Two
I first got to know Dobbo over a long and very pleasant lunch at the Vineyard Hotel towards the end of 2009. He had already begun training the UCT first team for the 2010 Varsity Cup which kicked off on 1 February. This was to be his last stint at coaching the team and he wanted to go out with a bang. In the two years since the inception of the Varsity Cup, UCT had been pipped to the post by the University of Stellenbosch. This year, Dobbo was determined that the Cup should be won by his alma mater.
In his early 40s, bald with bright blue eyes, I found him excellent company: clever and well read with an anarchic sense of humour. What drew me most was that beneath the apparent lightness ran a darkly fierce current. It seemed to be either chanelled into, or springing from, rugby. I was never quite sure which.
Over grilled fish and tangy sauvignon blanc in the Vineyard's glorious gardens, I asked Dobbo where it all began. Initially, at least, he says, it was with his father, Paul Dobson, legendary Latin and rugby master at Bishops. Paul Dobson was driven by two religions: Catholicism and rugby. It was the latter that took stronger root in his son.
Because he taught at Bishops, Paul Dobson could get free board and tuition for his son, so Dobbo - and I use his rugby nickname here - was a boarder there from Grade R to post-matric. The school, as much as anything, shaped him. Rugby is very important at Bishops.
'In my final report, the headmaster said: "John did very well. He won the history prize and the writing prize, but his greatest desire was to play rugby for the first team." He was absolutely right. I couldn't care less about academics or anything like that. At Bishops, you've got other competitive sports like cricket and hockey, but, you'd get 10 000 people at a first team rugby game. At a hockey game, you'd get 20 parents, an ice cream seller and a packet of raisins. And once you realise that, it's what defines you.
'School was clearly divided between the minority of boys who weren't interested at all, and the majority who supported the system. The first team captain - which I wasn't - was an absolute hero.'
Dobson understands the pain and failure of rejection. 'Dropping a guy is quite cruel, actually. It has a big effect on people. I know that. In my first year at senior rugby, I didn't make the first team, and I felt a deep sense of shame about that.'
Once you make the first team, however, everything changes. 'Everyone knows who you are. Everyone likes you and respects you. If you win the history prize, no one cares, so you feel insecure about yourself. I suppose rugby was the remedy. If you're in the first team, you can talk to girls afterwards. You can talk to a Herschel girl, which you can't do if you are playing in the fourth team. It's tragic, I know, but it's absolutely true. I did a post-matric in order to play another year of rugby for Bishops.'
The acme of any year is the biannual derby with Rondebosch Boys' High, traditionally Bishops' biggest rival. I went to one. The Rondebosch and Bishops boys each massed in their respective stands, in their school uniforms, singing their hearts out for their teams. It was, unusually, a nice Cape Town winter's day, and literally thousands of parents and old boys stood and sat in the sunshine, transfixed by the vision of these schoolboys at each others' throats. Bishops won by a good margin, and after the game was over, all the Bishops boys, followed by a few hundred old boys, swarmed onto the field, forming a huge circle around their conquering heroes.
This scene is played out every year all over the country: massive derbies that usually boil down to duels between two ancient rivals: Michaelhouse vs Hilton; Affies vs Pretoria Boys' High; Gimmies vs Volkies in Potchestroom. Their followers - families, several generations of old boys, gangs of nubile girls from sister schools - gather faithfully each year. Chops and wors are braaied over huge fires. Moms sell tea and home-made cake while dads fuel up in the beer tents.
It's a fun-filled day in the sun for the whole family yet, despite the fact that it is officially a school event, there is an edge, a sexiness to it, due to the extreme physicality of the game and the passionate intensity of the competition between the rival schools. Schoolboy rugby is high-impact, cutting-edge entertainment. I know, from having spoken to many of them, that it is intoxicating for the players. I remark on this to Dobbo and he nods vigorously.
'You can imagine the pressure on that youngster. All you want to do is play in front of that crowd; to have that rush.'
