It was at the Oppikoppi Music Festival in 1997 and Koos Kombuis was finishing up his set with a cover of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” He was basically riffing, adding a few lines for a proudly South African audience.

“No Woman, No Cry. No boerewors, no braai.”

And then:

“No Woman, No Cry. No Chester, No Try.”

The wordplay was nonsense in the context of the song, but it was fun nonsense, and the crowd ate it up.

The reference, of course, was to Chester Williams, the fine Springbok wing who had become in many ways the symbol of the aspirations of the “New South Africa,” the face of a South African national rugby team that, while still virtually all-white, in a sport that nationwide was still overwhelmingly white and fraught with racism, aspired to something different. In the lead-up to the 1995 World Cup in South Africa, Williams had become the face of the national side, an iconography that held up even when his hamstring didn’t, keeping him out of much of the competition. he made it back for the knockout rounds, scoring an epic four tries in the quarterfinals against Western Samoa. He was part of the defensive heroics in the epic finals against New Zealand’s All Blacks, a dramatic, albeit try-free affair that saw the Springboks win in extra time to take the World Cup and seal their places as the symbolic embodiment of the Rainbow Nation of God.

Chester Williams died on September 6th. He was shockingly young, just 49 years old, and likely succumbed to a heart attack.