Newly minted Glaswegian understands those that don't want him in a Scottish jersey
Kyle Steyn tells a story about unity, forgiveness and love, the tale of a white South African cop assigned to protect Nelson Mandela amid some of the most volatile days the nation had seen.
The subject of the yarn is Steyn’s father, Rory, a former Johannesburg police officer raised in the days of apartheid and conditioned by division. In 1994, he was hired to lead the security team who watched over the newly-elected president during his five-year term – he knew little of what to expect or what kind of man he had been tasked with guarding.
As it transpired, Rory Steyn had court-side seats to the fusion of a people. He was at Ellis Park when Mandela was greeted by a rapturous frenzy three days after his inauguration.
He ran security for the All Blacks at the 1995 World Cup – and remains convinced they were poisoned the week of their final loss to the Springboks in the most poignant match in rugby history. He famously bundled Mandela and Prince Charles into the back of a Rolls Royce to escape a stampede of clamouring supporters in Brixton.
He saw these huge public events but he was also privy to moments of great spontaneous beauty. The intellect, the humility, the unwavering benevolence of Mandela, whether addressing a gnarled Afrikaner or a gawping child, captivated him. These were values he would impress upon his three boys.
(Continue reading below…)
“My dad worked for a special branch of the police, so he talks about how he was listening to bugged phone lines of people that worked for Mr Mandela, then four years later he was working for Mr Mandela,” Steyn says.
“He learned that Mr Mandela had only taken him on because he’d been working for that branch – Mandela was trying to make an example of his own security team, about how he could get white bodyguards of the old apartheid regime and people who had looked after Mandela all the way through his time in jail to integrate and interact and be a perfectly functioning team.
“Dad openly admits when he was younger he voted for the pro-apartheid party. He said it was incredible to see all the perceptions of Mandela, the way he acted in front of people and behind closed doors were just 100% consistent. The way he treated people, no matter where he was, was just mind-blowing to my dad.
“So certainly growing up, we were under no illusions as to how to be inclusive of everybody and that’s certainly something I’m most thankful to my dad for – having that open mind, I’ve got so many black and white team-mates that have all been great friends.”
The roots of Steyn’s blistering ascent through Scottish rugby were laid in Glasgow long ago. Douglas, his maternal grandfather, was an engineer from Bearsden, the plush city suburb a few miles from Scotstoun, where his grandson has thundered on to the scene as a potent member of the Warriors backline.
Steyn’s mother and her three sisters were born here before Douglas found work in South Africa and emigrated with his brood. “My granddad’s got two brothers, one stayed here in Bearsden and his family still lives here, so I’ve been up there to see him and they showed me the house where they actually grew up, which is cool,” Steyn says.
“My mum’s family is crazy about Flower of Scotland, so putting the TV on for the anthem was almost more of a thing than watching the actual game. The four girls and my gran were interested in the anthem and my granddad and I were interested in the rugby. They’re not good singers at all.
“The Fiji game [in November] was the first game I watched at Murrayfield and hearing Flower of Scotland there was spine-chilling with no music and then the pipes go off…unbelievable.”
Gregor Townsend stumbled across Steyn in almost comical fashion. He was in Bloemfontein to watch Glasgow play the Cheetahs and got chatting to the bloke handing out the sponsor’s man of the match award. The man turned out to be a friend of Rory’s, who said there was a handy young centre captaining the Griquas Currie Cup team and did Townsend know the lad happened to be Scottish-qualified?
Zander Fagerson, Callum Gibbins & Kyle Steyn have been added to our European squad ahead of this month's Heineken Champions Cup quarter-final against @Saracens, subject to EPCR confirmation. pic.twitter.com/4sQpLwq0tO
— Glasgow Warriors (@GlasgowWarriors) March 14, 2019
“Gregor passed it on to [Scottish Rugby’s director of rugby] Scott Johnson and [Scotland Sevens coach] John Dalziel. I got a call from Scott Johnson asking if I saw Scotland as the future for me and I said yes from the word go,” Steyn says.
“I got in contact with John and came over last February for a trial period with the sevens, did two weeks’ training and managed to go away with the side to LA and Vancouver. John stayed in contact with me the whole way through the year and eventually I got a sevens contract.”
