Johannesburg - Bulls coach Jake White earlier this week penned an open letter titled ‘Sport is not life and death, your next heartbeat is’ and his thoughtful soliloquy was an important reminder that every so often, all of us must take a moment of introspection and reset our priorities.
The former Springbok World Cup-winning coach’s musing sprung from a hospital bed after he recently underwent emergency abdominal surgery due to a life-threatening blood clot present in his small intestine.
According to White, had this clot dislodged and passed through his brain, the 59-yea-rold would have suffered a stroke; had it entered his heart, a heart-attack; and if it had reached his lungs, he would have collapsed.
White was fortunate in that he was on tour when the worst of the ailment fouled him, and that it did not rupture on his way back from Wales, where surely, he would have been in deadly distress.
“For most of my career as a coach, a rugby match was like life and death for me,” White wrote.
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“The next try was life or death for me. But when you’re lying in intensive care with tubes stuck down your throat, you quickly realise what life and death really comes down to. It’s not that next try. It’s that very next heartbeat, and your hope that it will happen.”
There is no doubt that the last three years have been some of the toughest endured by South Africans and the world.
Covid-19 destroyed many lives and took so much from so many. After that, we have had to endure geopolitical instability, inflation, the rise of our cost of living, loadshedding, watershedding, political incompetence, graft and an unsure future.
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In many respects, we have lost the connective tissue that binds us as a society, suffering with mental and physical pain that hampers our return to normalcy. I certainly speak for myself in this regard.
Sometimes it takes the voice of an other, someone known to you but far removed to make you reassess your current place in the world. For White, that voice was his doctor’s, when he asked: “Doc, should I buy a Lotto ticket?” and the response came as “Jake, you’ve already used it”.
On the other side of the coin, we are still here, we have survived, we can carry on the fight, hold onto hope and dream of better days that we can make reality; an epiphany White and I now share, an empathic notion that makes the world a little bit less lonely.
As White closed off in his letter: “We’re alive. And that is all any of us have.”