www.sportsillustrated.co.za | 4948 | SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SEPTEMBER 2012

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BY ANGUS POWERS

EBEN ETZEBETH

TIRED OF OTHERS’ ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WHO HE SHOULD BE, EBEN ETZEBETH IS ON A MISSION TO FORGE A REPUTA-TION HIS FAMILY CAN BE PROUD OF. THE SCARY PART IS THAT HE’S GOING TO USE BRUTE STRENGTH TO DO IT.

48 | SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SEPTEMBER 2012

on a Saturday morning, young Etzebeth would take it hard.

“He was always like that,” recalls his mother, Karen. “He sommer got bedon-nerd. I would often say to him, ‘Eben, it’s OK if you don’t win.’ He’d say, ‘No, it’s not OK, ma.’ He doesn’t believe in losing. He is very goal-orientated. If he puts his mind to something, he will go for it until he has it. He always wants to win.”

In his final year at junior primary, Eben was crowned victor ludorum at sports day (he excelled in sprints and jumps), but once he got to high school, he found the going harder. His athletics career stalled, and he became a fixture in the B team backline, roving between centre, wing and fullback. But in 2007, half way through Grade 10, Etzebeth decided that something had to change. The prospect of playing U19C or D had no appeal, so he joined his brother at the local Virgin Active. His membership contract only allowed him access during off-peak hours, and he had school and rugby practice to attend anyway, but pumping iron had the desired effect and soon he started picking up some size.

“When Eben started gymming, I was bigger than him,” says Ryen, now an estate agent like his mother. “I was about 100kg, but I haven’t changed much because I’m still around 105kg. It was that December holiday after Grade 10. I don’t know what happened, but he just got big. It was quite abnormal, even though we were eating a lot of protein. A lot of tuna and raw eggs. I don’t know what happened to his hormones in that holiday, but when he went back to school, his friends didn’t recognise him.”

The first-team coach knew a good thing when he saw it though and demanded that Etzebeth attend trials as a lock. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to play lock. I want to play wing’,” Etzebeth remembers. “But I had no choice. My body decided. So I went to trials as lock and before I knew it, I got my first game for the first team. From there, the family genes kicked in and by the beginning of matric, I weighed 122kg.”

It was an extraordinary growth spurt as the youngster packed on 40kg of bulk, and 15cm of height, in two years of solid gymming, maturing and eat-ing like a horse. To achieve gains like that, Etzebeth’s musculature must be of a variety that is exquisitely attuned

to being loaded: even now, under the watchful eye of the Stormers condition-ing coach, Etzebeth can put on a kilo-gram of pure muscle after a mere week’s work in the weights room.

But do not underestimate the role of nutrition in this equation. Etzebeth him-self never did. In fact, when UCT offered him the use of a team flat to lure him to the Ikey Tigers, Etzebeth declined in favour of staying in Goodwood and enjoying the benefits of his mother’s cooking. Mrs Etzebeth still feels the strain of feeding her youngest. “He’s always hungry,” she complains. “Even when the house is dark and quiet at 11 o’clock at night, I can hear him in the kitchen at the breadbin. He’ll be look-ing for leftovers from supper, or making ham and cheese snackwiches. I love it when he’s playing away or there’s a tour, so that I can have a rest!”

WHEN THE ETZEBETH brothers out-grew playing in the street they crossed the road to Goodwood

Rugby Club, where they could kick and tackle to their hearts’ content. After he started taking his rugby more seri-ously, Goodwood RC was where Eben put in the extra hours and more hard yards. When he lifted his eyes from the turf, Etzebeth would see Tygerberg hills undulating across the near horizon. He knew that if it weren’t for the sports bur-sary, his mother could not afford the fees to send him to Tygerberg High. When his gaze swung west, the sandstone lump of Table Mountain loomed over the city’s sprawl. Who knew that his future lay in that direction – first at the English university on its slopes, and then down the road at Western Province? But back then, those Goodwood fields were the centre of his rugby world.

