Durban - For the first and only time in his life, Frik du Preez was at a loss for words. He stood before his teammates in the dressing room at the Sydney Cricket Ground and twiddled a beer can in his giant paws as he contemplated the end of his spectacular Springbok career, one that would later earn him the title of Springbok Player of the 20th Century.
But words would not come and he slowly sat down again. It was 1971 and, fittingly, Hannes Marais’ “Unbeatables” had just won the third Test against the Wallabies to complete a 15-match tour of Australia without defeat to give Frik the perfect send-off.
Kim Shippey, the renowned radio commentator, was with the Boks and he said: “This giant of Springbok rugby rose to say farewell but the emotion was too much for him. Instead, he delivered the most eloquent non-speech ever.”
And what a career it had been — from 1961 to 1971, with 38 Tests and 49 tour matches, not to mention 109 matches for Northern Transvaal, and for the amateur era, a decade in the top flight was almost unheard of.
Frik recently celebrated his 87th birthday, and he has always said his longevity on the field and then off it is because he loves life.
He smoked throughout his playing career, was never shy of a beer, and said: “Rugby was never my god. My approach was that life is not just rugby. It is why I was often criticised for not being serious enough but it is also why I played for so long.”
Du Preez was incredibly athletic for a big man. We are talking about a lock forward that in one match for the Bulls against Western Province famously landed a drop goal, kicked a penalty, and capped a unique performance with a try.
Frik’s great friend and rival, Colin Meads, the All Black who was named New Zealand’s Player of the 20th Century, tells a tale of Frik’s agility.
“I played with Frik during the IRB’s centenary matches in England, and we roomed together. At one practice, the forwards were seeing how high they could jump, aiming at the crossbar of the posts. A few scraped the underside of the bar, but Frik simply leaped up and clasped it with both hands, and hung there with a grin. I couldn’t match that so I snuck off for a chat with the backs.”
The youngest of six kids, Frik grew up on a farm near the Botswana border. He was a fullback and flyhalf at high school in Standerton but when he enlisted in the air force, a sergeant took one look at him and said, “Rubbish, you are now a lock.”
And thus South African rugby had a lock with the skills of a back.
The first Springbok match he watched was the 1955 Lions v Boks Test at Ellis Park. He had played the curtain-raiser for the Northern Transvaal U19s. He was gutted when Bok fullback Jack van der Schyff missed a conversion to win the game in front of 95 000 fans.
It was watching that epic game that inspired Frik to become a Springbok.
In his debut Test, against England at Twickenham in 1961, he kicked a conversion and in his first 10 Tests, the Boks never lost. That run ended in 1965 when they won just one of six Tests on a tour of New Zealand and Australia.
Afterwards, a sulking rugby administration bent on finding scapegoats compiled a secret blacklist of players who had allegedly not pulled their weight on tour. Frik’s name would have been top of the list because he refused to allow poor results to dampen the fun of touring.
Frik humorously recalls in his autobiography: “After the tour, Doc Craven was worried because he had never seen me yawn on the day of a Test and a player properly focused is so tense that he yawns all the time.”
A further cause for concern was that Frik sang in the shower after a Springbok loss. “How can you sing when your country has been defeated?” Doc asked with incredulity.
Frik’s response? “With respect to a legend like Doc, what a load of hogwash! Firstly I don’t recall him monitoring me before a Test to see if I was yawning and as for the singing, I did not have too many opportunities to sing after a defeat because in my 38 Tests we only lost eight times!”
The accusation that Frik took rest breaks during games was common. Even in 1969, when he “dropped, placed and scored” as teammate Mof Myburgh described that sequence of scoring against WP, Craven said: “Frik only played for seven minutes, to which Frik retorted: “If that was the case then Doc and WP are lucky I did not play for the other 73 minutes!”
Frik’s teammates never felt he was slacking and if a teammate was “bullied” by a bigger opposition player, Frik would deliver justice. In the fourth Test between the Boks and France in 1979, Frik dealt jungle justice to lock Alain Plantefol, who had been irritating the South Africans with off-the-ball shenanigans. But when he tried to hold back Frik by tugging on his jersey, a right hook put him on his backside.
