If, like me, you are a bit of a nut for sport, but also interested in the role it plays in life at large, particularly in the lessons it teaches, then you might want to get the book I’m reading at the moment.
It’s called Legacy – What The All Blacks Can Teach Us About The Business Of Life, by James Kerr. It looks at the remarkable success story that is the New Zealand team. They have been the No 1 rugby team for more than 10 years now, and have won the World Cup twice in that time, and that hasn’t happened by accident, of course.
Like most South African fans I resent their success, and the fact the Springboks can’t beat them regularly, but during such times, right now for example, when we aren’t playing them, we all wish our rugby team could be more like theirs.
There’s no big secret to their success, according to the book: it’s all about character, about doing the small things properly and about identifying individual and team values and sticking to them.
Former All Black coach Graham Henry coined the phrase “better people make better All Blacks” and he continuously pushed an old mantra in the team: “leave the (black) jersey in better condition than when you received it”.
I say these things aren’t a secret because I’ve read them before in various places. The well-known philosopher-coaches said those sorts of things all the time. And Kerr quotes Vince Lombardi and John Wooden, for example, in the book.
But it occurs to me, rugby is a sporting code well-suited to teaching young people that success depends on such behaviour. It was reinforced last week when I attended the launch of Wits University’s Varsity Shield campaign when they had Lions coach and captain, Johan Ackerman and Warren Whiteley, as speakers.
In their assessment of the Lions’ chances this year, and their encouragement of the Wits team, both spoke about the same things the All Blacks believe in. Whiteley described how senior players in the team carry water for the others, and lug the tackle bags around – exactly what Kerr describes as one of the All Black values he calls “sweeping the shed”.
Kerr refers to an incident in which he saw Ritchie McCaw and Dan Carter stay behind after a game to clean out their change room because “no one takes care of the All Blacks, we take care of ourselves”. Kerr calls one of his chapters Sweeping the Shed, and in it he goes into the concepts of servant leadership, humility and selfless contribution that, he believes, are among the secrets of the team’s success.
The only way in which the time and money put into running sporting programmes at school can be justified is by insisting that it’s done to teach young people lessons that go beyond the skills and techniques that playing the various games successfully require.
They should be learning the things that will make them valuable citizens, good mothers and fathers, productive workers and decent human beings. If sporting programmes don’t do that, then why bother?
You won’t learn those lessons easily if you are a perpetual loser, I concede, but neither will you if winning is regarded as all-important. Because then winning becomes the dominant value and, when that happens, all other values fly out the window.
All sorts of social scientists have studied the All Black phenomenon. They seem to agree that a values-driven principled approach is what makes them successful. We’d be stupid not to follow their example when we teach children to play rugby.