Reggie and me, p.30
Reggie and Me, page 30
‘Why the hell are you in such a rush?’ asked Stuart as he buttered his second piece of toast.
‘The trial invites are up today!’ Hamish exclaimed, as though there wasn’t a person in the world who didn’t know this.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Julia, but Hamish was already out of the kitchen and packing his tog bag.
‘It means the guys who’ll be invited to the trials for the firsts and seconds go up today,’ explained Roger.
Stuart sighed and set down his butter knife. ‘I fear a large disappointment coming the way of your brother.’
‘Is Hamish going to play for the firsts?’ asked Julia, who, by no design of her own, was the most rugby-knowledgeable junior-school pupil at Brighton College.
When Hamish Fraser saw his name at the bottom of the list, albeit in a manner that suggested an afterthought, he was beside himself. Roger was standing with the who’s who of the Form IV class, four of whom were also on the list.
‘Rog! Rog!’ Hamish blurted, looking up at his brother. ‘I made it! I’m on the list!’
‘Well done, Hamish!’ Roger smiled as a few giggles went around the group.
‘Trials are next week Wednesday!’ Hamish turned and made to jog away, but tripped on a book bag and sprawled at the feet of some Form IIIs.
‘Enjoy your trip, Fraser,’ someone laughed.
For the rest of the week, Hamish was unable to concentrate on anything other than the rugby trials. His training increased in intensity – he destroyed four rose bushes and broke a window practising his box kicks in the garden.
At break on Wednesday morning, Hamish made his way down to the field alone. He walked out into the centre and looked up at the College’s magnificent façade. A few months previously, a motivational speaker had come to talk to the Matric body on ‘Your Goals through Visualisation’. Mr Ron Dervish had been dressed in a perfectly tailored but slightly shiny blue suit, with not a hair out of place.
‘You have to see your goals in your mind’s eye,’ he’d crooned. ‘You’ve got an eye in the middle of your forehead – the all-seeing eye.’ Ron Dervish looked wistfully to the back of the auditorium. ‘You wanna win? You gotta see yourself win. You wanna be a success? You gotta see your success.’ He’d tapped his all-seeing eye.
Hamish Fraser had been seeing himself in the blue first XV jersey for as long as he knew it existed. As far as visualisation went, he was willing to bet that he’d visualised himself in that jersey more often and in more scenarios than any other soul before or after. If Ron Dervish was correct, Hamish would not just be playing one game for the first XV, he’d be captaining the side from scrum half.
He sat cross-legged in the centre of the field, took a deep breath, closed his eyes and engaged his all-seeing eye.
Hamish is standing at the base of a scrum, a golden number nine on his back. The ball dribbles to the feet of the number eight. Hamish whips it off the ground and it rifles straight and true into the arms of Johnny Goodenough, standing at fly half.
Hamish is making a try-saving tackle on the King James wing as the College roars with admiration.
Hamish is breaking around the blind-side of a scrum. He evades the loose forwards, chips over the defending wing, collects his own kick and runs around to score under the poles.
At lunch, Hamish forced himself to eat a bit of rice and drink some sweet coffee for energy. He sat, as always, with his Zulu classmates, three of whom had also been invited to the trials. Robert Gumede had declined his invitation on account of an intense dislike for Mr van Zyl and very little affection for the game of rugby. Andile Ntunjwa would almost certainly make the hooker berth his own, and John Radatso was blisteringly fast on the wing.
Down on the field at two-thirty, it was a hot afternoon. Mr van Zyl and Mr McLintock surveyed the boys as they ran two warm-up laps. Some were horsing about, others lost in contemplation over how best to impress the coaches or outplay a rival for the coveted blue kit. Hamish ran at the back of the group, heart racing. His boots were perfectly polished, shorts clean, socks tied neatly in place and maroon practice jersey tucked in.
The first two teams of the trials were called out. These were the boys on the fringes of selection, and Hamish was assigned the scrum-half berth in one of the teams.
