'Each guy had a number ... this was about taking your identity away and building you up again'
Before we set out, I got some advice from a mate of mine from Durban who was friendly with one of the instructors running the camp.
He said that one of the drills required you to bury an egg and cook it underground, underneath a fire, and urinate on the egg so that the moisture cooked it. He told me we would only get one match, so I should smuggle in a lighter, which I did, lodged in the inside of my cap.
After about two-and-a-half hours in the bus, we were nearing Warmbaths (now Bela-Bela) when we were told to put on blindfolds. About 20 minutes later the bus stopped, and we were told to take the blindfolds off and get off the bus. It was pitch black and we were in the middle of nowhere. Then the shouting started.
Instructors, dressed in khaki, screamed at us to get into a formation, but none of us had been to the army, so it was a complete mess. Eventually we got into some kind of formation, while these guys laughed their heads off at us. They then told us to get onto a truck that would normally transport cattle or sheep.
Before we climbed on, we were searched for contraband, and I thought to myself, "Holy shit, I've got the Bic lighter on the inside of my cap."
There we were, 30 okes standing naked and being searched, basically spreading our cheeks and opening our arms. The instructors started going through all our clothes, but somehow they missed the lighter strapped inside my cap.
After 10 minutes of marching down the road in the dark, we were stopped alongside a bunch of poles at the side of the road. What followed was horrible. There were two guys to a pole and off we went down the road. Every now and again the instructors would tell us to swap partners - "Poles down, swap!" Victor Matfield and Bakkies Botha would just find another pole, because they are the same height and they wanted to stay together, but the instructors spotted their little trick and our punishment was to leopard-crawl through the fire brush.
It was ridiculous, but typical army stuff about everyone paying the price if individuals stepped out of line.
At that stage we were surprised at what was going on, and obviously knew it was no joke, but no one had a clue how long it was going to go on for.
About an hour-and-a-half after that, we entered a little enclosure in the bush. Dawn was breaking and Rudolf (Straeuli) was now on the scene (up until then we had only been with the instructors). He sat on a little ledge, and on the ground before us were boxing headgear and gloves.
"Form a circle," he said. "Ja, we need to get to know each other. There are a lot of rivalries here, and in the World Cup only certain guys can start. Players will be competing for the same positions. We need to understand the dynamics of that, so we must fight."
First up was Thinus Delport against Werner Greeff. Now, Werner, who can be a difficult fellow at the best of times, had just thrown his toys, and his sense of humour was gone. He's a good but tough guy who's had a lot of personal upheaval in his life and doesn't take any shit. We could see he wasn't impressed with this camp at all, and now the first fight was between the fullbacks.
Werner wasn't really interested in fighting at first, but then he took a few shots from Thinus and realised, "OK, I'm not really proving anything, I'm just getting a klap." He got angry and that's when the fight really started.
Jaws dropped. Selborne Boome, our quiet intellectual, thought he was in a time warp. He went to De Wet Barry and asked, "Is this for real?"
That was the typical type of match-up, but there were also some strange ones. There was the uncalled-for bill between Corné Krige, the captain, and Schalk Burger, the 20-year-old.
In another fight, Derick Hougaard got punched in the nose by Breyton Paulse. He came out of the ring yelling, "My neus is af (my nose is broken)! My neus is af." Rudolf threw him back into the circle and said, "Keep on fighting, your three minutes are not up."
None of the 15 fights were uncontested. In each of them, the guys got stuck in - you had to fight. The instructors were egging everyone on like mad. They were loving it. That's why I say I wasn't traumatised by Staaldraad, as I learnt a heck of a lot about myself and about the individuals around me. None of it helped me or South Africa in the 2003 World Cup, but would I do it over again? Yes, I probably would, because I had never done something remotely like it. I realised that you can go without food for three days - as long as you have got water, which we always had access to - and that you can function without sleep.
For me, Staaldraad was an educational experience and I quite enjoyed the challenge. Look, it wasn't pleasant. My fight with Christo Bezuidenhout was like a Clash of the Titans. All the fights between the big boys were.
Apart from the heavyweight clashes, there were the athletic match-ups where a guy like Gcobani Bobo, throwing jabs, knocked Louis Koen out twice.
On the first night, the winners of the tug-of-war had been promised food. Our group won and they brought a box which contained two live chickens.
"There's your supper, there's the fire, do whatever you want," said Rudolf.
The Afrikaans guys said: "Lekker, we can sort this out and share the meat."
But Rudolf said: "No, no, no! Joe (van Niekerk), you must kill the first chicken."
Now, Joe was the type of guy who thought chickens came from Nando's. He had never considered how they got there, so he started to panic and hyperventilate. "No, I can't kill a chicken!" he said.
"Joe, kill the chicken, just wring its fucking neck," Rudolf replied. Joe had never killed anything in his life, and wrenched the poor creature's neck, without too much conviction. I can't explain how horrific it was. We all stood there like bloody barbarians watching poor Joe hyperventilate and reluctantly torture the unfortunate fowl. He just didn't want to do it and didn't know how. Eventually Joost van der Westhuizen had to intervene by grabbing the chicken and putting it out of its misery.
The instructors then took us to a dam, and it was off with our kit again and into the water. We had to wade in up to our chins. It was the coldest water I had ever experienced, and I had never felt so frozen in my life.
