What do you think?
Rate this book
Beyond the Tryline: Rugby and South African Society
135 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 24, 2012
This was my furst review in an academic journal, in The Journal of Sport History in 1997:
Ian van Zyl played in my Natal high school rugby team. He was a thinking rugby player with a real eye for the gap. The school team was very good, some of the players were provincial representatives and they made up almost all of the Zululand high schools team. When they played home games it seemed like the entire town turned out to watch.
The centrality of rugby in South African social life has often been the subject of comment, and it is usually stressed that rugby has a particular place in the Afrikaner world. Aside from its inclusion in a number of general commentaries on South African sport, little attention seems to have been given to rugby as a socio-cultural institution. Beyond the Tryline is a significant step towards correcting that gap - a gap so big that a player with only a modicum of Ian van Zyl's ability would have got through easily.
Beyond the Tryline gives extensive coverage of South Africa's rugby scene. Black rugby meets English rugby, Afrikaner nationalism greets the build up to the 1995 World Cup. Through all this, rugby is seen through a Geertzian deep play lens. It is placed alongside other social characteristics as either being informed by, or informing, nationalism, schooling, class or gender. In doing so, the collection is certainly ambitious, confronting a huge topic in a svelte form.
Grundlingh's opening essay looks at rugby in the so-called 'New' South Africa. He works his way through the tangled politics of rugby's reconciliation with itself as the (white) South African Rugby Board sought a new relationship with the (non-racial) South African Rugby Union to form the South African Rugby Football Union. Problematically, he highlighted (white) public opposition to the deals struck between the ANC and the SARFU to build a new rugby yet derides the (anti-apartheid and non-racial) South African Council on Sport for being more interested in doctrinal purity and the reconstruction of South Africa than in international sport. This is the weakest of Grundlingh's three essays, and oddly grants South African rugby considerable autonomy.
Grundlingh's second essay steps back to look at rugby's response to isolation. In doing so, however, he extends the acceptable period of isolation. He continues the notion that tours such as that by the 1986 Cavaliers from New Zealand - nearly a full strength All Black side - were 'rebel' tours. This essay is a useful attempt to show institutional rugby responses to isolation while maintaining the image that a strong anti-apartheid feeling persisted inside SARB. A discussion of the changing attitudes to the sports boycott and racialised sport would have helped. He needed to address the contradiction between acceptable mixed race national teams, and their rejection at all other levels. This argument suggests that 1970s multi-nationalism had become naturalised, yet this implication is not developed.
Grundlingh's final contribution looks at the connections between rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity. This discussion places far more emphasis on nationalism than on gender, largely because imperial gender role(s) are assumed to have been adopted. There was, however, a conscious attempt by the SARB to publicly incorporate women as supporters, which appears to be at odds with this imperial ideological role of rugby. Grundlingh is quite right to argue that the attempt to 'Afrikanerise' rugby is anti-imperial, but his failure to consider the gender implications of this shift from rugby as an imperial bond to its role in nationalist assertion significantly weakens his analysis. The essay would have been strengthened had he considered at the role of women in Afrikaner nationalism, as well as looking at the tensions between this and the place of women in Afrikaner rugby. The essay does include a useful discussion of the spread of rugby within Afrikanerdom, but greater attention to the social status of ministers and school-teachers in facilitating the dispersion of rugby to Afrikaner communities would help explain why an English sport took hold so rapidly. This explanation seems to hold well for the Cape, but it is a problem that Afrikaner rugby in Transvaal is depicted almost exclusively in terms of Pretoria: what about the spread to rural areas?
Spies and Odendaal each contribute one essay to the collection. Spies deals with rugby within white English speaking South Africa. This is a disappointing essay, lacking a clear thesis except that schools are important in the spread and development of English speaking rugby. It is too patchy and insufficiently analytical. Spies has missed a chance to consider English and Afrikaner social relations around rugby - how does the imperial heritage, and tension over apartheid formations, impact on or play through relations between white communities or attitudes to rugby? That said, it does provide a useful narrative of the growth of English rugby.
Odendaal's contribution is perhaps the most useful and significant in the collection. It is an important narrative of the development of black rugby. Despite this, it would have been strengthen by the inclusion of more about social relations of non-white rugby. He also points to tensions between SARU and SACOS over the priorities given to international contact and social transformation. A clearer statement of how these tensions were manifest and the extent to which they were resolved would have made to piece much more useful. Despite this, the essay is the most comprehensive statement on black rugby in South Africa to date.
Beyond the Tryline provides a good basis for further scholarly analysis of South African rugby and some useful ideas for those working with sports in former colonies of settlement. It is often the case that the primary treatment of any subject has a kind of sacrificial role to play in ongoing debate. Hopefully Grundlingh, Odendaal and Spies will not be too disappointed to take their place on the altar of sports' social analysis.
