The following article, explains far more than anything the ODU has published before, why someone such as John Dobson (1986K) received the Robert Gray medal.  

The article was written by an OD.

John Dobson was quite literally born into the Bishops Family. Eldest child of Margaret and Paul Dobson (who himself became a Bishops and South African legend in the Latin and VIth form classroom, as a School House housemaster, author, and rugby referee administrator), John spent the first 14 years of his life growing up on the Bishops campus. He attended the Prep and College between the years 1973-1986, including the final year in Post-Matric. He was in Kidd House.

Coach John describes this period of his life as the equivalent of “living in a giant country club for all those marvellous facilities from rugby fields to tennis courts to squash courts to the gymnasium and the chapel. This naturally generated in me a deep and eternal love of the school. I was privileged to mix with everybody from the pupils to the ground staff to the kitchen staff to the academic staff to the administrative staff. I drew so much from these lessons and those of the Bishops staff with whom I was privileged to interact, and not just on the rugby fields”.

“So many of the tenets of the school and its ethos and values still influence me in the world of professional rugby”. 

“The school was my life”. 

The influence of his father, Paul Dobson, was also pivotal: “I think my father became one of the legendary schoolmasters over his 30-year tenure at the school. He loved rugby, its history and most importantly its values. The values of fair play, sportsmanship, respect for the referee and the traditions and institutions involved. His desire to mould lives through sport as well as his special passion for rugby inspired me to become a rugby coach, even though I knew it would be an extremely risky career choice. Like my father I am, at heart, a school teacher and coaching is, at its core, really just teaching. I saw the marvellous respect and relations across generations my father and his peers enjoyed from their old pupils. I wanted to do the same – to influence the lives of young men in their most formative years. I also have a deep and abiding love for the institutions such as Bishops, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Western Province (WP) rugby and I wanted to use my skills to help those institutions excel and prosper. I felt I could help. Nowadays I see a more pressing national social imperative that makes the job so important”. 

John began as an “accidental coach”; his assumption was that his career would be in Law, for which his University degrees – Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Law, Master of Laws - had prepared him. From UCT he also received two other degrees: a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing.

His first experiences in rugby coaching began in 1994 with the Bishops under-14c and under-16c teams reaching unexpected heights as coach of the Bishops under-16a team in 2000. Switching his attention to UCT, he began coaching the Fourth XV in 2003 before guiding the First XV in 2004 to its first victory in 43 years in the annual Intervarsity encounter with Stellenbosch University. In 2007 he coached the UCT under-20 team to its first unbeaten season in history. During this time he attended Murray Maxted’s International Rugby Academy of New Zealand where he roomed with Eddie Jones. It was his first exposure to world-leading rugby coaches and began an ongoing and relentless search to travel anywhere in the world to acquire information and new skills that might make him a better and more effective coach. This desire is certainly one of defining character traits.

His reward was to be appointed coach of the 2008 UCT First XV in what would become that club’s most challenging year in its 126-year history. For that year saw the inauguration of the Varsity Cup rugby competition for the first XV teams from 8 selected South African Universities. When the competition was announced, John was warned by the competition’s organizers not to set his and UCT’s hopes too high. He was bluntly informed that the expectation was that UCT would be simply overwhelmed by their much more fancied and better funded opponents, leading to UCT’s relegation at the end of the first year. Relegation would essentially mean the end of UCT rugby as nationally relevant and competitive, with essentially no chance for recovery. (The long-term success in any team sport requires the ability to attract and retain talented players. If excluded from the major University rugby competition the UCT rugby club would, in the future, not have been able to attract skilled rugby players considering a future professional rugby career when many better options exist at other South African Universities). Saving the UCT Rugby Club would require Coach John to produce nothing short of a rugby miracle.

Working with a fraction of the financial resources and the player resources of the competing Universities and with a largely indifferent University administration, Coach John and his coaching staff prepared the players who could produce those miracles. During this experience, John proved to himself that the key to sustained success was to develop a culture of “belonging”; of caring excellence with players of intelligence who are willing to learn; who are of flawless character; of high discipline; who have the motivation to do what is correct for the team and their fellow team members at all times but most especially in moments of adversity; and all with an absence of any personal ego.

In other words, the array of personal attributes that he had learned from his parents and his lifelong exposure to the special Bishops culture.

To this he added the playing skills, the intellectual analysis of the game and the culture of self-belief that would convert a group of largely under-rated rugby players into Champions.

The result was that between 2008 and 2010 the team were beaten finalist in 2008 (in the final move of the game, after the full-time hooter) and 2010 and beaten semi-finalists in 2009. In 2011 when he was Director of UCT rugby, John’s UCT team captained by Nick Fenton-Wells (grandson of former Bishops Headmaster, Anthony Mallett) finally won the Varsity Cup, repeating this success in 2014. (The 2012 WP Vodacom Cup team also captained by Nick Fenton-Wells, and featuring many of the UCT 2011 Varsity Cup winning team, also won that competition).

These performances were enough to attract the attention of the Western Province rugby administrators and for the remainder of the 2010 season John was appointed WP under-21 Head Coach, guiding that team to victory in the under-21 Currie Cup; a success his teams would repeat in 2012 and 2013.

In 2015 he was appointed Head Coach of the WP Vodacom and Currie Cup teams; these teams reached but lost the finals of both competitions. In that year he was selected as Western Cape Sports Coach of the Year.

In 2016 he was again appointed Head Coach of the WP Currie Cup team which won the inaugural Currie Cup Qualifiers competition.