After the game, though, Plantefol went to the Boks’ change room and in broken English congratulated Frik on giving him his best-ever shiner.
But he was not always accurate in his deliverance of justice. Against the British Lions in 1968 he was kicked in the head and believed the culprit was lock Willie John McBride, to whom he flung a punch, but with his vision blurred, he knocked out the innocent centre Mike Gibson!
Yet he and McBride became firm friends and the Irishman years later holidayed at Frik’s farm.
McBride was one of the Lions of 1968 that watched helplessly when Frik scored his wonder try in the first Test at Loftus Versfeld, from a lineout 38m from the Lions’ tryline.
Some 75 000 of Frik’s fiercest fans watched Mof Myburgh secure the ball and Frik peel around the front of the lineout from his No 5 position and scorch down the touchline, scattering red-shirted bodies in all directions, to score to a thunderous din.
Die Vaderland reported thus: “Isn’t he just a wonderful rugby player? You hate to think that one day the Springboks will have to cope without him because Frik is getting on (he was 32). You feel like preserving him in a fridge or asking Dr Chris Barnard to give him a younger heart.”
Frik would play three more years for the Boks, his career culminating in Sydney. The rugby world knew Frik was retiring and after the 18-6 win, the Aussie crowd sang Auld Lang Syne while Frik was chaired off the field.
In 1971, Frik was invited by the RFU to tour England with a star-studded World XV to mark their centenary celebrations. Frik recalls a humorous moment when he was addressed by Lady Ramsay, the wife of the chairman of the RFU, Sir William.
“Oh, I remember you well,” she said. “You were here last year with the Fiji team!”
Not only did Frik see the funny side but he befriended the Fijian that had also been invited to play, Jono Qoro, the prop who featured in the World XV’s 28-11 defeat of England.
Qoro arrived in London dressed in his Fijian sarong and struggled with the cold. Frik gave him a Springbok tracksuit which he wore on the sideline at Twickenham, thus making him by some margin the first black man to wear a Bok tracksuit, which Frik thought was a wonderful irony.
Qoro repaid Frik by winning him a bet. Frik knew Qoro was a champion beer drinker and set up a contest between him and Meads.
With their World XV teammates as judges, the two gulped down jug after jug until Meads collapsed. Qoro then downed another beer for good measure!
The World XV were unbeaten on their tour and that was because they had great players but also a superb team spirit.
On guitar they had All Blacks great Bryan Williams while the famous fullback Pierre Villepreux sang in French, Qoro in Fijian; Aussie Roy Prosser sang Waltzing Matilda, and Frik brought the house down with Sarie Marais.
In his retirement, Frik is a sought-after speaker and raconteur, and he often shares his thoughts on the amateur versus professional eras.
He mostly feels that the game was much simpler in his time.
For instance: “Our idea of a balanced diet was simply to eat what was served to us. I remember how, during lunch before the 1969 Currie Cup final against WP, we feasted on steak and chips at the Pretoria Country Club. And later that afternoon, I dropped, placed, and scored.
“Us players from the old era always joke that in our time rugby still used to be dangerous and sex was safe! We also maintain that we played the game to build up a thirst!
“In the modern era, we hear about running lines and so on. But we also did that stuff, we just did not have a name for it. Ask guys like John Gainsford and Mannetjies Roux … they did it all the time to score tries.
“A bunch of us former Springboks were shown a video and it was explained to us what angles the modern Boks were running on the field. Louis Moolman leaned over and asked me: ‘Frik what lines did we run in our day?’
“Pal,” I replied. “We knew only one line. The TRYLINE. That was the line we were running for!”
* Postscript
While Doc Craven liked to needle Frik to get him to play to even greater heights, he said this when Frik retired: “Frik du Preez is the personification of Springbok rugby. We will never see the likes of Frik again.”
And when the World Rugby Hall of Fame was instituted in 1997, the first legends inducted were Gareth Edwards (Wales), Colin Meads (New Zealand), Hugo Porta (Argentina), JPR Williams (Wales), Mike Gibson (Ireland), Willie John McBride (Ireland), and … Frik du Preez and Danie Craven.
* This story is from Mike Greenaway’s upcoming book, The Fireside Springbok, to be published in June.
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