Them's Fightin' Words

I hover very much around the periphery when it comes to sports in general, only really getting excited about them when World Cups come around.

It’s a huge failing I have as a man and it’s lead to a bazillion awkward conversations when well-meaning strangers ask my opinion about something sporty only to be met with an expression so blank, for a second it looks like I’ve actually died.

So I’m probably not the best-suited person to comment on anything vaguely sport-related, but none the less, I think it needs to be said that the Blue Bulls’ new away jerseys make me want to tear my eyes out.

Back in highschool there were only two sports that were offered in winter – rugby and hockey. If you played rugby you were one of the MANNE! You were one of the BOYCHAYS! You were a flippin’ TUFF OU who didn’t take no kak from nobody.

Conversely, if you played hockey, you were obviously a homosexual.

This retarded segregation lead to me opting for “social squash” as a winter sport, which I played exactly once with my dad’s wooden racquet from the 1960s which I broke in a fit of rage when I discovered how shit I as at squash.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to here is that from our early teenage years as men growing up in South Africa, it is drummed into us that playing rugby is the very pinnacle of what it means to be a man.

For years this Paleolithic classification of manliness put me off the sport entirely until Jake White lead one of the best Springbok teams I’ve ever seen to victory at the 2007 Rugby World Cup.

Watching that team literally mow down the competition along the road to victory gave me a new respect for rugby because holy shit, those guys were running onto the field, game after game, like a buncha fucking berserker warriors, and destroying EVERYTHING!

You’d have to be a robot or something not to feel inspired watching South Africa dismantle the teams we came up against – it was blood for blood by the gallon and by god, we were ready for war.

Since then I no longer fall into a waking coma when someone switches the rugby on because professional rugby players are tough as nails and while the finer points of the game are still lost on me, I get a kick out of watching ous getting chewed up in bone-crunching tackles and steamrolling the opposition to score tries against impossible odds.

I don’t think there is a sport on this earth where the players put their bodies on the line like they do in rugby (with the possible exception of ice hockey) so why the fuck would you dress those players in the pinkest uniforms I’ve seen outside of a gay pride march?!

Sure, I know what you’re thinking – the notion that pink is not a manly colour is ridiculously sexist, small-minded and prescriptive and that I’m no better than the guys back in highschool who thought all hockey players were gay.

But still, there are certain things that are burned into our consciousness from a very young age, certain basic associations we make that stick for life. One of which (in Western society anyway) is that blue is for boys and pink is for girls.

Of course any half-intelligent reader will stop me at this point with the inevitable “the fact that YOU aren’t comfortable with a team of rugby player wearing genitalia-pink jerseys says more about YOUR insecurities as a man than it does theirs” to which I’ll respond by saying “well done” while I pat you on the head because this is not about me.

This is about a team who, while they might not have been the favourites to win against the unbeaten Stormers, still took a good 40 minutes to get on the scoreboard after a disappointing first half.

There’s no denying they fought tooth-and-nail in the second half as they drew level with the Stormers, but where was that same single-minded determination in the first half?

It was in the changeroom where they left it the minute they jogged out on the field pinker than a My Little Pony themed birthday party.

Confidence in sport is everything and sure all chauvinistic stigma aside pink is just a colour, but I’d be willing to bet good money that at least a handful of Bulls players on Saturday ran onto that field thinking “I can’t fucking believe I’m wearing this…”

-ST