Is rugby dying?

Aaron Mauger’s signing to English Premiership club the Leicester Tigers highlighted a fault line in the modern monolith that professional rugby has become. Mauger is one of the top international players in the world and the fact that he would turn his back on that international career in the prime of his rugby-playing life for an overseas stint tells us something important about what is happening in the world of professional sport.

Mauger is simply following in the footsteps of a current All Black Leon MacDonald, who left for Japan after New Zealand’s failure at the 2003 World Cup and made a return last year in order to take one more shot at being part of a World Cup-winning squad.

Mauger is doing the same thing. He is cashing out for a couple of years, earning some pounds, experiencing life overseas and afterwards he will return to New Zealand where he may want to have another bash at winning the World Cup.

If New Zealand win the World Cup this year, Mauger would have left at the height of success. A Tri-Nations champion, a Super 14 champion and a World Champion. Plus he would be heading out for a maximum paycheck in England, not as a traditional aging star looking for a buck, but as a fully-fledged rugby genius who is at the height of his powers.

If New Zealand loses the World Cup, then he would probably spend another four years doing exactly the same thing he has been doing up until now. Winning trophies which are becoming increasingly meaningless.

I am a rugby writer and I can’t really tell you who won the Tri-Nations in a given year, except for the years of 1998 and 2004, because that is when South Africa won it.

Yet my mother could tell you the results of most of the Lions’ tours since 1938, seeing her father played against them (and beat them) in that year when the world hovered on the brink of its greatest peril.

Nowadays I can’t really blame a player like Mauger for the decisions he has made. I can’t see how he could have made a shrewder one.

The bottom line is Test rugby really does not mean that much anymore. When South Africa runs out to play, the prestige is created by virtue of the fact that one expects the fifteen best South African rugby players to run through that tunnel.

That expectation has disappeared. the coach is now the star of the show, the players his pawns in a pedantic game of ‘Risk’.

When I was a little guy I remember the excitement of seeing the green and gold run out in 1992 after years of isolation. It was something distinctly special, and what I have realised since then was that its ‘specialness’ was inherent in its ‘amateurishness’.

Nowadays, and I say this respectfully and acknowledging the history behind the jersey, the green and gold is something far more kitsch.

Pieter van Zyl wears one with a ‘boep’ hanging out of it as he makes a fool of himself tackling the referee in Durban in 2002. Little kids wear it while they pretend to be Dan Carter.

Before the return of the green and gold, I was under the impression that the blue and white stripes of Western Province was as good as it got. Friday sees the kick-off of the Super 14, a game in which fluid franchises battle it out in a summer frenzy that is fuelled by media companies.

What I have discovered is that the spirit of rugby has as its anathema the spirit of professionalism. There can only be a ‘sic transit gloria’ for the Springbok jersey nowadays.

After 1995, the South African, and indeed the world rugby administration discovered that there was only one way for the game of rugby to survive in the new postmodern world. And that was professionalism.

But what they did not realize was that professionalism would slowly corrode the game, and, in 1995, something was lost forever.

All the great stories of heroism see an unlikely hero take on the mantle of greatness and of supreme sacrifice before they record feats of greatness. Whether it be a carpenter’s son in Galilee or the young peasant William Wallace in the Scotland of the Middle Ages, heroes are unlikely. They are amateur. It is their definition.

And that was the appeal of the Springbok – its ‘amateurishness’. Doctors, engineers, soldiers, construction workers, policeman, fat guys, little guys, young guys, rich guys and poor guys all united together and put on a jersey to play a game together in which they represented something, be it the local village or a country. The game in which they played mattered only because they wore that jersey. And, sure, it was only just a game. Those players would have been the first to acknowledge that, they had babies to feed and a mortgage to pay. But there is something glorious about a good game and a spot of fun with your friends.

Culturally speaking we live in the age of globalisation. The brutality of twentieth century nationalism is giving way to the profiteering expediency of the multi-national corporation.

The game matters now only because there are victories to be won, because a jersey now represents nothing but a brand and the image of that brand must be retained. The profit potential of the game was idolized to the extent that the game itself was killed. The game does not matter because of the jersey, it only matters because of the victories to be won.

And, as the victories of the Tri-Nations, the Super 14 and indeed the World Cup become increasingly hollow (see England), what life will there be left in the sport of professional Rugby Union?

Well spotted, Aaron.

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