THERE can surely be no more glaring example of the bully-boy nature of South African rugby administration than the defeat of Brian van Rooyen in his bid to oust Louis Luyt as president of the Transvaal Rugby Football Union (TRFU).
For what Luyt managed to do was turn the issue from one of what Van Rooyen believed was best for the game into a personal attack on a man who had the guts to stand up and be counted. What Van Rooyen missed was one simple fact: the flags fluttering over the Ellis Park stadium may have changed, the old order has not.
Van Rooyen, in his failed bid, mirrored many of the things this newly hatched democracy is still striving for: transparency, accountability and a system of open and collective decision-making.
The accountant who still turns out at lock forward for his club voiced his concerns on the way the TRFU books are managed, about the inner circle who wield the power and about the lack of momentum in a programme to develop the game in underprivileged areas.
The bid for presidency represented a microcosm of the problems facing the nation as a whole.
In victory, Luyt gloated. “You are gone,” he told his erstwhile opponent. But then Luyt has ever been thus.
It was Luyt’s own decision to play Die Stem over the Ellis Park public address system in defiance of any internal changes that had been made before the test against the All Blacks which signalled this country’s re- admission to world rugby.
It was Luyt who uttered a smug and hugely unfunny slight of the All Blacks after the World Cup final and, when that all-time great of the game, Colin Meads, walked out, had the temerity to call the legendary New Zealander a “has been”.
It was Luyt too who pushed for the installation of his son-in-law Riaan Oberholzer as the chief executive of first Sanzar and then the South African Rugby Union and made his son a capo of the Ellis Park Stadium mafia.
There can also be little doubt that it was Luyt’s hand that wielded the rubber stamp for the execution orders on Edward Griffiths, Morne de Plessis and Francois Pienaar, despite any public utterances to the contrary.
Pienaar was a marked man from the time he bested Luyt in the post-World Cup contractual wrangles. Luyt got him in the end.
Van Rooyen has been headed off by a voting system that is loaded against any real semblance of democracy. Whether he is, as Luyt says “gone”, remains to be seen.