In 2017 again as Head Coach, his teams won the inaugural SuperSport Challenge and the Currie Cup with John being nominated as a finalist in the SA Rugby Coach of the Year.

In 2018 the Western Province Currie Cup team, unbeaten in the competition until then, lost in the Final. John was selected as WP Government Sports Coach of the Year.

In 2019, John was appointed Stormers Super Rugby Assistant Coach. The WP Currie Cup team would lose in the semi-finals of the competition.

In 2020 John was appointed Stormers Super Rugby Head Coach. His team was lying fourth on the log in the Super Rugby competition when COVID-19 struck and the competition was called off.

But COVID-19 was a small part of a much larger challenge faced by WP Rugby at that time and, without a solution to which, the WP Rugby Union and with it, rugby in the WP, as played and administered since 1883, would have collapsed. Few in the public may be aware of exactly how dire the situation had become by 2020,137 years later. Or of the miracle that was required to secure a future for rugby in this Province. It is said that “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man”. In the fullness of time, history will record that in this case that man turned out to be Coach Dobson.

For the reality is that John’s remarkable run of coaching successes was achieved in the setting of a decades-long disintegration of the administration of professional rugby in the Western Province. Financial maladministration had reduced the once revered Union to a state of irretrievable bankruptcy, faced with imminent and seemingly inevitable liquidation. The image of the once iconic Newlands rugby ground falling into disrepair provided a vivid visual confirmation of this decline.

The other obvious evidence of this decline was the flight of top class players from the Union, beginning in the 2020s. Exceptional Springbok players who had come to prominence in the Western Province during this time including Siya Kolisi, Cheslyn Kolbe, Eben Etzebeth, Damian De Allende, Dillyn Leyds (Bishops Ist XV 2010), Bongi Mbonambi and Pieter-Steph du Toit had all departed the province for more attractive offers elsewhere. All this was happening at the very moment that the WP Stormers together with two other South African teams had been included in a previously exclusive European rugby competition, the United Rugby Championship (URC) played between teams from South Africa, Italy, Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Yet the financial situation had become so dire that when the WP team flew to Trevizo, Italy on September 25th 2021 to play their first game of the 2021/22 URC competition, neither the management nor the players knew for how long the Union would survive. The most probable eventuality was that the WP franchise would be liquidated within weeks, and the Free State Cheetahs would replace WP in future competitions.

The WP franchise was temporarily saved by John’s proposed solution which was accepted by South African Rugby Union (SARU) even before the team had returned from Italy. It will become clear that this first proposal to save WP rugby was accepted largely because of the unique trust that South African rugby has in the integrity, honesty and trustfulness of John Dobson.

The rest is now the story of legends. After languishing second last on the URC log in December 2021, the team recovered to win the inaugural URC Final competition played in the Cape Town Stadium before a near capacity crowd of 31 000.  Coach John was rewarded with his selection as South African Rugby Coach of the Year, receiving his award from his mother at the Cape Town Stadium. In 2023 the team again made the URC final, again played at the Cape Town Stadium before a sold-out crowd of 47 261. The Stormers lost narrowly to the Irish team from Munster.

In this process of the URC competition, a new tranche of WP Springboks have been produced including Damian Willemse, Herschelle Jantjies, Manie Libbock, Deon Fourie, Evan Roos and Joseph Dweba. Of equal importance, Cape Town’s rugby faithful had clearly embraced the move from the historic Newlands rugby ground to the Cape Town Stadium; the traditional Cape Town support base has been re-invigorated, and dignity has been returned to WP rugby by these successes.

But all this success on the rugby field was still not sufficient to guarantee the financial future of WP Rugby which was still bankrupt and surviving only at the discretion of SARU under whose financial administration it had been surviving since September 2021. What was still required was a plan to secure a new source of major sponsorship for the Union.

And what has happened to achieve this is unquestionably Coach John’s greatest contribution, one that will unquestionably define his lasting legacy. Which has been to initiate and manage the process to save the future of rugby in the Western Province, both professionally and at club and school level.

This has now been achieved by attracting a consortium of local funders - Red Disa Investments – who have bought a 72% share in WP Rugby at a cost of R148 million. Without that investment, rugby as it has been experienced for the past 140 years in the Western Province would have ended with consequences that are too devastating to contemplate. Whilst school rugby would have survived for a period, that would have been all. But schoolboy rugby would also have collapsed as there would have been little future, no inspiration and no pathway for the best players to continue playing and so enjoy the possibility of changing their and their family’s  lives through rugby.

But the responsibility to convince the 120 rugby clubs that each needed to give up its shared control of WP rugby for a 21% (down from 100%) future share now fell squarely on Coach John and his administrative team’s shoulders. It would be a measure of the extent to which the clubs trusted Coach John and his vision for the future of WP Rugby.

In the end on September 6th 2023 in one of the most momentous moments in the long history of the WP Rugby, the clubs voted to give up their controlling power and to accept a new vision for rugby in this province – the vision developed and made possible through the unique skills of John Dobson and his effects on the playing success of the Stormers in the 2022 and 2023 URC competitions. 

In this process Coach John has reconnected WP rugby with the citizens of the Western Cape, and restored pride in the Stormers and WP rugby jerseys with an impact on the lives of local communities in ways that few will appreciate. The Police Commander of Blue Downs informed John and the Stormers that when the team wins, gender-based violence drops noticeable in the zone of his responsibility.

The mission of the WP Stormers has become: To Make Cape Town Smile. 

And that is the “why” that motivates the team in all that it now does.