Rugby World Cup 2019: Jaco Peyper has learned that you play the game of celebrity at your peril

A few years back, Jaco Peyper gave an interview to a South African radio station in which he explained that being an international referee is not the sort of career you take up if you want to make friends. “If you’re a referee and you want to be a hero, you’re in the wrong place,” he said. “That’s not part of the job.”

It can indeed be a lonely business and, one presumes, Peyper will be feeling particularly isolated at the moment, following the fallout from a photograph taken in the aftermath of the France v Wales quarter-final showing him posing with Welsh fans, mimicking the elbow for which he had sent off France’s Sebastien Vahaamahina just hours earlier. Peyper was excluded from consideration for semi-final duty, and so it probably safe to assume that his tournament is at an end.

There is a certain irony there in that, like Vahaamahina before him, Peyper has been culpable of a momentary lapse in judgement that has ended in total catastrophe. The brutality of World Cups lies in their breath-taking finality, the idea that once you err there is no way back, and this applies to officials as much as it does to players. No matter that Peyper got virtually every big call right during the quarter-final and has been one of the outstanding referees in the tournament. At this level, one strike and you’re out.

There will be those who lament this state of affairs as a gross overreaction to what was essentially a harmless offence (and for all the chagrin on the French side, show me a genuine victim here). Certainly that was what Warren Gatland was getting at on Monday when he decried the culture of “political correctness” that had led to Peyper’s suspension. Personally, though, I’m less interested in the simple morality of Peyper’s actions than in the economy of the process: this curious business of seeing and being seen, of fame and scrutiny, of infamy and punishment, the culture in which simple human lapses are exploded into gigantic character flaws.

At the heart of this lies the increasing ‘celebrification’ of officials, across a range of sports, but arguably in rugby union more than anywhere else. The increasingly esoteric laws of the game, which hand a greater responsibility for subjective interpretation, as well as innovations such as Ref Mic, has unwittingly turned referees into a sort of personal brand: not merely an arbiter or custodian of the game, but a protagonist and a performer in their own right.

Nobody plays this game better than Nigel Owens, of course, and it has barely been possible to navigate this tournament without coming across one of his adverts for the official World Cup airline partner, in which he sternly blows his whistle at errant passengers who cut in line, or make too much of a fuss in their seats. Owens has a fair claim to be the most well-known official in sport, with a talk show, a newspaper column, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and a considerable body of work on YouTube.

In a recent feature-length interview with the New York Times – yes, the New York Times – he told a story about travelling to Fiji and suddenly hearing somebody shouting his catchphrase – “this is not soccer!” – at him from across the street.

Meanwhile, since hanging up his whistle Alain Rolland has used his platform within the game to carve out a moderately successful niche as a motivational business speaker. “As a business consultant, Alain has a range of approaches that will up-skill your management and sales teams,” his personal website boasts. “Alain’s motivational presentations and courses provide practical advice based on his own personal experiences both on and off the pitch.”

Peyper, from what I can discern, is some way short of that level. He doesn’t seem to have given too many interviews and certainly doesn’t seem to be publicly active on social media. He was steeped in rugby tradition from an early age, attending Grey College in Bloemfontein, the likes of CJ van der Linde and Jannie du Plessis among his contemporaries, and although he played the game as a youth, by his own admission he was never much good. His size counted against him, leaving him, as he put it, “broken into several pieces by the time he was 20”.

Thus refereeing became his calling, and by all accounts one that came naturally to him. He was officiating Super Rugby games while still in his 20s, an international referee by the age of 32, a first World Cup at 35. And as he walked into Oita train station after Sunday’s quarter-final, he will have known that in a climate where referees are perhaps under more pressure than ever – tournament organisers even took the rare step of criticising their performance in the early stages – he was a strong candidate to take on the final if South Africa failed to make it.

And so: what on earth made him do it? Ultimately, Peyper’s errant elbow was not a failure of comic judgement – because, if you think about it, it’s absolutely hilarious – but of self-perception. Having finished work for the day, he walked into that train station as Jaco Peyper, regular bloke. What he failed to realise was that in today’s game, no figure in the public eye has that luxury, not even referees. Fame, however fleeting or minuscule, is a coat you can’t simply slip off. As celebrities the world over quickly learn, you don’t have to be on duty to be on trial.

Once the photo was public, Peyper’s fate was sealed. In the kangaroo court of social media, no misdemeanour, however small, may ever be allowed to go unpunished. And there’s an acrid lesson there for anyone with even a modicum of recognition value: the eyes are everywhere, the lenses are unforgiving, and the judgements will be merciless. Peyper isn’t the first person to learn that the hard way, and he certainly won’t be the last.