Last week Schalk Burger and a number of his South African teammates spent a few days in St Petersburg. In the Russian city for the Laureus Sports Awards, Burger called his dad, the elder Schalk, back in the Western Cape and said they had to find a way to all come back to St Petersburg on a family holiday.

Such is the city’s architectural splendour and extraordinary collections of art that it is easy to understand why Burger was excited. You think, too, that he would have been impressed reading about the 900-day siege of the city during the second world war when its impoverished citizenry, surrounded by the German army, refused to surrender. He is just another fine sportsman, nothing compared to what he saw and felt in St Petersburg except, perhaps, that it was an appropriate location to consider what it is that he brings to his sport.

Also present at the Laureus Awards was South Africa’s World Cup-winning coach, Jake White. “Back home especially, people ask, ‘Who was the best player you coached?’ The best player by far that I have coached is Schalk Burger,” says White. “His workrate, his tackle count, his involvement in the game exceeds anyone else’s. His teammates want to be with him, his effect on them is immense and they know if they are near him, then they are going to be close to the action.”

White tells different stories. There was the 2005 game against the All Blacks in Dunedin when Burger’s collision with a teammate left him with a gashed mouth. It happened five minutes before half-time. “What’s he need, doc?” White asked Yusuf Hassan, the Springboks’ medical man, during the interval.

“Fifteen stitches on the outside, at least 15 on the inside.”

“Doc, he’s gotta go back on,” White said.

“What do you want to do?” he then asked Burger.

Not able to speak, the player mumbled his readiness to resume. Perhaps with a touch of guilt, White watched Burger through the second half, realised that within five minutes the internal stitches had sundered and that the next 35 minutes were spent knocking over Kiwis and using his jersey to soak up the blood from the inside of his mouth.

There is much else that White loves about Burger. “We used to do the bleep test to see where the guys were at in terms of their endurance. Schalk would outrun everyone. It didn’t matter if you put him, a 17st flanker, against the lighter guys in the backs, he would end up with the next best guy after everyone else had dropped out and he wouldn’t give in. The other guy had to stop because Schalk wasn’t going to and then we’d be intervening, ‘It’s okay Schalk, you can stop now’.”

Such athleticism is freakish but not irrelevant. For the calendar year 2006, Richie McCaw was the All Blacks’ top tackler with an average of 14 tackles per match. Burger was the Springboks’ top tackler. His average was 21.

HE COMES breezing into the foyer of the Kempinski Hotel that overlooks the Moika River in the heart of St Petersburg. It is 11 o’clock on Tuesday, the morning after the banquet, and the tiny red rivers that wriggle through the whites of his eyes tell of the night before. Burger disguises everything with his boyish smile. You wonder how it was that White was first struck by the anger and fury that drove him on the pitch? Away from the battleground, he is the gentlest soul, the smiling kid everyone wants to play with.

In New Zealand, Jerry Collins will show up at the Springbok hotel and insist that they go for a beer, not that he needs much persuading. Same in France, same in Ireland, same in Australia; it is he who attracts the guys who still think rugby is a game for human beings. It is not difficult to work out why his company is sought because he is a charming companion and his mixture of talent and modesty is unusual.

He hurtles through his childhood on the family farm an hour outside of Cape Town. There was rugby and cricket and a bit of golf and when asked if there was any other sport, he mentions that he did “a bit of mountain-biking”. What he doesn’t say is that he was once an underage champion in South Africa and nor does he recall another national championship race in which his bike chain snapped close to the finish and rather than quit, he picked up his bike, put it on his shoulder, ran the last section and took the bronze medal.

Schalk Sr, who played six times for the Springboks during an era when opposition to the apartheid regime restricted them to 12 matches in a decade, watched his son grow. “It’s not something we’re given to talking about but Schalk was always very talented, especially on the creative side,” he says. “He could draw and paint and he was a phenomenal musician. He was also good at sport and I thought back then that cricket would be his game. We built a cricket oval on our farm and called our flagship wine Cricket Pitch. Then he goes off and makes rugby his life. Shows what I know.” Whatever sport his son chose, Schalk Sr wasn’t concerned. “People told me that because of the way he threw his body about, he would be washed up in rugby by the time he was 15. I always thought, ‘I don’t mind if Schalk does ballet as long as he’s competitive and gives it everything.’ You would like them to have a sport but it doesn’t matter which.”

There was only one sport he hadto play: golf. The recollection lights up the young man’s eyes. “We had the family fourball every Sunday; Dad and my sister Rene against my brother Tiaan and I. We loved it. Jeez, I still owe them money from those games,” he says.

“I wanted my children to play golf,” says Schalk Sr, “because the game offers us a lesson in life. Golf is not meant to be fair, just as life is not meant to be fair, and I wanted them to understand that. I read where Jake White said Schalk is an old-style rugby player, the way he socialises with his teammates and the opposition. For me, that’s the most important thing.I still see rugby as part of his education; the game is bigger than the individual, it is more important than professional contracts and I think he understands that.”

The young Burger needed a maturity beyond his years because success arrived with the suddenness and power of an avalanche. In the same season he didn’t make the South Africa under19 team, he ended up playing for the under21s in the World Cup final. The following year, at the age of 20, he made his first appearance for the Springboks, and a year later, in 2004, he was judged the world’s best player by the IRB. “At the time, every week was a new challenge and a step up in standard,” he says. “I couldn’t believe what I was achieving. I mean the first time I played for Western Province I kept thinking, ‘This can’t be right’. I went to Stellenbosch University, played just two games for the under21s and was then picked for the senior side. That was the biggest jump and after that, everything else seemed okay.”

From the moment he selected him for South Africa’s under21 side, White loved what Burger brought to the game. “The great players have something indefinable, something in the way they affect the team,” says White. “When they’re not there, that’s when you most feel it. England without Martin Johnson. Schalk has that kind of effect with South Africa.”

To understand the nature of the warrior, picture him lying on a hospital bed after major spinal surgery in June 2006. Before the operation, it was said the injury might end his career. He worried like hell. Afterwards, they said the surgery had gone well, his family were in the hospital room, the Springboks v France Test match was on the television and he had never felt so relieved and so relaxed in his life.

“The game was going well, we were in front, then my alarm went off and there were nurses all over the bed, saying, ‘What’s happened, what’s wrong?’ ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘It’s just the bloody French, they’ve scored a try.’ When they did, my heart rate went from 60 to 150 and set off the alarm. The nurses told me to stay calm, and my heart rate settled down. Then everything was fine – until the French scored again.”