Greeff gains strength from pain and disaster

Werner Greeff, the latest in a long and glorious line of South African attacking full-backs to confront England at Twickenham, once played golf off scratch and would still be doing so had he not broken a few of the more relevant bones in a motorcycle crash a couple of years ago.

"It put me back a little: I play off four now," he says. What he does not reveal until much later in the conversation is that he is a left-hander who learned to play as a right-hander because he could not afford left-handed clubs. "You know how expensive those things are. They were way out of range at that point in my life."

And what a life. If the fact that Greeff, a one-time printer from Cape Town, took only a couple of years to master that most challenging and unforgiving of individual sports while standing the wrong way round is on the unusual side of remarkable, it is nowhere near as extraordinary as the rest of his story – a story of penury and tragedy, of dignity in the face of dispiriting odds, of an inspiring belief that, for all its cruelties, the world is essentially a positive kind of place.

Greeff may or may not make it through to next autumn's World Cup in Australia, but whatever happens on the Springbok selection front over the next 12 months, it is safe to predict that we will not see his like again this side of Armageddon.

Greeff was raised by a deserted mother in a tough northern suburb of Cape Town, the furthest of far cries from the privileged upbringing common to the vast majority of his predecessors in the Bokke shirt. (His kid sister died of cystic fibrosis at 11; later, Greeff would be devastated by the early deaths of both his girlfriend and his best rugby-playing buddy, the Springbok tourist Robbie Markham, in road accidents). He was a hot school athlete, specialising in the sprint hurdles, and an even better tennis player who enjoyed three years of invincibility on the local junior circuit, but family privation held him back.

"My mother always worked every hour of the day to give us what we needed, but we didn't have the money for me to travel around playing tennis tournaments, much as I would have loved to have done it," he recalls. "And there was no rugby in my family... no sport at all, apart from the little bit of football my grandfather played. I'm playing rugby now only because it opened doors that would otherwise have remained closed. The first time I flew out of Cape Town was with the Western Province Under-21 team. I am grateful to the game for that."

Fascinatingly, Greeff's gratitude has not blossomed into any great love for the sport he plays; indeed, he may be the first Springbok rugby player not to be particularly keen on rugby. "It is not my passion, my great love in life," he says. "Many of my friends would sacrifice all they have to play rugby for South Africa and, because I know what it means to them, I do not take my responsibilities lightly. But so many people dream of playing rugby professionally that they spend too little time on other aspects of their life and lose sight of the fact that there cannot be a million Springboks. What they need is a sense of balance.

"This is sport, and only sport. People accuse me of talking crap on this subject, but why would I lie? I do not watch rugby – if I was going to watch a sport, it would not be this one – and it went through my mind at the start of this year to give up the game and do something else. I am pleased I stuck with it, of course, for it is a great honour to represent your country in any field. But it is my job, not my obsession. I feel emotion like other sportsmen: you would have to be a stone not to be affected by some of the things that happen on big occasions. But before I started playing seriously, the only thing I knew about Springbok rugby was that we won the World Cup in 1995."

He knows other, more important, things. At 25, he has encountered more hurt than many people twice his age, yet believes utterly in his own, made-to-measure philosophy of iron self-belief and boundless optimism. "I refuse to fail," he pronounces. "People write me off all the time: they said I could not play outside-half for Western Province, or play full-back for the Springboks, only to see me do both of those things. I am a fighter who knows what it is to be at the bottom, and also understands that it is possible to rise up again. And anyway, I do not believe my life has been so hard. Not really. The bad things happen to us all. It is just that, in my case, they happened early."

Worryingly from England's perspective, Greeff's self-belief extends to the events waiting to unfold this Saturday. "It is clear that we must take a step up after losing in Scotland last weekend," he says, "but England must take a step up too, for they will meet a dangerous Springbok team. I honestly believe we are close to developing a very special side. Some of the stuff we are putting together on the training field is awesome, and our failure to reproduce that quality of work in match situations on this tour is down to a lack of experience as much as anything."

Maybe Greeff is right. Maybe he will have the final scoring word this weekend, just as he did when the Boks beat Australia in a Tri-Nations classic in Johannesburg three months ago. If he does, he will celebrate with the best of them. If he messes up, it will not be the end of his world.