False Bay Rugby Football Club

Club100 is the fundraising arm of False Bay RFC and Andy Calmeyer has in the past lined up a variety of interesting and entertaining speakers.

With well in excess of one hundred Club100 members and their guests in attendance, Peter de Villiers held the audience’s attention with his open and honest, from-the-heart talking. He exposed himself as a down-to-earth, modest individual, whose passion for his country and the Springboks abounds.

De Villiers, with a mixture of honesty, metaphors and self-deprecating humour, led the attentive group through contentious issues, while never being inflammatory or insensitive. Clearly this man has an affinity for his fellow man and his charges speak of an approachable, encouraging coach, who respected their knowledge and ability, of which one is left in no doubt after such an encounter.

The Bok coach took the audience along a pathway as he described the challenges in terms of the various South African cultures amongst its passionate supporters alone. One tittered at his descriptions yet they were refreshingly accurate, all the while conveying the enormous challenge of meeting the expectations of the myriad local cultures.

Coaches, especially international coaches, are always more than willing to promote their rugby intellect and the methods they employed to achieve success. In their defence, this comes partly from having to address groups of self-appointed experts who ultimately have little or no idea of what goes on at the highest level, but exercise their right as supporter to pass criticism.

Coach de Villiers’s approach was rather to share credit, candidly assessing success and identify reasons for failures. In this context, he said that a major contributing factor to the dismal 2010 year the Boks suffered in 2010 was because of the extremely successful year they had enjoyed the year before.

“As my achievements, which Andy read out in the introduction, indicate, we won everything in 2009, then we lost everything in 2010”, he said, guffawing with a laugh emanating from the base of his stomach. He continues, “It’s hard to tell people when they have achieved so much that it will not always be so and often the only way that lesson is learnt is through experiencing the down side as well. That’s what happened to the team.”

The Coach led the audience, now hanging on his every word, through a journey of analysis, storytelling and acknowledgement of the brilliance of certain individuals in the team. He spoke glowingly of the vast majority of his players and made special mention of the leadership skills of John Smit, the uncanny ability of Victor Matfield in lineout analysis and Schalk Burger’s awesome rugby intellect.

He shared some humorous anecdotes of Jean de Villiers and Jaque Fourie as well as the unique character that is Bakkies Botha.

He addressed sensitive and contentious issues with his trademark humour, which is sharp, insightful and wonderfully refreshing.

He then opened the floor to a Question and Answer session. The first audience member started his question with “Mr de Villiers…” only to be interrupted and told that his name is Peter, proof of the modesty of the man.

Everyone in attendance felt a warmth for this unique man.

There was so much covered in this informal forum, one was left pondering for a long while afterwards.

Thank you, Peter de Villiers for donating your time to address our members. We are forever indebted and enriched by the experience.