The catch, he says, is its transience. 'The tragedy for the boys who have put their all into this throughout their school years is that it all disappears in a flash after that final derby, never to be repeated. The next year, there's nothing. It's absolutely gone. After the last game - in my case, Bishops vs Rondebosch - that's it. The next thing is you've got to report to a club and play in front of 20 people on a grim, windy afternoon somewhere out on the Cape Flats, so you can see why that last school game is, for some guys, their defining moment.
'I used to work with a guy who is now 68 and who was a very talented player. He played for his school, then for UCT and then for Western Province. He got used to playing in front of 40 000 people. Everybody knew him. There were lots of kudos, lots of drinks. He never moved on, however. He didn't finish his studies. He remains defined by being a Western Province player. That was his crowning moment and nothing that has happened since has come close to matching it. I've got some friends who are still living in 1986, when we played our last game for Bishops.'
Nothing has changed, he says. If anything, schools rugby is even stronger.
By now our plates have been emptied. A waiter comes to remove them and refill our wine glasses. Dobbo asks: 'Is this okay?'
'It's great,' I say. 'Keep talking.'
'Well,' he says, 'at UCT now, I get a lot of students coming to me who are really good players and really good guys, but all they really want to do is recreate what they had at school. So many South Africans remain defined by that experience, even those who are overseas. If you meet a guy for the first time, he will ask: what school did you go to? When you name the school, he asks which team you played for. Your answer to that question defines whether you are in or out, because schools rugby is so strong, stronger than it's ever been. Everyone wants to be part of that.
'Every year, in the schools rugby season, we run a schools' Top 20 chart on rugby365.com (the website Dobson owns), and it gets the most hits of any story. It's all old boys. So, if you meet a bloke and he says he comes from Joburg and you say: 'The Lions are shit, hey,' he'll just say: 'Ja.' If he tells you he went to Wits and you say: 'Wits rugby is shit, hey,' he'll just say: 'Ja', but if he tells you he went to KES and you criticise KES rugby, your life could be in jeopardy. That is why two South African teams are the top in the world - because of the strength of schools rugby.'
He pauses, gazing up at the shadows slowly darkening the slopes of Table Mountain. 'The thing with rugby now is that it's at a crossroads: it's becoming like American football where you don't play unless you are professional. There are no guys playing social American football at club level. They play for their college and they get their homecoming queen and then they either stop or they sign up for Texas State or something. Rugby here is almost at that level. In the old days, you'd play right through. Now, because school is so hyped and club rugby is so poor, lots of guys stop after school. The logical thing would be for a guy who played at school to play for his province: play for Western Province against Griquas at Newlands. That's what they are driving towards and a lot of them end up being very disappointed.'
To his credit, Dobbo took the windy afternoon on the Cape Flats option after he finished post-matric, swapping the elegant and expansive playing fields at Bishops for the scruffy pitches of Elsies River. 'It was a bit of a change,' he said. 'I'd been used to climbing into someone's dad's BMW to get to away matches. At Elsies River, the guys would come straight off night shift to play. They came in taxis, on bicycles, on foot. Guys didn't have boots, or their boots were held together with tape. It was quite a sobering experience. The cliché is that all rugby men are the same. That's a fallacy. You can't be the same when you are playing under such different conditions. In Elsies River, you'd hear gunshots and police sirens while you were playing, but the effort those guys made to play rugby was quite humbling, especially if you had come from Bishops. They were so passionate about rugby. I could never have played straight after finishing a nightshift.
'Those guys were very good to me. This was before Mandela was released. All the clubs were racially-based - whites, coloureds, Muslims, Africans. I was the only white guy playing for Elsies River, and the reaction to me when we were playing mostly white clubs was a bit depressing. They'd have a go at me: who is this guy playing with the Hotnots? It was quite sweet because our guys used to protect me, especially the props.
'I played for them for a whole season and it was great fun. Truth be told, if I had really made a good fist of it, I would have stayed on, but I was quite keen to scuttle back to the ivory tower.'
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