Contents

Acknowledgements 8 Foreword by John Mitchell 10

1. Sowing Seeds Our farm in Zimbabwe and early rugby moulding 13 2. No Longer Welcome Time to flee our ‘homeland’ 30 3. Making Peace Reflections by the sea 43 4. A Fresh Start New life in Brisbane before a calling to the west 51 5. Laying Foundations My early years in Perth amid African callings 72 6. Def ning Moments My Test debut and a new worldview 86 7. Battling Demons Personal challenges and the EightyTwenty focus 96 8. An Untimely Injury My Rugby World Cup dream is almost shattered 111

Openside_ Internals FINAL.indd 6 28/10/11 1:01:37 PM 9. Rising Again Returning from injury and charity challenges 124 10. Creating Heroes Back to and the birth of Heroes 137 11. Wake-up Calls Samoa shock and an All Black lesson in Auckland 151 12. Changing Tide Victory in and Tri-Nations triumph in Brisbane 166 13. Game On A memorable Maori welcoming before victory over Italy 179 14. Injury Frustrations Shock loss to Ireland before the USA fronted up 193 15. A Welcome Relief My return against Russia and victory over the Springboks 204 16. A Temporary Ending Semi-final loss will make us better for next time 220

Re lections 239

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y first memory of the Rugby World Cup is pumping his fist as he scored against Australia in the opening Mmatch of the 1995 tournament in . I have great memories of watching the 1995 final between the Springboks and All Blacks on TV at my grandfather’s farm in the Lowveld in Zimbabwe— the plane flying over the stadium, Nelson Mandela being at the game, and the Springboks in the final. ‘... van der Westhuizen to Stransky, Stransky for the drop goal’— straight through the posts. I can still remember my dad, Andy, throwing his empty coffee mug in the air in joy. What a day—that’s Rugby World Cup! I started playing rugby in Grade 3 at Midlands Christian School in Gweru, a city near the centre of Zimbabwe, in Midlands Province. I had been throwing a ball around for as long as I can remember though and Mum tells me I used to sleep with my rugby ball as a kid. There’s a photo of me somewhere at about two months old trying to reach for a ball that was just out of my grasp—it was obviously a pretty strong impulse. Halfway through my first day of training with the Grade 3s, I was sent to train with the Grade 5s and I played in the Grade 5 Colts team for the rest of the year. I loved it. If we ever went anywhere—to a friend’s house for dinner,

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my grandfather’s farm for the weekend or away on holiday—the rugby ball would come with us. My two brothers and I would kick the grip off it and we’d play with the bald bladder-looking ball until the inevitable day when it was kicked too far or mis-kicked into a thorn tree. People often ask me if I played rugby in Zimbabwe. Rugby is played in most schools there and it has always been very competitive and of a pretty decent standard. Zimbabwe played in the 1987 and 1991 Rugby World Cups but has failed to qualify since then. Top players have often moved south of the border to play rugby in South Africa or further afield. Notable Zimbabwean players include Adrian Garvey, Gary Teichman, Tendai ‘the Beast’ Mtawararira and arguably two of the fastest men in rugby—Tonderai Chavhanga and Takudzwa ‘Zee’ Ngwenya. Tonderai got six tries on debut for the Springboks, and Takudzwa scored that memorable ‘try of the tournament’ for the USA, when he outpaced Bryan Habana against the Springboks at the in France. We were lucky enough to have a satellite dish out on our farm and could get South African TV, including Supersport, which showed every game for the , South Africa’s regional competition. And I would try and watch every game. I used to spend hours and hours watching rugby. Whether it was Griquas v Eastern Province or a big clash like Western Province against Natal , I’d try and pick up little things that certain players did or moves that came off. I’d write them down and then try and use them for the school team. I didn’t miss too many Springbok games either—often we would go to a friend’s place where we’d have a big braai (barbeque) and watch the game in the evening. I will admit, though, that when there were a lot of people there I hardly ever watched the game on TV—the opportunity to play rugby out on the grass with my mates was far more appealing. These games inevitably started as touch rugby but soon morphed into full-on contact, complete with rucks and mauls, and grass burns to

