Book Review: In Black and White - The Jake White Story
November 28 2007
The autobiography of Jake White, In Black and White, is set to break all records for a South African sporting book and do so easily, surpassing best-sellers such as Springbok Saga and Rainbow Warrior by François Pienaar and Edward Griffiths. This is the big one.
If you read nothing else, read Chapters 44 and 45, the ones about the World Cup Final - the lead-up to it and the match itself. Read them and experience all the emotion and pride all over. They are so pure and innocent, so glorious, and so free of a dirty world of politics and backbiting which infests much of the rest of the book. If you read nothing else, read those two chapters.
That it will sell is not surprising. The timing has been perfect, in the euphoric midst of the World Cup conquest. The marketing has been brilliant, regularly in the news with pre-release serialisation with massive sympathy for White, the victim savaged by dark forces in and around battered South African rugby. He is the hero that could rise above pettiness, nastiness and bitterness and deliver a glorious victory with aplomb. And then there is lots of controversy, machinations and inside revelations. Gossip is always good.
That Jake White got a lot right is obvious. No side wins the World Cup and the Tri-Nations by accident or through a coach's benign neglect. In doing so Jake joined Doc, Morné, Naas, Joost and Os as men in South African rugby who need no surname. Their first names are a brand and immediately recognisable.
That Jake got things right was not an accident. It was the result of careful, thoughtful planning and energetic attention to detail. In addition there was Jake's respect for the Springbok and its traditions. He got the Springboks back into their old blazers and wearing them with such respect. He could talk to his players about the pride of being Springboks and the history that carries them on. A lot of this was typified in their composure at the World Cup, in winning the World Cup and in the parades around South Africa on their return. Jake gave - or at least helped to give - South Africa rugby heroes again.
For his achievements Jake deserves great credit. Just for hanging in there is a matter of great courage and determination - that or madness, in the face of all the troubles that beset South African rugby. To get a taste of it, all you have to do is read the bit about the appointment of Zola Yeye as manager of the Springboks team in 2006. It is frightening. If it is a true account - and we have no reason not to believe the account - then we have a taste of what a Springbok coach goes through. It is certainly not a normal situation. That Springbok rugby does as well as it does with the pressures it suffers from non-players outside the immediate team is a miracle. It is no wonder that overseas coaches do not apply for the Springboks coaching job now, when, as Jake says, "You end up coaching for survival", not when forces outside rugby starting picking the team, not when you have to do a trade-off - picking Luke Watson for the freedom to pick the players you want. The biggest testimony to the rightness of Jake's actions was the support of his players and the others on his coaching staff. He was loyal to his squad and they were loyal to him.
But Jake stood accused of not supporting Oregan Hoskins, the president of SARU and his assistants who make regular, grim appearances in the book. They found it hard to support him in his darkest hours because he would not pick the players they wanted and because he had not supported them in their appointment of Springbok manager.
Perhaps what epitomises the careless, clueless callousness of the administrators most is advertising the post of Springbok coach a few days before the quarter-final of the World Cup.
Some of the gripes are petty and some repetitive but that Jake had reason to complain is obvious. Inevitably there are heroes and villains. After all the book is in black and white. There is little space for grey men.
The book takes the reader rapidly past personal issues, such as family, and rushes him into White's huge ambition to coach the Springboks, something nurtured from his school days at Jeppe. Other things are simply shucked aside - his own playing career at and after school, his training to become a teacher, his marriage, the birth of his children - that sort of incidental.
This is the autobiography of a rugby coach and all else is incidental. When he moved to Cape Town he spoke of the upheaval of leaving his friends and familiar places without a word of what the migration could possibly have meant to his wife and two sons. The book is about Jake White and Jake White's rugby coaching. And when he gets into the heart of the matter, his career as Springbok coach from 2004 to 2007, the only Springbok coach to complete his contract, then the book is at its fascinating best.
It is not a coaching manual. Apart from selection, much of which Jake got right, there are no coaching tips and little about the actual contribution of the likes of Gert Smal and Allister Coetzee and nothing about how Eddie Jones made an impact, if any.
There are touching bits and even humorous bits but by and large it is a serious book. Rugby is big and serious business. When the Springboks lost 31-27 to a last-minute try by Keven Mealamu in Dunedin, White could say: "the Dunedin defeat cost me more than the chance to coach a winning team in New Zealand - it cost me millions in earnings too."
Rugby has been good to Jake who had grown up hard - the kid from a broken home, at boarding school from the age of six, changing his name from Jacob Westerduin at the age of 13. It was also good for a very ordinary player. But in that kid who had grown up hard and that ordinary rugby player there was an extraordinary passion and determination and in the process he became wealthy and a household name.
There is a leap of credibility to be made. It is, after all, one man's story and one man's view of events that concerned him. But it is an easy leap to make because so much of it rings so true. One of the key stories is the Watson saga - the non-selection of Luke Watson, the "incentive" (bribe?) to pick him, the instruction to pick him, picking him. In that matter Jake's story differs substantially from Cheeky Watson's story and differs from the story told by Brian Biebuyck, Jake's lawyer quoted in the matter. It makes one a bit uneasy about other stories. That was small detail compared with the way Watson's name was added by Hoskins to the list for a training camp in Bloemfontein and then the way Watson was chosen for the test against Samoa.
The style of the writing also makes it an easy read. Much of it sounds just like Jake speaking - full of colloquialisms, an easy style. Some it of is even elegant. It all hangs together rather well.
Mercifully, the book has an index.
But before that there are Chapters 44 and 45. They should be made setworks in all South African schools!
No. of Pages: 342
Soft Cover
Author: Jake White with Craig Ray
ISBN978-1-77022-004-1
Release Date: November 2007
Publisher: Zebra Press