The Ruck has launched a new narrative series on the Springbok-All Black rivalry, and the opening episode goes straight to the root of why this fixture has always been about more than rugby. Hosts Will Kelleher, Elgan Alderman and Alex Lowe trace the rivalry's poisoned origins to the 1921 tour of New Zealand, where team manager Harold Bennett privately told his Maori counterpart that no Maori side would find accommodation in South Africa — and that he would personally recommend the exclusion of Maori players from any future All Black touring party. The episode frames Bennett's conversation, and the infamous Blackett telegram that inflamed local opinion during the same tour, as the moment a deliberate racial exclusion policy was formalised — one that, as the hosts argue, would drive the next six decades of tension between the two countries: protest movements, Olympic boycotts, South Africa's expulsion from international rugby, and the rebel tours that followed.
The racist policy that shaped 60 years of Springbok-All Black history
The Ruck's new series argues that a racist selection policy formalised during the 1921 Springbok tour of New Zealand set the course for six decades of political conflict around the sport's greatest rivalry.
The Ruck's new series argues that a racist selection policy formalised during the 1921 Springbok tour of New Zealand set the course for six decades of political conflict around the sport's greatest rivalry.
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