Rugby
A thought from The Captains: 'Everybody Brings Something'
In the final episode of What We Know, Siya Kolisi and Proteas Women captain Laura Wolvaardt explain why the things that make us different are the things that make a team hard to beat.
The first thing Siya Kolisi noticed was the grass.
He was being driven through the gates of Grey High School in Gqeberha, his mom beside him, a bursary boy from Zwide about to start a new life 15 minutes from home. The fields were impossibly green. The white school buildings looked almost French. "I was looking there and I was like, I'm going to be whatever I want to be," he says. "And I look at the grass, I'm like, it's going to be a carpet for me falling on here."
If you know anything about Kolisi, you know how this story goes. Zwide, the Grey bursary, the Springbok captaincy, two Webb Ellis Cups. It has been told in a memoir, a feature documentary and more speeches and headlines than anyone could count. What gets told less often is what the boy from Zwide brought with him through those gates, and why it still matters to the teams he leads.
It wasn't easy. There was English, for a start, which he barely spoke. When the other boys came over, keen to chat, he would duck away. Eventually he decided he had to start trying, one or two broken words at a time. "The nice thing is they were all accommodating," he says. "And I'm still friends with a lot of them today."
Siya Kolisi trains during What We Know filming in Port Elizabeth
© Wayne Reiche / Red Bull Content Pool
Kolisi leads Episode 4 of What We Know, the final instalment of the series. The theme is diversity, and host Eugene spends it with a team of captains and leaders: Kolisi, Laura Wolvaardt, Temba Bavuma, Teboho Mokoena and strongman Rayno Nel. Rassie Erasmus likes to say that our diversity makes us stronger. Ask Kolisi what that actually looks like and he doesn't give you a slogan. He gives you a tackle.
adidas What We Know Episode 4 in Cape Town
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
It's the township tackle, something Erasmus has spoken about. Hard, rough fields in places like Zwide meant boys learnt their own ways to bring a bigger man down, and players from other areas had their own techniques again. "It's not just in language," Kolisi says. "It's also the way we do things as people. And rugby is no different."
Put all of those ways of playing into one squad and you get a team that is very difficult to scout. "We've still got a team system, but you can also be yourself," he says. "How can you prepare for all of those different ways of attacking in a game?"
Everybody brings something. So what did a skinny kid from Zwide bring to Grey? He doesn't hesitate. "I think I brought my smile." He wasn't the biggest or the best on the field, not then. "But my energy, I thought, was good. I always tried to make those around me happy."
And he brought a song.
Back home in Zwide there is a tree next to the field where the boys used to warm up. Someone would arrive with something on their mind, a bad week, a loss, whatever was going on at home, and start to sing. Then the next person would join, then the next. "The more the song goes, the lighter you feel," Kolisi says. "It feels like everyone has joined in the song. They carry some of the burden. You feel connected."
He took it to the Stormers and then to the Springboks, where it has become part of who the team is. These days you'll find Felix Jones, an Irishman on the coaching staff, singing along. In the tunnel before a Test, the other side has no idea what the words mean. "But we feel connected," Kolisi says. "We have a voice, we are seen and we can be ourselves. How beautiful is that?"
Laura Wolvaardt had her own version of that first day at Grey, only hers came with a wrong turn. At Parklands Primary she spent every break playing cricket with the boys, with dustbins on the field for stumps, and every afternoon hitting cover drives at a ball on a string hung from the balcony. She was good enough to be sent to Western Province under-11 boys' trials. A day or two in, the old man running them walked over. "He said, you're kind of at the wrong place. We actually have a girls section for you."
Laura Wolvaardt plays street cricket in Cape Town
© Tyrone Bradley / Red Bull Content Pool
Until then she had genuinely thought she was the only girl in the world who played cricket. She was sent to the womens under-19 trials, where she found a handful of strangers of every age. "At first there was a bit of disappointment that I wasn't with my friends anymore," she says. "But then a huge discovery moment, that this is actually where I'm meant to be."
Today she captains the Proteas Women, and the way she runs her team would have made life a lot easier for a boy from Zwide learning English one word at a time. When the squad is together, everyone speaks English, because "language is an easy one to exclude people." She pushes players to talk to teammates they wouldn't normally sit with, and she watches for cliques. It isn't about being nice. "If you don't have that connection with the person off the field, then they're not going to trust you in the moment when the pressure is on."
Where Kolisi brought a smile, Wolvaardt admits she has to work at it. "I'm a bit of an awkward person and I'm not the most social person," she says. "So it's something I really have to put a lot of effort in." Two very different temperaments, one conclusion: people play their best when they feel they belong. It was the advice she got from Bavuma when she asked him how the Proteas pulled together to win the World Test Championship.
Bavuma talks about letting everyone bring their own flavour into the pot. At Mamelodi Sundowns, Mokoena says, whoever arrives is welcomed "as if they are locals".
Kolisi's version is simpler, and it shows up in the episode when he sits down with Nel, a strongman from a small town who seems to come from another planet. "Completely different," Kolisi says. "But we still find a way to connect." Then the two of them find out who can lift more.
For Kolisi, that way of connecting started long before Grey and long before the Springboks. In Zwide, if you were hungry, you knocked on your neighbour's door. "If they have half a cup of rice, they'll give you a quarter of it," he says. During Covid, handing out food parcels back home, he was stopped by a woman who had once given him a cup of rice. He had multiplied it, she told him, when she needed it most.
"That's how I was raised," he says. "The values that I learned here, that's who I am."
The boy who once ducked away from conversations because he didn't have the words now leads the singing in a Springbok tunnel. He didn't have to become someone else to get there. He just had to bring what he had, and trust the rest of the team to join in.
Watch Episode 4 of What We Know to see Siya and the captains' story in full.