After school, Etzebeth sold his scooter and moved into hostel at the Western Province Rugby Institute in Stellenbosch. The 2010 intake – including names like Siya Kolisi, Frans Malherbe, Nizaam Carr, Scarra Ntubeni and Sam Lane – began their march on higher honours by winning the U19 Currie Cup for WP. More than most, Etzebeth knew what was at stake. “I said to myself, I’m not going to waste a year at the insti-tute when I could study and get a job elsewhere. I had to try and make it in rugby. When I think back, I should have

THErE arE TWo sto-ries that illustrate the intent that Eben Etzebeth carries within. The first you may have heard before. It took place during Stormers pre-season training earlier in the year.

While the rest of the squad were push-ing out their sets of incline dumbbell press using normal weights, Etzebeth was taping two loose 5kg plates onto the heaviest dumbbells available (65kg) just to get a decent sweat on. Soon after-wards, the Stormers were forced to order in pairs of 70kg and 75kg dumb-bells, with a request for 80kg weights pending. No-one in South Africa has ever needed 80kg dumbbells before.

The second story you probably saw unfold on TV, and then watched again in disbelief on YouTube. Five minutes into the Super Rugby semifinal between the Stormers and the Sharks, Etzebeth received the ball at head height, took three small steps and then braced for a tackle from the on-rushing Bismarck du Plessis. For an instant both men’s bodies absorbed the energy generated by the collision of 230kg of bone and muscle, before Etzebeth exploded forwards and upwards, flinging the brawny Sharks hooker aside like a ragdoll. After collect-ing himself, Du Plessis played on (and had the last laugh at the final whistle) but no-one at Newlands that day was left in any doubt about what Etzebeth will ultimately be capable of.

Two stories, but the moral is the same. Don’t get in Eben Etzebeth’s way.

WHEN ETZEBETH Was growing up, he would beg his brother Ryen, older by four years, to come

and kick the rugby ball in the street. Etzebeth’s family live in Goodwood, a modest, working-class suburb laid out along Voortrekker Road, the original road from the Cape to Stellenbosch and beyond. Although his was something of a rugby family, Eben learned the game at

school and the enthusiasm he showed was all his own. His bedroom

walls were plastered with posters of Bobby Skinstad

and Jonah Lomu, and if his team were beaten

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EBEN ETZEBETH

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worked even harder there. No-one ever regretted working hard.”

When Stellenbosch University weren’t interested and UCT came call-ing, Etzebeth leapt at the chance. The best decision of his life, he calls it, and it catapulted him into the big time. Door after door swung open, all with seem-ing ease. The 2011 Varsity Cup was fol-lowed by representing the Baby Boks at the IRB Junior World Championship, and then playing for WP U21 in the Currie Cup. Torn ankle ligaments put a senior Currie Cup debut on ice, but Etzebeth had done enough to earn a spot in the Stormers training squad. The rest – including the run to the Super Rugby semis and a Springbok debut at the ten-der age of 20 – is recent history.

But the price of fame is not always listed on a three-year Western Province contract. And your name is not always yours alone. When everyone (not just the future Mrs Etzebeths on Facebook and at Newlands) wants a piece of you, and they all claim to know who you really are, it can get more than a little frustrating.

“Lots of people have come up with the comparison to Bakkies Botha,” says

Etzebeth. “I don’t really care what they say about that. If people think I play like Bakkies, let them think that. I want to start my own career now and not always be known as the next Bakkies.

“And the same with my family, the Etzebeths. I don’t want to live off a name that they set down before me. I want to create my own legacy and let it stay there for years to come. When people hear I’m an Etzebeth, they speak about Clifford and Skattie; about how they played in those days and how they

messed people up on the rugby field and sommer off the field too. I think Clifford can keep you busy for a few hours with all his stories.”

Clifford ETZEBETH, likE his nephew, is a man of vast proportions. The raw-boned power conferred by the

Etzebeth genetics is undimmed even at the age of 62, but the battered face and huge, gnarled hands suggest a different kind of career in a different kind of time. The son of a railway worker, Clifford P

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Watch Eben Etzebeth line up for the Springboks in the Rugby Championship, 25 August to 6 October, live on SuperSport.

evaded his old man’s temper by jump-ing out of the cottage window as a 10-year-old to join the local wrestling club. Three months later, when he won a junior WP title, he got up the courage to show his dad the cup. Clifford and his brother Skattie went on to wrestle for South Africa, while Harry, Eben’s father, wrestled and played eight-ball pool for Province. Their sister, Alida, played provincial netball.

