John Dobson

John Dobson was enjoying victory. A parade through Cape Town to celebrate the Stormers’ first international trophy, a profound experience for a man who has only ever coached professioanlly in Western Province. But it didn’t come close to that day in 2007 when he sat in C-Max in Pretoria Central Prison, and came face-to-face with ‘prime evil’ himself. 

John Dobson is a conflicted man. One month ago, the Stormers coach delivered the first piece of international silverware in his franchise’s history: the inaugural United Rugby Championship (URC). His team achieved this while under administration, and did it playing a style of rugby that swept the rugby-mad Western Cape along in their success, as they won eleven consecutive matches to round out the season, culminating in an all-South African final against the Bulls, won by the Stormers 18-13 at Cape Town Stadium, their home ground. 

How do you beat that? “The person coaching the Stormers should be a person of colour,” John tells the Rugby Journal. “I should actually transform myself out of a job. That should be what I want, but I don’t. I want to keep coaching the Stormers. And that’s really conflicting.  

“But it would also be unfair to transform everyone else too, wouldn’t it? If I appointed only black assistant coaches and only selected black players, that would be unfair. It’s a really tricky, vexed issue.

“What I take enormous pride in is that this team, the way it looks and how it plays, represents society in the Western Cape. The Western Cape is unique to the rest of South Africa because of the population of so-called coloured people and their passion for rugby.”

Roughly speaking, South Africa has 55 million people. Forty-three million are black, five million are white, two million more are Indian and Asian, and five million are of colour.

Of the coloured population, which is to say mixed race – such as Cheslin Kolbe – ninety per cent live in the Western Cape, that’s around three or four million, and they are bonkers about rugby. 

“If I took the Stormers to train in a so-called coloured township, a poor township out in Blue Downs near the airport, we’d get two thousand people coming to training, they’re just rugby crazy,” says John. “The coloured population were marginalised in apartheid because they weren’t white. And to a degree they are marginalised in the current government because they aren’t black, they aren’t ethnic African. They speak Afrikaans, they have a lot of cross-habits with different population groups but it’s a very poor community.

“Rugby is part of the culture of this region more than anything else,
which is really special.”

John’s confliction around rugby and race in South Africa runs deep. To understand it properly, we need to rewind thirty years, to when a teenage John was conscripted into the South African army in 1988.

It was a time of intense internal strife in South Africa, as the apartheid regime that had been in place since 1948 was clinging to power at all costs. Avoiding conscription meant facing a jail term. Although there were ways in which white South Africans could duck out of national service – such as going abroad or by gaining an exemption to play rugby – John chose to enlist. Something, he admits, he should never have done.

After nine months of basic training, he was posted to a counter-intelligence unit, whose tactics were to maximise the mistrust in South African society between white and black people. 

 “Being in the intelligence services in the days of hardcore apartheid was an oxymoron,” explains John. “The cause was so manifestly wrong that we were involved in. I didn’t want to be there and I knew what I was doing was wrong … but … creating misinformation or disinformation, it was a dark area of dark.”

Unsurprisingly, John didn’t finish his two years of national service in the military, eventually playing the rugby card to extract himself from active service.

But his memories from those times, including Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom and the birth of the rainbow nation, remain the defining experience of his life. “I am absolutely fascinated by it, by South Africa’s transition to democracy, because I was involved in it. It’s probably what interests me most in my life.

“The transition ... the magnanimity of the oppressed black people is just staggering, it’s a miracle what happened in this country.”

A large slice of the miracle John is referring to is the post-apartheid truth and reconciliation process, which expeditated the transition to democracy. This process was authorised by Mandela and overseen by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and stands as perhaps the most high-profile and radical example of restorative justice in human history. The process offered an amnesty for many of the unspeakable human rights violations committed during the apartheid regime, by all sides, so long as the crimes committed had been confessed in full by the perpetrators and could be proven to have been politically motivated. 

In post-apartheid South Africa, justice would be exchanged for reconciliation. There would be no Nuremberg-style trials.

The pay-off from this merciful approach was that only two government-employed killers ever saw jail time. “I was always gobsmacked that for all of apartheid, there were only two guys in jail,” explains John. “One of them is called Eugene de Kock, he was an apartheid hit-force operative. He killed 43 people but got amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on 41 of them. He didn’t get amnesty on the other two because he couldn’t prove the political angle. He was put in prison for 212 years.

“I felt so sorry for this guy, it felt odd,” admits John. “You felt sorry for this guy who had done these things. Eugene got 212 years, but he [FW de Klerk, the leader of the Nationalist Party at the time apartheid fell] got a peace prize. You know what I mean?

“So, I wanted to investigate him. Just as a project for my own interest.”

For John, investigating Eugene – a man who the South African media had dubbed ‘prime evil’ – meant going to see him in jail, with a view to writing a book about him. John Dobson doesn’t do things by halves.