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remember the game by. It was always a case of laying claim to being your favourite player, and then you got to play as him for the game. I usually got in early, telling everyone that I was Bob Skinstad. I didn’t grow up thinking, ‘Wow, my family is a rugby family so I’ll be good at it’. But my dad and my grandfather say that every generation had excelled. My pop (Mum’s dad) was a keen rugby player and had a lot of talent, but chose to pursue his studies, becoming an Air Force pilot and then eventually building up a very successful citrus farm in Zimbabwe. The land was classified as ‘unfit for human habitation’ but he bulldozed it from bare thorn bushes and scrub anyway. I love listening to his stories of starting the farm, with so many unknowns, he was really just beginning with a dream and seeing where it would lead, building it slowly over time with a lot of hard work. My uncle now runs it, which has been a very tough job given the political and economic situation that Zimbabwe has been in for the last ten years. My dad, Andy, was a very good rugby player in his day too, but he also chose to study and then move back to the family farm. Dad says that things were very different back then because rugby never offered you the option of making a living and it took second place once he, and I imagine many like him, left school. Even though he couldn’t keep playing, Dad sure passed on that love of rugby to his sons. I’m the oldest of three boys. Mike’s about eighteen months younger than me and Steve is four years younger. They are such good brothers: always keen for an adventure, not afraid of a bit of competition and they both love the outdoors. I sometimes feel sorry for my mother, Jane, who had to live in a house with three boys and my father. But Dad always says, with a chuckle, ‘Your mum’s fine, Dave, she married well.’ My brothers and I were forever playing hockey or rugby in the backyard. Or we’d play WWF (after the World Wrestling Federation, not the World Wildlife Fund), a sort of wrestling free-for-all where we

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would practise moves that we had seen on TV, but this only happened when Mum would go into town without us. When Mum came home, we’d hastily put the cushions back on the couches. She’d ask us, ‘Boys, have you been wrestling?’ at which point we’d lie and say that we hadn’t. We were terrible liars and I’m sure we didn’t fool her. We were under strict instruction not to watch wrestling on TV. It was ‘too violent’ and got us ‘too wound up’. I’m certain Mum knew full well that we wrestled (she had caught us more than a few times and it’s hard to cover things up when it ends in tears or a blood nose) but she turned a blind eye. Mike’s not doing so much wrestling anymore—he has almost finished university. He’s been studying construction management and got a job in the field after doing some prac work for a company. He’s really the handiest, most helpful guy you’d ever meet. At his 21st birthday party, the guys who made speeches all spoke about Mike being there for them during the hard times in their lives—that’s Mike through and through. Whenever I have a project at home that needs doing I’ll send him photos and a flurry of questions about how best to make it happen and he always has the answers. Back on the farm in Zimbabwe I would spend hours devising traps to capture wild birds or monkeys or the genets that lived in our roof (I did release them, but it was a lot of fun). Mike would inevitably help with the building of the trap from a sketch meticulously drawn on graph paper to a trap ready to carry down the hill from our house to where we wanted to set it up. Steve’s the youngest. I sometimes forget how young he is because he’s really mature for his age. He came over to Perth for a few months after finishing school at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010. He was at the Western Force Academy and doing really well. He’s a bit taller than me and also played on the flank. It was so good getting to spend that time together and sort of get to know one another again after years of being separated by most of Australia. We had some great

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times swagging in Margaret River, skinny dipping at various Perth beaches at midnight, surfing and just hanging out. At the beginning of 2011, Steve found out he couldn’t continue playing rugby because of a niggling back injury. It was a tough time for him. He ended up heading to Africa for a few months and spending time on our grandfather and uncle’s game farm, which is next to their citrus farm. Steve was there when my uncle was arrested by the police and locked up for the night. My grandfather had received a ‘letter of no interest’ from the Zimbabwean government after he bought the farm, which means that the government wouldn’t be forcing them off the land. However, with my uncle’s arrest, it seemed they had changed their mind. My uncle and grandfather eventually won a case against the government in the High Court, allowing them to keep the farm.When Steve returned, he enrolled at uni, in psychology and anthropology, and has been studying and writing his own book about his experiences when we left Zimbabwe and the following years. He doesn’t think he’ll publish it but it is more just for him to get it all out and has been a somewhat therapeutic experience. I think having three boys was just what Dad needed. He often says that when he got home on his motorbike from working on the farm we would often get him to kick ‘up-and-unders’ to us in the garden. ‘Just 100 kicks Dad, only 100. Then we can go inside. Please, it’s getting dark’, we would beg him. My poor dad. He had amazing patience with us boys and spent a lot of time with us outdoors, whether it was kicking a rugby ball or playing hockey in the garden after school, or showing us how to de-worm sheep, or trusting us with the bakkie (ute) on the farm from when we were ten or eleven. During my childhood on the farm, I kicked ’s drop- goal through our makeshift home-made goalposts hundreds of times. Then I’d retrieve the ball from the chicken run if it was a really good strike or from the passionfruit vine or bamboo if it just made it

