story actually. I was with my girlfriend of the time in a car outside her parents' house getting in some private time when I was embarrassed by being interrupted by her mother knocking on the car window,” recalls Muller.

“I was red-faced with embarrassment but she insisted my mother was on the phone and that it was very urgent, I must come into the house. So I had to do this kind of walk of shame to the house. My mom said ‘Listen, you have to go to Durban right away, you are playing for Free State tomorrow’.

“I thought she was talking nonsense and I told her so. But sure enough, Andre Joubert had been injured on the eve of the game, and I was to replace him at fullback. The Trotske brothers were still involved with Free State in those days and they flew me to Durban the next day in a private charter.

“Because it was a test Unions day and we weren’t playing the main game, we were playing early, and it was quite a rush to get there in time. I was picked up at Durban airport by a liaison officer and remember being rushed to the stadium through heavy traffic. There were a lot of people going to King’s Park and the traffic was jammed. When I walked into the change-room it was just 20 minutes before kick-off and I was playing my first game for Free State.

“It was quite something to go through all of that and then end up in the same change-room as a legend such as Helgard, who was still involved with Free State then, and to be playing against someone like Pote Fourie, a veteran loose-forward for the Bulls. I was still a laaitie.”

THE MOVE TO DURBAN

Muller played well enough to get some more games for Free State that year, but it was the following year, 1991, that he settled in what became an accomplished midfield partnership with the youthful Brendan Venter.

“Helgard had by then been moved to flyhalf or fullback. We had a good season and I thought I was doing well but the following year I had a bit of a fall out with the Free State coach Gerrie Sonnekus. I was a settled first-choice player by then but for a test Union Day match I was carrying a slight niggle and it was agreed I should rest voluntarily.

“Gerrie told me he’d select me for the following game, the first Currie Cup game, but the week of that game Helgard came to me and told me I wasn’t in the plans. I felt that I had been lied to and that I had to play for someone I could trust. That was when I phoned Craig Jamieson, who was then the chief executive at the Natal Rugby Union, and I told him that if he could organise me a car and a job I would be happy to come to Durban. The next week I was playing for College Rovers and the rest is history, I played all my remaining years of provincial rugby in South Africa for Natal, who later became known as the Sharks.”

BOK DEBUT WENT BY IN A BLUR

That was 1992, the same year that Muller was part of the Natal team that won the Currie Cup for the second time, and also the year he made his Bok debut in South Africa’s comeback from isolation test against New Zealand at Ellis Park.

“Everything was a blur around that game, both the build-up and the game itself,” he recalls.

“In those days you weren’t allowed to gather for a test match before the Wednesday of the build-up week, but we found a clandestine way to get together on the Sunday or Monday. Still, it wasn’t much time for a team that was effectively playing together for the first time to gel.

“I remember there being a lot of hype that week. It was the first game the Boks were playing in a long time, and there were a lot of proud South Africans expecting a lot of us. Perhaps the hype around that game spurred us on to play above ourselves. We came close to winning that game.

“But the next week we played Australia in Cape Town and that was when the reality dawned that when it came to skill and some other important aspects of rugby, South Africa had fallen behind during the years of isolation. The Wallabies beat us comfortably and it was a real wake-up call.”

PLAYING ALONGSIDE HIS BOYHOOD HERO

What those games, and the tour to France and England that followed, did do for Muller was offer him an opportunity to play with his boyhood hero.

“I think Danie Gerber was every South African’s rugby hero in the 1980s. I can remember waking up early in the morning, around 4am, in 1981 to watch that series on television. Having Danie’s experience, and Naas Botha was also there, helped a lot in those early test matches. They made it easier by bringing a calmness.

“Danie was great running off the ball. He could see space and exploit it. He was both a great creator and a great finisher. I thought we worked well together. He was well into his 30s by then but even then he still had class. I learned a lot from him.”

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