Gone were the days of leather balls. A synthetic white pill was drop-kicked and collected by one of the locks, who charged forward to take contact. Hamish arrived at the ensuing ruck to clear the ball to his fly half. Mr van Zyl was a fan of the dive pass and so a dive pass Hamish gave him: the ball plopped out of the ruck, Hamish put his hands on it, glanced towards his fly half and dived. At that moment, Neil Long, in an attempt to free himself from the pile of bodies on the floor, lifted his heavy left leg. As Hamish let go of the ball – body flying horizontally – his forehead collected Neil Long’s left knee. The ball rocketed into the arms of the fly half and play continued – for twenty-nine of the thirty players.
When Hamish woke up, his vision was blurred and there were three medics peering over him, one calling loudly for a stretcher.
He closed his eyes.
Not for the first time in his life, Hamish spent the afternoon alternating between bouts of vomiting and lying in the foetal position. It took three days for him to recover from the concussion. The family doctor, who expressed surprise that an individual so constructed should be playing rugby at all, booked him off sport for a month, which meant Hamish played no further part in any trials – not for those of the thirds and fourths, or for those of the fifths and sixths.
In May 1994, Hamish returned to the rugby field for the first time since his second major concussion. For the first match of the winter term, he was placed in the sixth XV, the lowest open age-group side. It was a bitter pill to swallow – yet there he was at eight o’clock in the morning, in the bitter cold under a scudding grey sky, about to take the field for the sixths against St Steven’s. They didn’t even have a full team – on the wings were two co-opted hockey players who’d fancied a bit of a run before their match.
Perhaps the worst part of that Saturday was that Roger, a year younger and nowhere near as interested in rugby, was playing for the fourth XV. By the end of the day, Roger would be reserve flank for the thirds.
Hamish’s match indicated at least one thing – he had no business operating behind the sixth XV scrum. The fly half for the day caught three passes that came his way; the rest just smacked into his chest and left him winded. He stood further and further from Hamish as the game progressed, terrified by the speed with which the ball shot at him from Hamish’s diving form.
At half-time there was something of a conflagration in the Trinity huddle.
‘Fraser, man, pass the ball softer!’ said the extremely bright but less than sporty member of the Matric class, who was playing fly half merely out of a sense of duty.
‘This is how I pass,’ snapped Hamish. ‘That’s the pass a real fly half wants!’
‘Fraser, this is the sixths, not the fucking All Blacks,’ said a lanky and disinterested lock. ‘Stop being such a doos. We’re all doing our best.’
‘No, you aren’t,’ Hamish whined. ‘You okes just don’t care!’
The scrum half’s less-than-inspirational attempt to chivvy his side into some sort of enthusiasm did a lot to account for the twenty-point deficit the sixths ended with that cold May morning.
The next week, Hamish was promoted to the fifths – there was no sixth-team game and the incumbent fifth XV scrum half had asked to be excused. During the week, Stuart had called his eldest into the study for a serious word.
‘Hamish,’ began the father, ‘wurd has reached me via Roger, who was approached by a few boys in the fifths and sixths, that there is general unhappiness with your attitude.’
‘My attitude?’ said Hamish, gobsmacked. ‘I try harder than everyone else in the squad!’
‘Someone described you, and I quote here, as “an arrogant little prick who thinks he’s too good for the rest of us”.’
Silence hung for a while.
‘You need to understand that those boys don’t live for rugby like you do. The best thing you can do to impress the coaches is put your head down and play as hard as you can.’
‘But, Dad, I’ve tried so hard for this and now I’m in the sixths! The rest of the team is making me look like a fool! Roger doesn’t even care about rugby and there he is playing for the fourths – and the thirds!’
‘Hamish!’ snapped Stuart. ‘You’re behaving like an ass! No one can make you look like a fool except you, and you are doing a great job of it!’
The sound of Tina placing dinner on the hot tray filtered through.