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over—we always argued about who would retrieve the ball from there. Because it was just next to the chicken run there were usually a few snakes hanging out to feast on eggs or one of my bantam chickens, or even one of the bigger layers if it was an African rock python. When it was a wayward kick, we would have to remove it cautiously from the bougainvillea, which sometimes meant a puncture in our already bald ball—rugby balls weren’t cheap so we used to cut the stitching and patch the inner up with a bicycle puncture kit and then, with help from Mum, stitch the ball back together. Despite all the time spent playing and practising, I hardly missed a game Western Province was in—they were my favourite team in the Currie Cup. Their team boasted players like , Pieter Rossouw (also known as Slaap Chips or ‘the intercept king’), , Corne Krige, Braam van Straaten and, of course, Bob Skinstad—I loved watching him play. My second favourite team was Natal Sharks, mostly because my mum’s brother, A.I., was such a die-hard Sharks supporter and they had a great brand of rugby. The Sharks included guys like the Rolls Royce of fullbacks, Andre Joubert, plus James Small, Gary Teichmann and the crunching defender Henry Honiball—the best defensive fly-half in world rugby, my dad and I would agree. We also enjoyed watching Kevin Putt, the feisty halfback, either ‘helping’ the referee or quarrelling with opposing players. I spent hours with my dad and my brothers watching rugby. From a young age I had no real doubt in my mind that one day I would be out there—I would be playing in the Currie Cup, playing rugby for the Springboks. Imagine playing for Western Province in the Currie Cup? Imagine running out at Newlands? Imagine playing against a team like the —‘die Blou Bulle’? For my grandfather, who went to boarding school in , the Bulls were his favourite team. Maybe he would come and watch me? I daydreamed about it quite a bit. There were no limits to my dreams

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and I am very grateful that my parents never once said I should be realistic or that I was being silly dreaming such things. I went from being an ardent Springbok supporter to following the Wallabies and wanting to play for them one day. Desperately wanting to play for them. I eventually became obsessed about doing everything I could to improve as a rugby player and eventually became so focused on my training and eating Mum took me to see a psychologist because I had become impossible to get through to. This didn’t really help so Mum took me to a sports dietician and she helped me readjust the way I thought about eating and become less focused on being so lean. It seems very odd thinking about it now, but, of course, that’s not the whole story. My dad was a farmer, but he was also a teacher, and someone who set high standards for himself and the work he did on the farm. This inevitably gave us a very disciplined upbringing. I clearly remember him passionately explaining (and, at times, shouting) at the foreman and other workers back on the farm in Zimbabwe about doing ‘half- jobs’. Half-jobs were unacceptable. Fences had to be straight, tomato trellises had to be made properly, rows should be dead straight and even the seed beds had to be set out correctly. Dad and the workers had this saying on the farm, ‘number one in Zimbabwe’, and that’s what they strove to achieve. Mum worked hard too, looking after the accounts and books and keeping us three boys fed and under control. ‘If you’re going to do something, do it properly,’ Dad used to say, and Mum would back him up. We were never pushed to do sport or extracurricular activities—but if we committed to something, Mum would make sure that we saw it out to the end, no matter how many times it meant she drove to and from the farm along the strip road, then along the dodgy gravel road that never seemed to get graded, to take us to sport or choir or whatever it was. Yes, I was actually in the school choir at primary school. I still

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