The Springbok giant – known for being the man who toppled Jonah Lomu – still lives in our memories five years after his death
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Maybe it’s excessive to say James Small lost his life before he died. Maybe it’s more genteel to say he misplaced a life, in the way you might misplace your car keys or gym bag.
Maybe we should be more respectful of an old Springbok. Except that Small was a man of the world and it’s surely not necessary to tug our forelocks too hard. He might, though, have a good laugh at himself and given himself a high five at the way he decided to go. It was quite a big moment, in a blazingly trashy, You magazine kind of way, although, equally, it was quite a Small moment, in a blazingly trashy, You magazine kind of way.
I know enough about strip clubs to know that they’re sometimes full of women from Eastern European lands, so an international score is my preferred option. He didn’t score a try in the World Cup in 1995 but he sorely tested Jonah Lomu’s patience by holding on to him like a punchy Jack Russell terrier whenever he could.
I’d sure as hell want my life and I to get along, so we could be together again like old times. Old times are, of course, the best of times and the cliché holds for Small, I think, far more than it does for most. The strip-joint part of Small’s death wasn’t the only thing that tickled my fancy. While in the club that winter’s night, the official version of events says that he had a heart attack, although it is germane to the record to point out that when he arrived at the hospital he was butt naked.
Although perhaps it is better to say Small’s heart was always on his sleeve. He’s one of the few guys whose heart functions best outside of his body. He wore it there all the time. After his heart attack, Small was brought to the Bedford Gardens Hospital, a hospital I knew well, because after she had a stroke in 2014, my late mother, Cecily, went there for a gallbladder infection.
She indicated that she wanted to sit down and I helped her. She sat down on the stone wall of a raised bed in which a fine, old walnut tree grew. The tree was surrounded by irises, so thickly clustered that she could bend backwards into them so they made a kind of pillow. It was the last time I saw her with even a semblance of happiness in her eyes.
Part of that was a kind of animal defiance, a defiance that served him well as a rugby player, but probably a quality that was less useful in the post-rugby life that he set about losing with such pathos. It was a harsh accent, without inflection or softness. And it told you not only what was there — what you could actually hear about the man — but told you something of what was behind the man, too.
This social backlighting, if you will, conspired to mean that he over-compensated. He was always meaner, that bit harder, that bit more foul. The chip he carried on his shoulder was there for all to see along, of course, with the heart he wore so successfully on his sleeve. Small seemed hurt in the way boxers seem hurt. He seemed primordially hurt, as though he was a dumb beast, who’d been dragging his hurt around with him since the beginning of time.
It was always curious to me to ask whether he played rugby because he was hurt or whether he played rugby to get hurt just a little bit more. I remember once trawling through YouTube on a slow Tuesday afternoon, looking for something but nothing in particular, which is a sure way to find yourself down the merry YouTube rabbit hole.
No one ever refuses the offer of a swapped jersey, have you noticed? It’s the one ritual in sport that remains unsullied by everything else. Come to think of it, Small’s entire career feels a little imagined nowadays. This isn’t only because Small was so silent, because there are so few words around Small, but because although he died less than five years ago, he seemed to die a very long time ago indeed.
A new generation knows nothing about Small, except as a guy on the highlights packages who often slammed the ball down with one hand after he’d crossed the opposition try-line.
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