 - The Real Thing
There’s an old rugby saying: if you’re good enough, you’re big enough. The actor Matt Damon would have to be very good indeed. In Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, Damon plays the role of 1995 Rugby World Cup winning captain Francois Pienaar. He is 5 inches shorter and 4 stones lighter – the All Blacks would snap him in half.
At 5’10” Matt Damon is also shorter than Nelson Mandela (6’1”), who in Eastwood’s film is played by Morgan Freeman (6’2”). Winning the World Cup as the shortest man in the room is the kind of exploit that Hollywood loves.
Invictus is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, which describes Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to seduce white South Africans to his vision of the Rainbow Nation. ‘Don’t address their brains,’ he said at the time, ‘address their hearts.’ And deep in the Afrikaaner heart is a love of Rugby Union.
For a potential Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, the obscurity of rugby presents a problem. What, exactly, is this strange-looking game? The bemused film critic of the Tucson Weekly described the Invictus sports action as ‘a bunch of guys groaning a lot,’ while over at the Kansas City Star rugby ‘pretty much looks like a group mugging.’
Over here, though, everything will be different. We know what rugby is supposed to look like.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen Invictus and rugby doesn’t look like this. As with any sporting setback, it’s not fair to place all the blame on the captain. Matt Damon isn’t given much of a team. His stand-in Springboks look like college boys, though not necessarily students of acting, and their emotional range is limited even for rugby players. They sometimes cross their arms to express indignation.
These are pat-a-cake Springboks led by mini-Matt Damon and they will never win the Webb-Ellis Trophy. In that sense, the casting is perfect for the formula – Nelson can lick the boys into shape. If they follow his crazy reconciling ways, then one day, perhaps at a World Cup on home soil, they will ultimately prevail.
 The Anxiety of Influence Eastwood, too, is in the business of addressing hearts and not brains. Mandela is a complicated man in a troublesome country, but as with the rugby it’s easier to keep things simple. The Mandela bio-pic soon becomes a plot-standard sports movie: he’s black, he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but can kindly ex-con Nelson Mandela inspire a bunch of undersized students to become Rugby Champions of the World?
Maybe he can, if these actor Boks show they know their rugby. I certainly hadn’t written them off in advance, especially as in America Invictus was rated PG 13, for ‘brutal sport action’.
Which is exactly what rugby should provide, when played properly. By ‘properly’, I mean as we’re used to seeing it on TV, most of the weeks of the year. To capture the full dynamism and grace of the game, and also the brutality, TV sticks to the basics. High-spec cameras follow the action.
In Invictus, because the players aren’t a patch on the real thing, the camera does exactly the opposite. It obscures the action. Eastwood keeps cutting away, and no single sporting sequence is allowed to develop.
I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.
That’s my Pavlovian TV-spectator response to unusual sports phenomena, a category that includes all the rugby in this film. I want Eddie Butler to explain why the wingers don’t sprint and the Samoans are weak in defence. Is it the altitude? Have the All Blacks been poisoned? And why has Andrew Mehrtens appeared in a World Cup final wearing an Andrew Mehrtens wig?
Instead of this sense of involvement, I gradually realise I’m watching the one activity on earth that is as far from real life as it’s possible to get: the rugby looks like amateur dramatics.
And in Invictus there’s no escape, because the ‘95 Final is shown at length, almost thirty minutes of ersatz rugby action. The fearsome Jonah Lomu is replaced by a slightly chubby student. He is occasionally jumped on by other students, but before we can assess his contact skills the camera cuts to another unrelated set-up. There are scuffed kick-offs and elementary back-moves, all performed at rehearsal pace so as not to confuse Wisconsin.
Eastwood knows something is wrong. How could entire nations be in thrall to this? He therefore decides that the fervour of rugby is best expressed by sound-effects.
 Springbok Back Line In Invictus, the major injury risk to the players is earache. Every tackle boofs like a blunt object thumped into stuffed leather, and out comes the stuffing as grunts and oomphs. This is the aural equivalent of the Batman biff and boom.
Just when the rugby can’t get any worse, the match goes slow-mo. On television, slow-motion exists to repeat the interesting bits. In feature films, it means the emotional heft is so weighty that time stands still. Or feels like it does.
As the action slows, so does the sound. Ellis Park fills with whale-song, as the groans wallow deeply from one amateur tackle to the next. The Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky, who isn’t Stransky and who has forgotten his kicking boots, is calling for the ball in slow-audio, an unintelligible last word direct from a Hollywood battlefield, possibly Iwo Jima, and I expect him at any moment to receive (tragically) a solitary bullet between the eyes.
