In a changing shed at Loftus Versfeld in Pretoria on a sunny afternoon in 1996, an All Black legend of the past, big kicking fullback Don Clarke is crying.
To the All Black players who have just won the first ever series victory for New Zealand in South Africa, he sobs, “Thank you, thank you so much for doing something we tried to do for years but couldn’t achieve.”
Read the full program for Round Five of TRC here
Sean Fitzpatrick, the captain of the 1996 team, would say a decade later, “I thought that sort of summed it up, what it meant to New Zealand.”
There’s a very simple reason South Africa and the Springboks are held in such esteem by Kiwis: For what started to feel like forever, South Africa always won. It took a lazy 45 years, and three tours for New Zealand to win a series in New Zealand, and a staggering 68 years, and six tours, to win a series in South Africa.
It’s true things changed with the professional era. South African players had been semi-mythical, feared objects of awe until they started lobbing into the country every year in Super rugby teams. Then we saw that not every South African prop was carved from granite, and not every player tackled by a South African loose forward ended in an emergency ward.
I’m not over stating how pumped up the legends were. In 1956 reputable papers in New Zealand printed a story saying Springbok prop Jaap Bekker had pushed against a solid wooden goalpost so hard at training the post snapped.
After prop Andy Macdonald had toured New Zealand in the 1965 Springbok team, we ate up stories that on his farm in Zambia he was attacked by a lion, which he wrestled with and eventually killed with his bare hands.
He actually was attacked in December, 1966, by an already wounded lion, and was mauled, but managed to kill it with a second shot.
So good old fashioned fear of being beaten, and the huge buzz if you managed to win, explains a lot about the respect and attitude New Zealand has towards South African rugby.
But just as important is the fact that Kiwis realised early that for rugby players and supporters in South Africa there was the same sense of national identity and pride in the performance of our Test rugby teams.
We were brothers under the skin in our belief that our mood could rise and fall on rugby results.
In blunt terms Kiwi sports tragics used to yearn for the winter. We were so average at Test cricket Australia would only send their Second XI to play us.
We held one cricket world record, the lowest scoring innings in a Test, 26 all out against England in 1955.
When we finally won our first Test, beating the West Indies in 1956, the media coverage made the moon landing look small cheese.
But then came the rugby season. We spent decades in the 20th century cleaning up the Home Unions at rugby. The Wallabies were taken so lightly that for several years in the 1940s the Bledisloe Cup was apparently lost, hidden away in the back of a storeroom. What did it matter? We’d always win anyway.
Unlike Australia, who every time their young backline would start to click would have their breakthrough stars lured away by chequebook raiders from league, New Zealand and South African rugby was left mostly unscathed by league scouts.
It was largely a social thing. All Blacks who went to league, usually in England, became the untouchables, banned from All Black reunions years after they’d retired. As late as 1990, when ’87 World Cup winner John Gallagher said, “I guess every man has his price”, after signing to play league with Leeds, leading Kiwi journalist Sir Terry McLean would write, “Could there be a more damning statement about a man’s character?”
There was also the feeling that South Africans, as only the Welsh did in the northern hemisphere, saw rugby as not only a game, but also as some sort of portal into a player’s character.
Moving into the professional era, a lot of those shared beliefs might have vanished, but one game cemented the rivalry for decades to come.
The 1995 Rugby World Cup final, in Johannesburg, stands alone as the most extraordinary in the history of the competition. There has never been a game like it, and it’s hard to imagine one in the future that could possibly pack in more drama.
South Africa, not just hosting, but competing in a Rugby World Cup for the first time, faced an All Black side that had set the Cup alight, a team that included the biggest star rugby has ever produced, Jonah Lomu, the kid from South Auckland who for five golden weeks transcended the sport the way Muhammad Ali had with boxing.
The late June afternoon began with the Ellis Park crowd roaring at the sight of President Nelson Mandela appearing in the stand in what we’d discover was Francois Pienaar’s Springbok jersey.
Then, out of the crystal clear, blue, high veldt sky came a high pitched sound that got louder and louder, until all 62,000 of us in the crowd were stunned when a South African Airways 747 jumbo jet, flying at a totally illegal 60 metres above the open stand, appears with “Good Luck Bokke” written under the wings.
Mandela meets the teams on the field before the game. “I saw he was in Pienaar’s jersey,” says Fitzpatrick, “and I thought. ‘Oh, oh, that’s interesting.’” The atmosphere is so electric Pienaar can’t sing the South African national anthem. He knows that if he doesn’t keep his mouth clenched shut he’ll burst into tears.
From the opening moments it’s clear this a super charged South African side, using an outside in defence to pincer Lomu on the left wing, driving him back towards tacklers on the inside. In a less technical explanation of the plan giant lock Kobus Weise tells diminutive wing James Small, who will mark Lomu, “You hang on to him, and I’ll get there and mess him up.”
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After 80 minutes the score is tied 9-all. They have to play two 10 minute blocks of extra time. The mood in the All Blacks is actually positive. But so is the mood in the South African camp.
For 20 minutes they slug it out. Andrew Mehrtens kicks a penalty, 12-9 to the All Blacks. Joel Stransky kicks a penalty, 12-all. Seven minutes from the end Stransky drops a goal, 15-12. Three minutes from time Mehrtens lines up for a dropped goal, 30 metres out. The ball drifts just wide.
The whistle sounds for fulltime. Pienaar and the Springboks drop to their knees and offer a team prayer. For Fitzpatrick, “It’s horrible. You don’t know what to do.”
But three years later, having had time to reflect, Fitzpatrick says in his book ‘Turning Point’ that, “I was disappointed (about the result), but it was fantastic to be part of that final. You felt you were part of something, part of history, part of another major step in the reunification of a country.”
The rugbyhistory between the countries is remarkable. The great thing now is that despite Covid-19 new chapters are about to be written.