When John got in contact with Eugene it was 2007, eleven years after he had been sent down. They met in the maximum-security section, ‘C-Max’, of Pretoria Central Prison. “It was the most powerful experience I have ever had,” he says. “I’m in the most notorious jail in South Africa and this guy walks in, and he’s this apartheid hitman, he’s creepy, cold, with piercing eyes, thick glasses. 

“But this guy blew me away because he was so softly spoken. In those days they would segregate the prisoners to avoid problems. There was a right-wing group in the prison called the Boeremag, who tried to overthrow the Mandela government. He told me he wanted nothing to do with them, he would rather stay in the black area of the prison. ‘I’m just a professional soldier,’ he would say. He said he would serve the Mandela government, he would serve the Zuma government, it was such a powerful experience, to realise he was so softly spoken, so decent, he loved Harlan Coben novels. What this guy went through ... when he knew the police were coming for him, he said ‘I’m not running away and leaving my men’. I think his kids were five or six at the time and he put them on a plane with his wife and he’s never seen them since. 

“He said that the first ten years in the prison were hell. It can’t have been easy to be the face of apartheid death squads in a black prison...”

When facing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a decade before, Eugene had confessed to more than one hundred acts of murder, torture and fraud, and took full responsibility for the activities of his undercover unit, whose murderous work was based out of a farm twenty kilometres from Pretoria, known as ‘Vlakplaas’ – just reading that name today is enough to bring South Africans out in shivers.

However, while white politicians were passing off the crimes of the apartheid era as the work of a few rotten apples, Eugene was at least offering far more of the truth. Contemporary reporting said he had even been applauded by a black audience for the honesty of his testimony. 

After a series of meetings with Eugene, John wrote his manuscript for the book. However, it never saw the light of day as Eugene broke off, or was forced to break off, communication with John as parole started to become a genuine possibility. 

That left John with a new problem. The manuscript was due to be handed in as the sum total of the master’s degree he was taking in creative writing at the University of Cape Town. “Because Eugene had pulled the plug on me at the last minute, for the right reasons, I couldn’t go and research another person, so I thought ‘I’m going to tell it in another way’. So, I wrote a work of fiction which I handed in instead.”

The result was a book – which he ended up publishing – called The Year of the Gherkin. It can be bought online. “It was a satire of people who I regarded as my types: pleased-with-themselves, white South Africans, who know we’ve got away with murder in this country, but are more interested in watching the rugby.”

In one of the scenes, the protagonist berates his friend for going to a Freedom Day event, celebrating democracy in the country. “For white South Africans it [Freedom Day] is just a public holiday, an excuse to drink,” says John. “And this guy actually goes to a Freedom Day event and his friend is like ‘mate, what the fuck are you doing that for? Come have a braai’. It parodies those guys.”

John wrote a second novel, The Day of the Turnip and sales were positive enough to mean he started work on a third. But plans to publish that were put on ice when he became Western Province’s Currie Cup coach in 2015, “because I do use racial epitaphs to parody those people who use them,” explains John. “And me writing those now wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”

Online reviews speak warmly of John’s humour in skewering South African stereotypes and societal norms, while almost universally expressing revulsion for the lead character he created, Jason Brydon, aka the ‘Jasonator’. 

One review reads: ‘Delightful descriptions of a dismal life as a paint salesman in Cape Town made bearable through seeing the absurd’.

Another says, ‘The Jasonator’s diary is hysterically funny and had me in stitches all the way through. Just about every South African stereotype is dredged up and shot at. Jace is, using his own words against him, a real chop. He is label-obsessed and shallow and he made me cringe’.

Another simply reads: ‘The Jasonator is such a twat. Hopefully he grows up in the next book’.

John’s ability to convey the dark side of white South African culture is clearly very on-the-nose. As is his ability as a rugby coach, even though he was a very late starter, only taking on his first professional role in his forties.

John first got noticed as a coach leading the University of Cape Town (UCT) fourth team to a couple of unbeaten seasons. In 2004, when the UCT first team had an uncharacteristically poor start to the season, John was promoted and turned the team’s season around, even leading UCT to a first victory over Stellenbosch University since 1961 in their varsity game. “Suddenly I was a hero for UCT,” says John. “It was a fortuitous game, the referee gave us one or two lucky decisions; we were holding on, everyone was holding on but we won it. So, I stayed on as UCT first-team coach.” 

In his second season, however, John was fired, for refusing to have an additional coach join his team. “That was a really good experience because I sulked for a year, wouldn’t watch rugby, nothing. Zero. 

“A year later I thought, ‘I’m going to prove you guys wrong’ so I called them up and said ‘can I coach the U20s?’.”

UCT had him back. And John started to mould the U20s into a successful side. So much so, Rassie Erasmus – then the director of rugby at Western Province – came calling, asking John to coach the Western Province U21s. 

“That was the first time I began to think ‘ah rugby could be a career.’ I was around 41-42 getting my first full-time role. It crossed my mind that I might not be good enough.”