‘You think it really matters in the greater scheme of things which team you play for? You’ve lost perspective completely. Rugby is for fun, camaraderie and fitness – nothing else. The wurld is filled with tragedy, death and sickness, and here you are worried about how hard your teammates play a meaningless rugby match. Think how many people died in Natal in the run-up to the elections! Get a grip on yourself!’ Now Stuart was shouting. ‘Get out! Go and think about your attitude and what’s actually important.’
Hamish stalked past Tina as she loaded the bowl of peas onto the hot tray.
‘Dinner’s ready, Hamish,’ she said. ‘Please go and tell Mummy.’
Hamish sighed. ‘Ag, ja, okay,’ he snapped. Then the penny dropped, and a horrible feeling of self-loathing washed over him. ‘Sorry, Gogo – yes, I’ll tell everyone. Thank you for supper.’
But it was too late and Tina left without a word.
That Saturday, Hamish acquitted himself well – he kept his temper and passed well. There was an injury in the fourths and so the week after that he found himself playing in the fourth XV – with Roger.
Roger was playing number eight, so when the side lined up to take the field, the Frasers were standing next to each other. As they waited, he looked to the side to see his father sitting on the terraces, smiling. He raised a fist at his eldest son. Hamish waved, tears welling in his eyes – he felt a tremendous sense of pride and joy to be taking the field with Roger. His brother, now approaching six feet, turned and looked down at his older sibling.
‘You alright, Hamish? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, Rog. Good luck!’
With that, the whistle blew and the team ran on.
Hamish played well by the lowly standards of the fourths. He passed accurately, kicked a conversion and scored a try off a penalty when he caught the St David’s forwards napping. The highlight came when he broke to the blind side of a ruck. His peripheral vision caught Roger’s unique, hunch-backed running style way out on the wing. The bigger Fraser yelled for the ball. It was not a pass many fourth team members could have achieved, but Roger, who’d suffered under Hamish’s merciless practice regime, knew that if there was one person in the team capable of flinging the pill that far, it was Hamish. The white ball rifled twenty metres over the heads of the opposition and his own team, and into his brother’s arms. Roger rounded a defender and scored in the corner.
After the game, Hamish played the move over and over in his mind’s eye, feeling a deep sense of satisfaction. Curiously, he didn’t mention it afterwards. He just patted Roger on the back and told him well done, perhaps realising that trying to relive the moment through its telling may, in some way, taint the perfect memory of it.
As Hamish’s final season of school rugby progressed, he cemented his position in the fourths and played once for the thirds when Spencer Trotter had diarrhoea. He also slowly began to accept that he’d never don the beloved all-blue kit of the first XV and, while it was a bitter disappointment, he attempted – sometimes successfully – to put the failure in perspective.
The last match of the season was against King James – Goliath versus David all over again, except in this case David normally had his backside handed to him by Goliath. There was talk that the 1994 Trinity firsts might actually have a chance.
Catastrophe struck in the week preceding the match. An influenza epidemic ravaged Trinity, cutting a swathe through the rugby and hockey ranks such that the total number of available players nearly made Mr McAdams cancel the Saturday fixture. In the end, Trinity was only able to field three rugby and two hockey sides – and Hamish found himself in the third XV. The Thursday before the match, he was called by Mr van Zyl to attend the last part of the firsts and seconds practice – Hamish would have to be the reserve second XV scrum half.
The firsts and seconds were running their moves against each other. Hamish took the ball and prepared to feed it into a seconds’ scrum. Bradford York, into his second year as the first XV scrum half, sized Hamish up and saw that he was shaking with nerves.
‘Fraser, just pass the ball like you always do and you’ll be fine – it’s all the same.’
Hamish was not used to such kind words, and he smiled. ‘Thanks, Brad.’
From behind the first XV scrum came a familiar voice: ‘Fraser the fish.’ The flu had placed Robert Gumede where he always should have been– anchoring the scrum for the best team in the school. While he’d always been stocky, Gumede was now also a touch over six feet. The recalcitrant Zulu had refused all offers and threats to join higher teams, and no one was surprised that, up to the last match, the thirds remained undefeated that year. Gumede had enjoyed playing in the thirds, but for his final match he would don the blue.
