A Game They May Remember

The whistle blast that may yet be heard around the world sounded at 9:15 C.D.T. last Saturday morning and was heard by no more than 300 Americans, all middle-class white folk, most of them young, some with babies in strollers. They had assembled to watch a game of rugby on the outskirts of Racine, a town of 71,000 set in the pastoral, milder-than-milk country of southern Wisconsin. It would be hard to imagine a less threatening way to start a fall weekend.

Note the date well, though: September 19, 1981. There are many months to go before the 1984 Olympics, but, as those Games approach, millions of Americans who know little of Racine or rugby may have cause to regret what took place that bright, chilly Wisconsin morning. Indeed, they may come to think of September 19, 1981 with a sharp dismay that not even the flawed Moscow Olympics of 1980 engendered. For this was the day a small group of their countrymen, combining a simple lack of sophistication with a kind of petulant obstinacy, at the very least put the Los Angeles Games in jeopardy and at worst crippled forever the Olympic movement.

And it all happened in such a bumbling, amateurish sort of way. When the referee blew his whistle to set the match and its possible consequences in motion, he was a quarter of an hour behind schedule, which is not uncommon in the happy-go-lucky world of U.S. rugby. As the home team, a representative side culled from midwestern clubs, kicked off, only the somewhat unusual hour of the start seemed anything but normal.

Things were far from normal, however, because the visiting side, 15 strapping young men wearing green and gold uniforms with an emblem of a leaping gazelle on their breasts, was the Springboks, the national rugby team of South Africa, inevitably a symbol of the apartheid policies of their nation. They had just completed two bitter, violence-racked months of playing in New Zealand. A week earlier, in Auckland, their final game had ended in a wild battle between police and a 6,000-strong mob hurling gasoline bombs from behind barbed-wire barricades, while a protester-piloted Cessna screamed into Eden Park stadium at goalpost height. Now the Springboks, whose mere presence had enraged placid, sheep-may-safely-graze New Zealand, were in Racine at the invitation of the U.S. Rugby Union.

In Auckland, 49,000 people had watched the Springboks. In Racine, they were playing in front of those 300 in a bleacherless meadow called Roosevelt Park, flanked on one side by a National Guard armory with tanks and artillery on display, and on the other by a building that had the look of a clubhouse. It was the Dr. John Bryant Center, which serves the local black community. In a piece of crassness equaled only by their original invitation, the administrators of American rugby had chosen a predominantly black section of Racine for the Springboks' debut.

Before Saturday's match, it seemed that the only game the South Africans might get to play in the U.S. would be Space Invaders, in some dark saloon. One by one, officials in the cities where the Springboks had planned to play—New York and Rochester, Chicago and Albany, N.Y.—had decided not to sanction the matches, thus pacifying protesters of South Africa's racial policies.

In Chicago, where their first game was to have been held in public at the Polo Grounds in suburban Oakbrook, they stayed at the Chicago Athletic Club on Michigan Avenue. Outside the CAC, a small band of picketers did duty on the sidewalk. In a way the anti-apartheid groups had won a small victory by keeping the game out of the city. The real triumph, of course, would have been to prevent the game against the so-called Midwest XV from being held at all. As a clear consequence of this, the tour organizers were humiliated into laying some cloak-and-dagger plans for a private game to be played at a secret venue.

At this point, deeply serious as the issues involved were, an element of farce crept into the proceedings. It was as if John Le Carre was collaborating on the subterfuge with the Marx Brothers. The spokesman for U.S. rugby, Edmund Lee, declared that he wouldn't be saying how, where or when the game against the Midwest XV would be played. At the CAC there were more TV vans than protesters staked out, and on Friday night they had a long cold vigil. Then, at midnight, some members of the media received a phone call: Proceed early in the morning to the junction of 94 and Route 50 at Kenosha, Wis. Look for a battered pale green '54 Olds in the parking lot of the Howard Johnson's there. Then check for further instructions.

And there in Kenosha, manning the green Olds—Checkpoint Charlie, as it became known—was a bunch of conspiratorial kids in the jerseys of the Racine Rugby Football Club. Their looks were stern, but it was clear that they were bubbling with fun. And just as obvious was the fact that they had little idea of the extent to which they were being betrayed by their elders in the sport.

It is very hard for an outsider to understand the special bonds that hold the rugby world together. Rugby is a close brotherhood based almost everywhere on a genuine amateur ideal. It is a beautiful flowing game at its best, in which you buy your own shoes and, after the contest, a beer for the man who clobbered you in the scrimmage. It is an international sport, and it prides itself on the fact that a player from, say, the Manhattan Blues can walk into a clubhouse in Cardiff, Wales, or Toulouse, France, or, indeed, Johannesburg, South Africa, and be welcomed warmly.