Instead he pops over a drop goal.
Clint gives rugby the fatal Hollywood treatment. In doing so, he undermines his film about Nelson Mandela, the nature of leadership, and the new South Africa.
In the best Hollywood sports films, usually about baseball or boxing, the protagonists are allowed to be grown men. Their lives depend upon their sport. The 1995 Springboks were also men, much closer to the flawed and grizzled heroes of Eastwood’s earlier work than they are to the college-boys of Invictus. They were playing for their old life and their new life, and also for themselves.
It does the truth of the story a disservice to insist, less than fifteen years after the event, that Mandela and the Boks can be simplified to serve the narrative conventions of this film. The rugby is central to this weakness. It becomes apparent long before the end that the epiphany of Invictus depends on the Springboks winning the Cup.
South Africa win. The film ends, and as choral arrangements squeeze the last sentimental tear from any dry eye, the credits roll against a montage of still photographs from the final. The real one.
There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the great man himself, at Ellis Park before kick-off. He is famously wearing the No.6 Springbok jersey, in green-and-gold, and he looks tiny against the blonde Afrikaaner bulk of Pienaar, the man he called ‘captain of rugby’. Anyone genuinely inspired by Nelson Mandela, and indeed by the game of rugby itself, will know that the triumph would have been as great if South Africa had lost.
 'there are no winners' As a sportsman, I am a member of the ‘ -y’ family. I’m related to Straussy and Backy. In our small sub-species, Homo Olympiens, there are three primary families. We are joined by the ‘-o’ family (Wilko, Johnno) and the ‘-ers’ family (Aggers, Athers).
We get along famously, because these sporting nicknames are names stripped down. They are names in the dressing room in their jockstraps. They’re no respecters of names. On the team-sheet nobody escapes – the system is automatic and egalitarian, and amid the mud and studs everyone is quickly allocated to one of the families.
The same does not happen in individual sports. One of the horrors of golf coverage on the TV is the smarmy use of first names – ‘Tiger’, ‘Lee’ – as if everyone was on first name terms. You’re not fooling anybody.
I’m thinking about this because I was surprised to be referred to on the net as Beardy. Over on his excellent blog designed for auto-didact, spliffy, anti-establishment ranting polymaths (who like trains), Ian Marchant reminded me (and all those in his wide constituency) that I’d offered to take the Physical Education Classes at the Free University of Radnorshire.
(This will be free like the National Gallery and not like Westminster Abbey, which is free except if you don’t pay you can’t go in. At the National Gallery there’s no bullying, and you’d have to have a heart of socialist stone not to bung a few coins in the tin or pay a couple of quid for some overpriced postcards).
But Ian is right. I have put myself forward as the Professor of PE at FUR. He was therefore correct to give me my active sporting name, and you know what, Marchers? That’s going to be the first class we take, before preparing for the more philosophical Race With No Finish Line (practical).
What are team nicknames all about? They announce an intimacy. They also infantilise, which makes them true. Those of us who like games and rolling about on grass are in touch with our inner child. A baby name is the best we deserve, and there is no room for airs and graces.
I was reminded of this once in the letter pages of the Times. A show-off Dad proudly wrote in to say that his eight-month old son was a keen fan of BBC’s Test Match Special. Not only did he like to listen to every ball of a Test match, at the age of eight months, but only the day before he’d uttered his first words: ‘Aggers.’
The next day another reader replied that his son, too, was eight months old and listened to every ball of the Test match. His first words were ‘Christoper Martin-Jenkins.’
 'mental about fighting' I was reminded about this because I was thinking about the translator Marie Rennard, who came up with the title Le Rugbyman Nomade. In French, ‘le rugbyman’ is a commonly used term for those lucky souls with a passion for the sport of rugby. However, it means more than that, just as ‘le cricketman’ would be someone with more than a casual interest in cricket. ‘Le rugbyman’ is a rugby nutter. He’s mental about rugby. This is because the ‘man’ in ‘le rugbyman’ comes from the wide-eyed man in maniac.
I’ve always liked this false-friend aspect of ‘Le Rugbyman’, as if everyone who plays rugby is indeed a superhero, with a big R in a shield across the front of his stripey jersey. Bird, Plane, Rugbyman – Dru could draw this in her sleep.
