It’s as if winning the World Cup will magically make our country’s problems go away — spoiler alert, it won’t

I have a secret that tends to shock other people when I share it. It usually passes my lips when the person I’m confessing it to has had a few drinks and I can’t match their enthusiasm with an inauthentic smile any longer.

Close relationships with family and friends have taken strain over the years because of it and my “coming out” continues to cause eye-rolling, even eye-gouging.

I’ve been outspoken and outcast before and lived to tell my next story. It’s a big week for Mzansi and so, on this platform of free speech and independent thought, where better for me to out myself to the world and show my true colours? Here goes…

(I am an All Blacks supporter)

While boos and jeers ring out from the green and gold “oor ons ewige gebergte”, allow me to clarify before you go issuing a clarion call for my head in the comments section.

When it comes to sports in general, I usually support the underdog. And when it comes to rugby specifically, I’m always happiest when the team that scores the most tries wins. 

I don’t believe in winning at all costs. I would rather see beautiful, running rugby being played than cheering for a game of converted penalties.

I played flyhalf growing up and idolised the rugby philosophy of one of my dad’s dear friends, a champion of getting the ball to the wing, Diocesan College doyen, Basil Bey.

I went to Rondebosch Boys High across the road, where I remember watching Herschelle Gibbs singlehandedly dismantle our first team. And Percy Montgomery, from Sacs, doing the same thing for that matter. I was taught to loathe and taunt them from the Standard Six sidelines in our blue school blazers.

And then, when Percy donned the blue and white hoops of Western Province, all was forgiven. I never could come to terms with the “us versus them” approach that was fostered when competitiveness went too far.

The school derby which breeds club provincialism that becomes clobbering patriotism, all pissed up in a pub. A put-on-your-jersey pageant that runs the risk of identifying yourself as one thing only at the expense of something else.

As Groucho Marx put it, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

Read more in Daily Maverick: Public Holiday? After such a stressful Rugby World Cup, we need a day off should Boks win, say South Africans

Combative ‘patriotism’

Spare a thought too for the Boks video analyst Dale McDermott who leaked the Staaldraad pics and was then shunned by SA Rugby. He ended up selling used cars in Cape Town and shot himself two years later.

All this sport is just that: sport. A distraction from our toil. So many smart minds regurgitating this motherland uber-alles mentality while we denude the soil beneath our scrummaging shoes and pollute the seas we swim in.