Jon Swift
IT is of more than passing interest that Bruce Fordyce, the man head-hunted to become the first paid executive director of the Sports Trust, admits freely to coming from a “priveleged, white background” and attributes much of his sporting success to this factor.
For Fordyce now has the task of administering the body — a surprisingly easy mix of private enterprise, government and non-governmental sports asspociations — which aims to bring a hint of that type of privilege to those who have never known it.
And they have been doing just that: nearly R8- million has been dished out to deserving causes since the trust was formed 23 months ago.
“It is an amount that will no doubt increase,” says Mthobi Tyamzashe, the director general of sport and recreation, and the man who chairs the trust.
“Bruce is one of the most acceptable sportsmen to the community at large,” says Tyamzashe. This is true. Fordyce, the winner of nine Comrades Marathons, is more than just a pretty face.
He is serious about trying to bring the benefits he enjoyed to others coming as he says from “being a wimpish, skinny, long-haired hippy at school” with no interest in sport, to becoming one of this country’s pre-eminent sporting achievers.
He has a way to go in his new endeavour. Evidence of this was the fact that his new business cards arrived only minutes before he publicly accepted the job, and that he has to “wind down” some of his commitments.
An erudite and reasoned thinker, he has access to both the kids at grassroots level through his fame as an athlete, and to the people who remain his priority in the new post, the decision-makers in commerce and industry the trust depends on for funding.
The trust has relied heavily on what Tobin Prior of Sun International refers to as the “seed money” from five major sponsors to get going.
FNB, M-Net, Sun International and the cricket and rugby unions between them stumped up R5-million which will be held in perpetuity, the interest being used for the day-to-day running of the organisation.
But there is much, as both Fordyce and Tyamzashe admit, still to be done. Somehow, with the familiar diminutive figure at the head of the pack, you can count on it at least being a hard-fought contest.