Knowing that the man comes from the maniac has wider consequences when the French meet our English-language superheroes. I mean the real ones.
Spiderman, pronounced Speederrhhman, is a confused newspaper reporter who is mental about spiders. Superman is a general, all-round, 24-hour basket-case – Supermaniac. He is the maniac above all others. Either that, or he just loves everything that’s super. He’s the original Hero of Super, a Superhero.
Batman gets a double misunderstanding, but barely suffers (he’s superhuman) in translation. Small French boys love Batman, but not because he has a friend called Robin or was bitten by a bat as a child. They’re immediate fans because here they have a superhero, just like them, who loves to ‘battre’. He’s Batman, a maniac about fighting, which about sums him up.
Language. What a Marvel.
 Cyclists Beware I’m trying to find out about the new place I’ve come to live. One way is to walk about. I’ve done a bit of that. There’s also jogging. I’m now a familiar sight along the Thames, tripping over mooring lines and dodging courting couples. Courting doesn’t involve much talking these days, it seems, and you can do most of it with your eyes shut. The Thames on a summer evening is the longest Lover’s Lane in England, with boys and girls in their late teenage taking another last chance to grow older without regrets.
For the broader view, I’ve also taken to my bike, and yesterday I rode from Slough to Oxford. Somewhere outside Henley I took a detour into the Chilterns, and learnt an important lesson: stone-age English folk knew what they were talking about when they named their villages.
Last October, with Virtual Tom, I cycled up a Tour de France Category 1 climb in the Vosges, the Ballon d’Alsace. It was so much fun we did it twice in a day, and Tom’s typically concise account can be found here. Riding a bicycle up a proper mountain is a very relaxing experience. There’s no rush. You physically can’t go any faster than you’re going. And you can’t go any slower because at 8 kph the bicyle topples over and you fall off. Nothing else for it but to settle in, and enjoy the views for the next ten upward kilometres.
There’s no such philosophy to save the unwary bike rider in the Chilterns. It’s the Chilterns, I kept thinking, I can go faster than this. I’m heading for a place called Pishill, I told myself, which is a pissy little hill outside Henley.
Only it isn’t. It keeps on going, and going, not steep, but by now I’m completely cooked from failing to notice that I’ve been going uphill for some considerable distance. While I thought I was pushing on, the Chiltern hills have gradually been stealing away my soul.
I should have learnt my lesson years ago, at a place called High Ham near Glastonbury. That High isn’t there for fun, and especially not on a bicycle.
Towards the end of the trip, I saw two small boys waving from the entrance to a Garden Centre. I pulled across the road to ask them if they needed any help.
‘No,’ they said. ‘We’re playing a game. We wave at cars. If the passenger waves back we get a point. If the driver waves back we get two points.’
I’m the competitive sort. We entered into an interesting discussion, and eventually decided that a cyclist pulling over and stopping was worth ten whole points. It was the bomb that decided the game.
It was only as I was riding away that I realised this game can only be fun to play in a part of the country that is essentially unfriendly. Who wouldn’t wave back? Then I remembered. I’m in the Home Counties, or near enough.
 'beyond reasonable doubt' I was scheduled to make an appearance on Sky Sports News today to discuss England’s feeble capitulation in the last Test of the Ashes series. The interview was arranged on Friday morning.
The last time I was on, a couple of weeks ago, I was marking the three-year countdown to the London Olympics. I was there to give my views on whether British athletes could expect triumph or disaster, though I suspect my role was to make the case for disaster.
I am the Loss Correspondent. I am the why-oh-why man. Something must be done. Don’t know what? Ask me. Where are the medals? I know where to find them.
This is because in 2005 I went to Australia to look for the answers. They’re all in the book How to Beat the Australians, and I talk a lot of sense. That’s because I mainly write books, and not newspaper pieces. I don’t have to generalise wildly after every England up and down, or pretend that single defeats or victories interrupt the more meaningful curves of (under)achievement. Books are sense whereas papers are sensation.
This morning, when it looked as though England might regain the Ashes at the Oval, I was stood down. Sky decided to send every unit they had, plus the kitchen sink and the ticker tape, to the Oval. They decided that England regaining the Ashes on a sunny Sunday afternoon in South London was not the time for common sense.
And I completely agree with them. Rev up the open-top buses. Forget the underfunding and the lack of free-to-air television and the abuse of public space. England are the greatest. Knight every one of them. Even Ian Bell.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of The National Academy of Writing in London. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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