We were given a drill where we were each handed a rugby ball that had to be pumped full of water, and when all the balls were full, we could come out. You had to find the ball in the water that had your number on it - there were no names on this camp, each guy had a number, as this was about taking your identity away and then building you up again as a team.
We were never ever going to pump our balls up with water. We had bike pumps with little nozzles, and you had to suck the water into the pump and then push it into the ball. The nozzles broke after two minutes.
We had been in for an hour- and-a-half when I saw that Stefan Terblanche was turning blue. His jaw was clattering and he looked as if he was about to freeze solid.
It was a bit easier for us big boys, because we have got some insulation, but I hated every second of it. I have still got real hassles with cold water, and I hate ice baths to this day because of that futile exercise.
While we were freezing our bollocks off, Rudolf and the instructors were having a braai in front of the dam, making boerewors rolls with tomato sauce and mustard, and drinking beers. The guys were gatvol, and began to talk about a rebellion. Corné came to me and asked me what I thought.
I replied: "Whatever we do, we've got to do it together because if we're disjointed ... Maybe they actually want us to make a stand together."
We started walking out of the water, but one guy stayed in. Faan Rautenbach is one of the most decent okes you will ever meet, and it's not in him to challenge authority. Faan just stayed there, chin deep, not budging while the instructors went mad. "Julle is nie 'n fokken span nie, klim terug in die water (You are not a fucking team, get back into the water)!" Then they shot two rounds past us into the water. We shat ourselves. And so we got back in ... After an eternity, the command came: "Out of the water, line up."
We always had to march in a formation of three and had to sing as we marched. The big singers were Louis Koen, De Wet, Corne and myself.
The guys were really tired - we hadn't slept for 40 hours - so we didn't give a flying continental about being self-conscious about whose member was hanging out or shrivelled up. We also didn't know we were being filmed because Dale McDermott, our technical analyst, was a part of the team and always had a video camera with him, as he did at the camp.
Eventually we were told to put our kit on. It was nearly dusk, and the next challenge was to stay awake through the second night.
The instructors told us they were going to drop each of us off on our own in the bush. We would have one match to make a fire, and then we would have to do the egg thing (as described earlier) and cook a drumstick. But we weren't allowed to eat the food when it had been cooked.
It was late winter on the Highveld and really cold. They told us that if our fires went out, we couldn't get help from anyone else, and if they found tracks from us walking away from our camps, the team would pay.
Rudolf was going from camp to camp asking each of us what we thought about the World Cup - this was his one-on-one time with us.
In the morning we got picked up one by one. We all smelt like braai smoke and hadn't really slept, but we were happy to see each other after being on our own for 12 hours. The instructors lined us up in a formation and we had to put our egg, wood and drumstick in front of us for inspection. "Is your drumstick cooked?" they asked. "Very nice, eat it. Egg? Cooked?"
They tested the egg by banging it on your forehead, and if yours wasn't cooked, you literally got egg on your face. If you had got it right, you could peel it and chow it. My egg was half done, so I got half the egg down my face and I chowed the rest.
That night the staggering troops were told that the next exercise would be staying awake.
The instructors lined us up and we had to lie lepel (spoon) to keep each other warm and retain body heat. So there we were, 30 okes in lepel formation watching the stars, with the instructors (who were taking hourly shifts) telling us about the stars and other boring stories in order to try and make us fall asleep. Our job was to keep each other awake.
We all made it through the night, though, and the next morning they told us we had a fun day ahead.
They said we were going to go abseiling and jump out of helicopters into the water, but we had to get to the top of the mountain first. The grand finale saw us all flown out in a big army chopper and dropped into the water. However, each group had one or two guys who couldn't swim, so we had to make sure there were enough swimmers in the water to catch them and guide them through the water.
We were then given materials to make rafts in groups of seven or eight, and told we had to use them to go across the dam and back. We had 20 minutes to build the raft, which had to be done in the nude in the water. Afterwards, an instructor's whistle went and we were back in formation. We marched and did push-ups. We were thinking to ourselves, "Holy shit, is this it? Is the camp over?" But then they marched us all the way to the middle of the bush, gave us GPS navigators and said: "Here are the co-ordinates, you guys get yourselves back to base."
We had been left in the middle of nowhere and it was getting dark and cold. We wanted to make a fire but our allocation of matches had been used up the previous night. I had my Bic and I wanted to pull it out, but I knew the instructors would then wonder how we started the fire.
Then the instructors said: "OK, you've got 30 seconds to fall asleep in that tent. It was probably a 15-man tent, so we had to pack in like sardines. I promise you, I was lying on my back, the one half of my body was on someone else's half and his half was on mine. We were told to sleep, which wasn't a problem. We slept for about an hour-and-a-half before the instructors woke us up with gunshots and told us to get into formation.
"Congratulations," they said. "It's all over and there's a braai on the go for you." We all tucked into lamb chops and guzzled beers - it was the best braai I have ever had. There was an immense sense of relief. We were alive! These okes had nearly killed us, they had broken us, and here we were having beers with them.
The vibe was really good on the bus. The guys had a feeling of togetherness and felt a sense of achievement. Rugby was the last thing on our minds because we were just so amazed at ourselves and were talking and telling "army" stories.
We talk and laugh about Staaldraad to this day.
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