‘Fraser,’ yelled Mr van Zyl, ‘put the ball in! This is not the fourths any more!’
Hamish turned, fed the ball under his hooker’s feet, ran around to the back of the scrum and delivered a perfect pass to Philip Cobbler, the fly half.
Fifteen minutes later, the practice ended. It wasn’t expected that Hamish would actually have to play for the seconds – his attendance was simply a precaution.
Saturday dawned crisp and bright. Unusually, Hamish didn’t have to be at school in time to break the frost on the field because the thirds would play at ten o’clock (technically still the first game of the day because there were no lower teams).
The King James thirds were merciless and well drilled. They hammered their private-school counterparts. Hamish played well when Trinity had the ball, passing accurately and fast, and clearing for touch a few times. His concussions, however, had made him reticent to put his head in the way of too many flying King James knees, so his contribution to the defensive effort was below par.
The seconds fared marginally better than the thirds. Halfway through the second half, an up-and-coming Form IV and incumbent second XV scrum half was carried off with a broken tibia – the bone snapped clean through, so that it looked like he had two ankles. One of the medics passed out on seeing it, and the game was delayed by the search for a second stretcher.
Hamish was ecstatic to play the last fifteen minutes of the second XV game – by far the loftiest rugby position he’d ever held on a rugby field. He played well, breaking once to the blind side and then sending a perfectly weighted chip over the head of the defending wing for his fullback to collect and then dot down for one of his team’s two tries.
So it was that, due to disease and injury, Hamish Fraser found himself facing Mr van Zyl at the end of the seconds’ game. The coach took Hamish aside and, with a look of pain in his eyes, told Hamish that he, as the second of only two remaining open age-group scrum halves in the entire school, would have to sit on the bench for the first XV.
‘Fraser – this is a fu … very important game, see. We have a chance today. You just need to sit on the bench.’ The rugby master paled visibly at the thought. ‘Let’s hope you aren’t needed.’ Then he handed Hamish a folded navy jersey, some navy shorts and a pair of navy socks.
The boy’s face lit up, his braces gleaming in the sunlight as he unfolded the all-blue kit.
‘Hey!’ yelled Mr van Zyl, grabbing the jersey away. ‘You don’t just put that thing on! You’re only allowed to wear the blue if you go onto the field. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Put the shorts and socks on – the blue is for those who play.’
The first XV match was an absolute cracker. While the flu had decimated most of the school, many of the regular Trinity firsts had escaped and there were a few key King James stalwarts either sick or injured. In the last game of rugby he would ever play, Robert Gumede decided to make an effort, delivering a performance of controlled aggression, strength and courage such that by halftime he was the de facto captain of the side. The spectating boys of the College roared his name as he made tackle after tackle, thwarting the efforts of the skilled King James backs.
At half-time, the scores were level at twelve all. Trinity had scored no tries but the unerring accuracy of Johnny Goodenough’s boot kept his team level. Hope began to ripple through the Trinity boys and watching parents. Mr McAdams, sitting with the King James headmaster, was silent – he’d sat through countless matches like this, graciously acknowledging defeat. Now, perhaps for the first time in his twelfth and final year as Trinity headmaster, he would leave victorious. He began to imagine the post-match tea not, as was normally the case, hearing how Trinity had tried hard but they really weren’t a rugby school. He dared to dream of egg sandwiches and Earl Grey accompanied by a stream of congratulations from the assembled staff and parents.
The second half exploded into life with the King James team determined not to fall like Goliath. They tore into the Trinity boys with renewed gusto, but Paul Simpson’s half-time talk and Robert Gumede’s tireless mangling of every attack inspired the team to new heights.
Hamish watched all of this from his position on the bench, not once letting go of the precious blue jersey in his hands. The other four reserves were wearing theirs – they’d all been capped for the firsts at one time or another. Only Hamish sat in his maroon match jersey – the same one he’d owned since Form I (at least it fit him now). While the rest leapt up and down with the ebb and flow of the match, Hamish watched Bradford York for any signs of injury or distress.