The goal was always to get a XVs deal and now Steyn has made it happen. At 25, he will be a full-time Glasgow player next season but with Dave Rennie losing so much firepower to the Scotland and to the treatment table, he has started each of the Warriors’ last four PRO14 matches and been among the most impressive performers in every outing. He was even called into the Scotland camp in the last week of the Six Nations amid a heinous spate of injuries.
There was a little anxiety about how his new team-mates would feel about a South African called Steyn fetching up and pulling on a blue jersey. There have been critics too of his rapid elevation to the national squad – not because he’s a poor player or a bad guy, but because it is seen as a slap in the face to those who have learned their rugby in Scotland.
Goodbye message from our Tafel Lager Griqua Captain, Kyle Steyn:
"I have been very privileged to play for Griquas and become apart of its rich history over the last two years. I have learnt many valuable lessons and made special memories and great friends. ..
Read more on FB. pic.twitter.com/dSQdqXX3fJ— Griquas Rugby (@GriquasRugby) October 12, 2018
“I’m here because I want to make a difference to the Warriors, to the sevens, to Scottish rugby as a whole. I understand where those people are coming from but I’m sure we’ve got the same goal – they just want what’s best for Scottish rugby and so do I,” Steyn says.
“My dad actually asked one of the sevens boys about that, in thanking him for the way they welcomed me, and he just said, ‘We’ve got a really small pool of players, a couple of South Africans, a couple of New Zealanders – that’s something we’ve got to adapt to, to help ourselves compete with these teams’.”
By sheer good fortune, Steyn’s parents were able to watch him crashing over for his first Glasgow try on Saturday – fittingly, against the Cheetahs – as they follow their youngest son on a high school rugby tour around Britain. Clan Steyn will descend on Allianz Park this weekend when Glasgow arrive aiming to inflict only Saracens’ fifth home defeat in the Champions Cup for eight years and reach the semi-finals for the first time in the club’s history.
The pair have already contested two ferociously brutal and immensely hot-tempered pool affairs this season. Saracens won both. In the first, at Scotstoun, there was as much collar-grabbing and shunting and off-the-ball verbals as there was rugby. Maro Itoje greeted a disallowed Glasgow try with sarcastic revelry. Rennie sent a clips reel featuring unspotted incidents, errors and reckless clear-outs to the tournament organisers after Mathieu Raynal’s erratic performance with the whistle.
Chuck in the howitzer of a Calcutta Cup draw at Twickenham, in which 11 Saracens and Warriors featured, Ryan Wilson’s antagonistic cameo on a rugby podcast, and Rennie’s midweek assertion that his opponents attempt to compensate for their errors with “a lot of push-and-shove to maybe bring the referee in to change a decision”, and the stage is set for another engrossing, angst-ridden duel.
“We need to put in a really physical performance but mainly it’s just a belief thing, believing we can go down there and get the win,” Steyn says.
“Making the ref aware of what they’re up to and making sure they’re not successful with it is probably the big one. They’re trying to throw us off from achieving something we want to do, and our main focus has got to be that we still want to achieve that. The boys are certainly going to be fired up and nobody will step down.”
Comments on RugbyPass
I’ve just noticed that this match has an all-French refereeing team. Surely a game like this ought to have a neutral ref? Although looking at the BBC preview of the Saints game, Raynal is also down as reffing that - so there may be some confusion about who is reffing what.
1 Go to commentsIf Havili can play anywhere in the back line, why not first 5. #10.
11 Go to commentsThe dressing room had already left for their summer break before they ran out in Dublin that year, and that’s on the coach. Franco Smith has undoubtedly made progress, particularly their maul, developing squad players and increasing squad depth. And against a very tight budget too. That said they were too lightweight last year and got found out against both Toulon and Munster in consecutive games. Better this season so far but they’ve developed something of a slow start habit occasionally, most notably losing at home to Northampton who played them at their own game. Play offs will ultimately show whether there has been tangible progress on last year, or not…!
2 Go to commentsAustralian Rugby has been a disaster, by not incorporating learning from previous successful campaigns. QLD Reds 2011 - Waratahs 2014. Players, coaches and administrators appoint there representatives for scheduled meetings, organisation’s agreement’s assessments and correspondence. This why a unified Rugby Union under one entity works. Every Rugby nation has taken that path. Was most difficult in the Northern hemisphere with over 100 years of club rugby before the game become professional. Took a lot of humility for those unions to eventually work together.