From there, John began to climb the Western Province hierarchy, becoming the Vodacom Cup coach alongside his U21s duties, then taking the reins of the Currie Cup team in 2015. In 2019, he took on the top job as head coach of the Stormers. He took over a listing ship. 

The Western Province Rugby Football Union had been liquidated back in 2016 for being unable to pay its debts. “We’ve just been through trauma since then,” says John. “Our equity partner left and off the field... let’s call it politics...

“But anyway, in two years as Stormers coach I’ve reported to eight different people. Our budgets were slashed and we just didn’t have money.”

The lack of funds saw players such as Damian de Allende, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Siya Kolisi, Dillyn Leyds, Wilco Louw, Bongi Mbonambi and Cobus Wiese, all seek employment elsewhere. 

“We were on the back pages for all the wrong reasons,” says John. “My job was to stay calm, to keep those stars we hadn’t lost like Steven Kitshoff and Frans Malherbe, who are really loyal.

“We kept them and shopped bargain basement. One of the best motivators is guys who are desperate, who want to prove themselves. So, after all those players left, we went around and found a bunch of guys who maybe weren’t cracking it elsewhere. Like Marvin Orie, like Manie Libbock, like Warwick [Gelant], like Hacjivah Dayimani.

“Because we have such good talent in this area, the players we did bring in, had to have X-factor.”

Despite a savvy recruitment drive, the Stormers’ situation got worse when the season began as they were put into administration, again, by the South African Rugby Union, and there was even talk of the Cheetahs replacing them in the URC.

The news dropped while the Stormers were away on their first trip to the northern hemisphere, meaning the players were, at least, out of the South African rugby bubble. On the field they battled to a valiant loss at Munster, then drew with Edinburgh, before beating the Dragons in Wales. “At that point I thought ‘bloody hell, there’s something here’,” recalls John. “Then we started to beat South African teams, scrapping through the local derbies, and it all took on a life of its own. 

“People give you credit for what you’ve done but you’re there actually going ‘what the fuck, is this really happening?’ like in the old days when you’re about to kiss a girl, you’re thinking, ‘is this really happening?’. It felt like that.”

John may not have been able to believe what he was seeing from the sidelines, but in the stands and via television sets at home, Stormers fans were. And their team were not just becoming title contenders, they were becoming great entertainers too. Come the season end, the Stormers topped the statistics for clean breaks, were second for defenders beaten and second in the offloads charts. They had a running fly-half in Manie Libbock who could scythe through defences at will, a first-choice Springbok centre in Damian Willemse, and a creative back-three who could all finish, in Leolin Zas, Warwick Gelant and Seabelo Senatla. 

The Stormers were the most-watched team in the league on television last season, with a total audience of 7.2 million viewers. That is partly down to being one of the two teams to reach the showpiece final, but it is also testament to the fact that they played scintillating rugby for most of the season.

While the Western Cape fans were engaging with their team again, the players felt highly engaged with their community. “Clubs all over the world do charity stuff,” says John. “Normally they go somewhere, have a photo opportunity and plant a tree and all that. But we split the boys in four groups and the guys had to adopt a charity, for no publicity, and over the campaign they had to sit with the people at that charity and ask what they needed. Then, that group of ten players had to establish what they could organise, and then supply it. For example, for one charity it was three motorised wheelchairs. So, it was never just a one-off visit.”

This kind of connection with people in the Western Cape was highly motivational, especially on the day of the final. “That morning there was footage of a load of farm workers, probably very poor because they were wearing black garbage bags to shield them from the rain whilst travelling in the back of an open truck coming down the highway. They had cardboard boxes unfolded saying ‘Go the Stormers’ and Frans [Malherbe] said to us all ‘this is live on the highway coming into town, who are we playing for today.’

“We saw it after the final as well, the car guards, homeless people, they were all shouting for us.”

John is one of the longest-serving coaches in domestic rugby in South Africa, having been on the payroll at Western Province since 2010. But after the recent success, how does he see his future at the Stormers?

“I would say this is probably a further five-year project at least. We won five Currie Cups in a row in the 1980s, we were the best-supported team in South Africa for a reason in Super Rugby and I want to see us back to where we were, with international respect. Just based on results, I have had some interest from other clubs, but I want to see us become a dynasty and have a reconnection to the people.”

Super-charging the rugby teams he coaches, from the University of Cape Town fourths, fifteen years ago, to the Stormers today, makes John part of South Africa’s ongoing story of integration, even if he’s conflicted about his role within it.

“The progress rugby is making is brilliant [in South Africa]. Before, rugby was an isolated sport of the white elite, and the picture has changed dramatically for the better. As a country we still have real challenges. But in terms of the stuff I worry about, the integration, the democratisation, everything is infinitely better than it once was.”

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by Thinus Maritz

This extract was taken from issue 19 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.