'Month long orgy of chauvinism'
2003-10-03 21:38
Cape Town - Rugby is a game crippled by its own rules, and the World Cup is a "month-long orgy of chauvinism", according to one of the sport's most penetrating critics.
That critic is Nobel literature laureate JM Coetzee, best known for his novels which, according to this week's citation from the award committee, expose the "cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization".
But Coetzee has in the past also applied his formidable intellect to rugby - with devastating results.
In a 1978 article in the now-defunct arts magazine Speak, he said rugby dreamed of itself as a celebration of speed, agility, strength and comradeship.
"Every now and again one sees evidence, flashes of beauty amid all the moiling and toiling, that the dream is not unfounded.
"But the flashes are intermittent. There is a mistake in the most basic conception of the game."
Coetzee - who was writing before the well-intentioned but flawed changes made to the laws on rucking after the 1999 World Cup - said that by and large, the rules failed to keep the ball "live" as they were intended to do.
Polictical importance
Asking why "this crippled game" flourished particularly in South Africa, he said its political importance between the turn of the century and the 1960s could not be overemphasised.
"Rugby became a means (as cricket never did) for the economically disadvantaged Afrikaner to assert himself magically over the Englishman," he wrote.
'Model of white polictial unity'
"In its pyramidal structure (club-province-nation) it also formed - as many politicians realised - a model of white political unity."
Coetzee, who admitted he was writing about the game as an "outsider", also mused on the significance of the game for spectators.
"The game promises to give meaning to a stretch of time (in this it is like narrative), and it fulfils this promise often enough to bring the spectator back.
"To post-religious people whose lives are submerged in chronos, who feel themselves dying while they are living, it provides the experience of time given meaning - which one might call a low-level experience of transcendence - often enough to make Saturday afternoon more significant than Sunday morning."
Not just a sporting event
In a 1995 article on the World Cup, hosted by South Africa and which the Springboks, led by Francois Pienaar, had just won, he said the tournament was not just a sporting event.
"It is the occasion for a month-long orgy of chauvinism and mime-show of war among nations."
In South Africa in particular it had unabashedly been promoted as a nation-building exercise, using the concept of a "Rainbow Nation" as master-image.
This was based on the premise that nationhood was a collective state of mind, that "if a group of people can be encouraged to believe they are a nation and to act together as a nation, then they are a nation".
Image-marketers
The opening ceremony had presented a "de-historicized vision of Tourist South Africa" put together by image-marketers.
"Now that rugby has fallen into the hands of an international cartel embracing a 'philosophy' of growth (a philosophy no more complex than that of a colony of bacteria), we can expect the inherent intellectual muddle of the Rainbow Project to be compounded by floods of images of South Africa as an exotic sports-tourism destination, different certainly, but only in a piquant, easily digested way."
- SAPA