7 Go to commentsThough Wilson’s sacking was pretty brutal, it wasn’t just down to that Leinster game; Glasgow had a lot of 2nd half collapses that season, in the URC and Europe, and only just scraped into the playoffs. Franco Smith has definitely been an improvement, some players are delivering far more than they did under Wilson.
2 Go to commentsjesus - that front 5!
1 Go to commentsShould be an absolute cracker of a game! Will be great to see DuPont & Ntamack in tandem once again🔥
1 Go to commentsBest team ever…. To have played? These guys are still pressure chokers. Came nowhere when it counted. What a joke
69 Go to commentsMusk defends anonymous terrorism, fascism, threats against individuals and children etc etc But a Rugby club account….lock ‘em up!!!
1 Go to commentsActually the era defining moment came a few years earlier. February 2002 to be precise, when Michael D Higgins as finance minister at the time introduced his sports persons tax relief bill to the dial. As the politicians of the day stated “It seems to be another daft K Club frolic born in Kildare amongst the well-paid professional jockeys with whom the Minister plays golf” and that the scheme represented “a savage uncaring vision of Ireland and one that should be condemned”. The irfu and Leinster would be nowhere near the position they are in today without this key component of the finances.
2 Go to commentsIt is crystal clear that people who make such threats on line should be tried and imprisoned. Those with responsibility in social media companies who don’t facilitate this should be convicted. In real life, I have free speech to approach someone like Reinach and verbally threaten him. I am risking a conviction or a slap but I could do it. In the old days, If someone anonymously threatened someone by letter the police would ask and use evidence from the postal system. Unlike the Post, social media companies have complete instant and legal access to the content in social media. They make money from the data, billions. Yet, they turn a blind eye to terrorism, Nazi-ism and industrial levels of threats against individuals including their address and childrens schools being published online all from ananoymous accounts not real people. They claim free speech. Free speech for anonymous trolls/voilent thugs threatening people under false names? The fault is with the perps but also social media companies who think anonymous personas posting death threats constitutes free speech.
2 Go to commentsSo if this ain’t the best Irish team ever then who exactly is? I don’t remember any other Irish team being this good & winning a series in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Yes I may rip them often for 8 X QF RWC exits & twice not even making it to the QF, but they’re a damn good team who many think can only improve, including me!
69 Go to commentsNot a squeek out of Leinster for weeks about this match. So quiet. The first team have been quitely building for this encounter under Nienaber’s direction. All fresh, all highly motivated. They are expecting a season’s best performance from Northhampton. They will match that. They will be fresher and apparently they will have 80,000 out of the 83,000 shouting for them. I do expect Northhampton to turn up big time. Not to be missed. On a tangent it is evident how the loss of a few Premiership teams has in some respect helped other Premiership teams and England. More quality over less teams makes the teams better, which has a knock on effect on England. Not the only factor contributing to England’s rise but one of them.
2 Go to commentsOur very own monster teddy bear Ox😍💪
17 Go to commentsThis is might be the most generalised, entitled, patronising, out-of-pocket cultural indictment on a group of people you’ll ever see on what is supposedly a sports publication. I can only assume the author is weak like a woman or homosexual. I’m feeling an incredible range of emotions but I am not quite sure how to express them. I might go beat up a hockey player - assuming that’s okay with Duane and the boys? 🙂
9 Go to commentsBest thing the Welsh clubs could do is apply to join Gallagher prem surely be more exciting matches for there support than they have now.
2 Go to commentsRugbyPass writers are useless! you guys should get a real job because you all suck at writing about rugby!!!
9 Go to commentslooking forward to RWC2027 …. Boks on mission impossible for the Three-in-a-row, ABs to prove they being on par, France wishing to crown the “DuPont-era”, Ireland knocking on the Semi-Door ….. until then we’ll probably have to deal with Weird Ben’s fantasy-RWC23 (fun fact is, the drivel always creates a flooding of comments) …..
223 Go to commentsBen Smith you really make some good points in this article, the Springboks were not close to perfect and good still beat the All Blacks, imagine if they were as good as they were against France what a hiding the All Blacks would have gotten… maybe another Twickenham drubbing
223 Go to commentsIt is a good argument to keep the Rebels for one more year but also isnt this just opening the door as well for keeping them beyond 2025. If they can create some sort of financial stability in the next year and if their performances lift as they have this season then how would RA even cull them after that? It might be the most cost effective decision at this stage and perhaps many people are guilty of keeping relationships going because of the cost to decouple but then again when does that ever work out well?
29 Go to comments