Clifford was the finest rugby play-er of the seven brothers and won 25 Province caps from 1977 to 1981. He played prop and lock, and roomed on tour with Errol Tobias. Those were the days of Morne du Plessis, Naas Botha, Gysie Pienaar and the like; when strong men feared the fists of Kevin de Klerk; and Natal’s relegation to the Currie Cup B section spelled the end of WP’s trips to Durban and the wildest after-parties at DHS Old Boys’ Club.

When he retired, Goodwood Rugby Club made Cliffie an offer he couldn’t refuse, so he played eight more seasons for the first team, until he was 39. Last year, half a century after jumping out that window, he won his weight divi-sion at the masters wrestling world championships. Ask Clifford whether there is much a rugby player can learn from wrestling, and he will offer to demonstrate by separating your arm from its socket.

There were years of suffering too. Four of the Etzebeth clan were policemen, and a fifth was in the correctional ser-vices. When Clifford was Eben’s age, he found it necessary to moonlight as a bouncer at nearby hotel bars. But hard living takes its toll. One brother died of lung cancer. Another died, along with his wife – and Clifford’s face darkens at the thought – of gunshot wounds when a domestic dispute turned tragic. Skattie was killed while on debt-collecting duty.

These days Clifford may have mel-lowed, but he still radiates the vigour of a very much younger man. At the gym he spins and rows, works on his core and uses the sauna to drop weight when competition time nears. Although, he notes, you can often lose as much as 2kg during wrestling practice. How on earth? “Sweat,” he says. “And sometimes blood.” He winks.

if iT WErEN’T for the surname and the physique, Eben might as well not be an Etzebeth. He easily passed matric

(despite missing weeks of class while on rugby tour) and does not yet have a girlfriend. He would rather gym than drink, and is grounded in his faith, read-ing the Bible each night and dropping to one knee before every match. He is handsome – his eyebrows have a wicked arch – and describes himself as shy. He has also never wrestled.

“I’m glad for my family that they did what they did, played Western Province or wrestled for South Africa,” he says. “But their achievements have nothing to do with me. My parents have always given me the freedom to make my own decisions, and I prefer it that way. If they don’t influence me, and I make a mistake, then I can only blame myself.”

Unleashing all that due diligence and bottled-up energy is what Etzebeth lives for. “On the field, it’s totally different,” he says. “You can take out all your frustrations there. I like the confron-tational battle. I like the team. It’s as if you become immortal, like the X-Men or something.”

It’s that mutant power, the intimi-dating physicality, that makes the field of play Etzebeth’s natural environment and the arena where he flourishes. Combine the strength required to bench- press 175kg with a backline player’s explosiveness (Eben covers 10m in 1.65sec and 40m in 5.11sec – incredible stats for a man his size) and the result really is science fiction-esque.

But Etzebeth is no laboratory ath-lete, wary of the dirty work. “I wasn’t in a lot of fights when I was growing up,” he admits, “but if it happens, I can stand my ground. I would back myself against probably anyone. Our family was known for ‘cleaning’ a few bars. I think it’s just in our blood. My brother is also a guy you must be a little bit scared of. He’s not that big, but… just believe me. But on the rugby field, every player has the guts and attitude to stand up for a fight and take a punch.”

No wonder his teammates named him Xerxes, after the so-called god-king of the movie 300. There is only one missing element, the intangible which will make Etzebeth the total player, and that is confidence. But even that is already emerging, growing strong-er as the youngster learns his trade. Meanwhile, Eben’s teammates take every opportunity to make him flex his biceps or show his muscles off for the camera. The joke is still on Xerxes. But for how much longer?

“I wasn’t in a lot of fights when I was

growing up, but if it happens,

I can stand my ground. I would

back myself against prob-ably anyone.”

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ToWEr of poWEr In his debut season, Eben Etzebeth passed every test that came his way, helping the Stormers to the Super Rugby semifinal and the Boks to a series win over England.

Big HiTTEr At 2.04m and 117kg, Etzebeth is a fearsome ball-carrier, as Bismarck du Plessis can attest. The prospect of watching them operate in tandem for the Boks is mouth-watering.

EBEN ETZEBETH