Groucho Marx was a funny man. He was also a wise man, once remarking that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies”.

As the damning of politics goes, that’s a pretty thorough, fitting assessment. Indeed, he could have been talking about South Africa.

This, remember, was a week in which a number of marginal and wannabe politicians tore into the Springbok selection policy. Some said the squad was too black, others too white.

This was also the week in which the EFF refused to support a motion in parliament congratulating Wayde van Niekerk and Anaso Jobodwana, our champion sprinters. And then there was that trade union nonsense.

Idiocy everywhere.

As ever, South African rugby was caught in the endemic madness that swirls around its very existence. The miracle is that our players so often produce excellence in such a polluted atmosphere. They even win World Cups.

Some context. Historically rugby emerged along racial lines, only unifying in the early 1990s. But the baggage of the apartheid years still hangs like a millstone. Recalcitrant coaches and long-existing structures, chiefly schools, continue as if it were the 1980s. Black rugby has made enormous gains, but it struggles to secure a foothold in the places that really matter, Super Rugby and Springbok rugby.

Everyone knows this, and it must be fixed.

Rugby bosses have long grappled with transformation and the swing to an all-inclusive game has been slow and difficult. The 1995 Rugby World Cup win was only a temporary salve. Rugby failed to harness the goodwill that spread across the land and has been apologising ever since.

Every subsequent World Cup has been preceded by a wailing and gnashing of teeth over selections. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Even Peter de Villiers, the Boks’ first black coach, failed to provide the impetus for black players at Springbok level. Yet he’s first in the queue lashing Heyneke Meyer and condemning the racial composition of the Boks.

It’s so tiresomely South African.

The problem is that it’s easy for spiteful opportunists to take pot-shots at the Boks because they inspire strong emotions. The country can be burning, the economy may be in freefall, but just you dare select the wrong players. Politicians vent, radio talkshows buzz, rugby headlines hog the street poles.

You wish they would save their energy and anger for the real issues that trouble everyday man: putting food on the table, finding a job, being safe.

Being what it is, rugby has to toe the line, so Meyer and rugby’s grandees suck it up like a battered wife who says nothing. It’s a perverse situation that hobbles rugby to an extraordinary degree.

Few know that SA Rugby does tremendous work in townships and impoverished areas. But these stories are seldom told. They aren’t sexy enough. They create little opportunity for posturing, so the politicians stay away.

I would argue that Meyer has the most hellish job in world rugby. All Steve Hansen or Stuart Lancaster must do is worry about selecting their best 22.

Meyer must take into account the dynamics of culture, colour and language and somehow blend it into a team capable of going to war with England or the All Blacks. All this, mind, in an atmosphere of being ridiculed and second-guessed at every turn.

It is the lot of every Springbok coach, the poor sod.

As a writer friend pointedly remarked this week, transformation doesn’t start with being chosen to wear the Green and Gold, it ends with it.

Transformation isn’t about quotas either. Transformation is a mindset, not a to-do list.

It is the preceding 15 years of struggle and sacrifice and opportunity that defines and develops a Springbok. Why pile opprobrium on Meyer, an honourable, decent man traversing the persistent madness of a game he so adores?

Because it’s convenient? Because he’s an easy target? Just because?

He would be the first to admit that he gets some selections and tactics wrong. Which coach doesn’t?

But the last thing Meyer should do is take his cue from people who have no right to be moral crusaders.

If he did, the madness would have beaten him. – © Sunday Tribune