At first, there was no great cause for alarm. Pieter‑Steph du Toit felt a blow to his left thigh, hobbled from the field and watched the rest of the game from the bench. Even as the injury began to swell towards full time, he thought little of it. He had experienced a similar injury as a high school player a decade earlier, and that had turned out fine. It was only about 15 minutes after the game, when Du Toit informed his Stormers team doctor Jason Suter that he no longer had any feeling in his left leg, that the full scale of an unfolding medical emergency began to emerge.
Du Toit had a haematoma that developed into an extremely rare condition called acute compartment syndrome. Which basically means that the tissue in his injured muscle had swollen to the point where it was blocking the blood supply to the rest of the limb. At that point, only 43 previous cases had been recorded in medical literature. Almost half had ended in an amputation. And without the prompt action of Suter in sending him straight to hospital, that would also have been the fate of Du Toit: a former World Cup winner, a future World Cup winner and a player who must now enter the discussion as one of the greatest Springboks of all time.
Twenty-eight tackles against the All Blacks on Saturday night. Player of the match as South Africa became the first country to win the men’s World Cup four times. And as Du Toit hunted down Jordie Barrett with the same relentless vindictiveness with which he had hunted down George Ford four years earlier, there was an aura of indestructibility to him that feels utterly at odds with the cruel misfortunes he has endured. Over the years he has had surgery on both ankles, a cracked sternum and two anterior cruciate ligament injuries, the second of which required his father to donate a piece of his own hamstring tendon so he could play again. Then there was the haematoma in February 2020, which required emergency vascular surgery to save the leg, and which somehow was only the start of the ordeal.
During the operation, the surgeon tested some of the nerves in the leg. They did not respond. After surgery, the muscle was still so swollen that the skin could not be pulled over the wound to stitch it. And so for 12 days the inside of Du Toit’s thigh lay open to the world, through a gash more than a foot long. When he flexed his leg, Du Toit could see the hole in the muscle that had been cut out so the doctors could operate. The idea of him ever playing rugby again remained remote.
By the time the wound could finally be stitched together, Du Toit had lost nearly 10kg, most of it in muscle mass from the injured thigh. Much of the damage to the nerve endings could not be repaired. It would be more than a year before he played rugby again. At which point Du Toit had to fight his toughest battle: convincing everyone he could go to the well again, that his best days were not in the past, that he could play a third World Cup at the age of 31.
The road back has not been frictionless. A crunching tackle from Duhan van der Merwe during the 2021 British & Irish Lions series brought a premature end to his comeback, and he ended up playing just three of South Africa’s 13 Tests that year. A move last year to Toyota Verblitz in the lucrative but less intense Japanese league raised doubts over whether he was still operating at the required intensity. But through it all, Jacques Nienaber and Rassie Erasmus continued to back him. And when you see performances such as the one he put in against New Zealand, you understand why.
“I always joke that if there’s a white plastic bag that blows over the field, he would probably chase that down as well,” Nienaber said of the man they call the Malmesbury Missile. “He was phenomenal. Defence is my department and he was exceptional. I must say in the last couple of games, he wanted it desperately.”
Afterwards, Du Toit clutched his match award and his second World Cup winner’s medal, and reflected on the journey they had all taken. “I guess as a team we like drama,” he observed. Perhaps when you have almost lost a limb, that extra sprint no longer feels like such a burden. And perhaps when you have stared straight into the abyss, the sight of a marauding All Black no longer seems to hold very much fear at all.