Ian van Zyl played in my Natal high school rugby team. He was a thinking rugby player with a real eye for the gap. The school team was very good, some of the players were provincial representatives and they made up almost all of the Zululand high schools team. When they played home games it seemed like the entire town turned out to watch.
The centrality of rugby in South African social life has often been the subject of comment, and it is usually stressed that rugby has a particular place in the Afrikaner world. Aside from its inclusion in a number of general commentaries on South African sport, little attention seems to have been given to rugby as a socio-cultural institution. Beyond the Tryline is a significant step towards correcting that gap - a gap so big that a player with only a modicum of Ian van Zyl's ability would have got through easily.
Beyond the Tryline gives extensive coverage of South Africa's rugby scene. Black rugby meets English rugby, Afrikaner nationalism greets the build up to the 1995 World Cup. Through all this, rugby is seen through a Geertzian deep play lens. It is placed alongside other social characteristics as either being informed by, or informing, nationalism, schooling, class or gender. In doing so, the collection is certainly ambitious, confronting a huge topic in a svelte form.
Grundlingh's opening essay looks at rugby in the so-called 'New' South Africa. He works his way through the tangled politics of rugby's reconciliation with itself as the (white) South African Rugby Board sought a new relationship with the (non-racial) South African Rugby Union to form the South African Rugby Football Union. Problematically, he highlighted (white) public opposition to the deals struck between the ANC and the SARFU to build a new rugby yet derides the (anti-apartheid and non-racial) South African Council on Sport for being more interested in doctrinal purity and the reconstruction of South Africa than in international sport. This is the weakest of Grundlingh's three essays, and oddly grants South African rugby considerable autonomy.
Grundlingh's second essay steps back to look at rugby's response to isolation. In doing so, however, he extends the acceptable period of isolation. He continues the notion that tours such as that by the 1986 Cavaliers from New Zealand - nearly a full strength All Black side - were 'rebel' tours. This essay is a useful attempt to show institutional rugby responses to isolation while maintaining the image that a strong anti-apartheid feeling persisted inside SARB. A discussion of the changing attitudes to the sports boycott and racialised sport would have helped. He needed to address the contradiction between acceptable mixed race national teams, and their rejection at all other levels. This argument suggests that 1970s multi-nationalism had become naturalised, yet this implication is not developed.
Grundlingh's final contribution looks at the connections between rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity. This discussion places far more emphasis on nationalism than on gender, largely because imperial gender role(s) are assumed to have been adopted. There was, however, a conscious attempt by the SARB to publicly incorporate women as supporters, which appears to be at odds with this imperial ideological role of rugby. Grundlingh is quite right to argue that the attempt to 'Afrikanerise' rugby is anti-imperial, but his failure to consider the gender implications of this shift from rugby as an imperial bond to its role in nationalist assertion significantly weakens his analysis. The essay would have been strengthened had he considered at the role of women in Afrikaner nationalism, as well as looking at the tensions between this and the place of women in Afrikaner rugby. The essay does include a useful discussion of the spread of rugby within Afrikanerdom, but greater attention to the social status of ministers and school-teachers in facilitating the dispersion of rugby to Afrikaner communities would help explain why an English sport took hold so rapidly. This explanation seems to hold well for the Cape, but it is a problem that Afrikaner rugby in Transvaal is depicted almost exclusively in terms of Pretoria: what about the spread to rural areas?
Spies and Odendaal each contribute one essay to the collection. Spies deals with rugby within white English speaking South Africa. This is a disappointing essay, lacking a clear thesis except that schools are important in the spread and development of English speaking rugby. It is too patchy and insufficiently analytical. Spies has missed a chance to consider English and Afrikaner social relations around rugby - how does the imperial heritage, and tension over apartheid formations, impact on or play through relations between white communities or attitudes to rugby? That said, it does provide a useful narrative of the growth of English rugby.
Odendaal's contribution is perhaps the most useful and significant in the collection. It is an important narrative of the development of black rugby. Despite this, it would have been strengthen by the inclusion of more about social relations of non-white rugby. He also points to tensions between SARU and SACOS over the priorities given to international contact and social transformation. A clearer statement of how these tensions were manifest and the extent to which they were resolved would have made to piece much more useful. Despite this, the essay is the most comprehensive statement on black rugby in South Africa to date.
Beyond the Tryline provides a good basis for further scholarly analysis of South African rugby and some useful ideas for those working with sports in former colonies of settlement. It is often the case that the primary treatment of any subject has a kind of sacrificial role to play in ongoing debate. Hopefully Grundlingh, Odendaal and Spies will not be too disappointed to take their place on the altar of sports' social analysis.
Displaying 1 of 1 review