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RUGBY: Steve Morris
NO one in his right mind would believe that Louis Luyt is an easy man to take on in a head-to-head battle. More than one opponent has tried. None have yet succeeded in ousting the man who sits at the administrative helm of the game of rugby in this country.
Brian van Rooyen, a blocky lock forward and accountant, is the latest to fall before the guns that Luyt has brought to bear, losing his bid to oust King Louis from the presidency of the Transvaal Rugby Union and his vice-presidential seat in the process.
But Van Rooyen did not, like so many of his predecessors, retire into obscurity to lick his wounds. He continued the fight, in the process spurring Minister of Sport Steve Tshwete into instituting a government inquiry into how the game is run in this country.
Luyt replied by charging Van Rooyen with bringing the game into disrepute, a charge Van Rooyen will have to answer at Ellis Park next Wednesday when he appears before the executive. The outcome, one would suggest, is a foregone conclusion. Van Rooyen will be censured and stripped of whatever official voice he still has left.
It is a move that one would suggest Luyt and the South African Rugby Football Union (Sarfu) have not thought through and one that threatens to split the game in this country.
More chilling though is the fact that this split is almost sure to run along racial lines. Van Rooyen comes from a background that never enjoyed the racial privileges of the majority of rugby players and administrators in this country, and he has the backing of another, Errol Tobias, the Springbok three-quarter who broke the all- white mould forever.
Luyt holds the administrative might, but there can be no doubt that in the eyes of the world, Van Rooyen and Tobias hold the moral high ground. Luyt has the disadvantage in this respect of a history of neglecting the feelings of the rest of the world as much as he ignores the internal barbs and arrows aimed in his general direction.
The social gaffes perpetrated by Luyt are too many to list, but his denigration of Colin Meads during the World Cup as being a ”has been” and his references to the size of England coach Jack Rowell’s mouth are just two that come to mind. Meads is revered in New Zealand, and trying to chop the venerable Pinetree down, earned Luyt far more enemies than he has probably computed.
Rowell, while he might not be the epitome of the England establishment, is nevertheless a powerful man, and a slight of the nature offered by Luyt after South Africa had come back from the dead at Loftus Versveld and levelled the two-match series against England at Newlands, will not be forgotten in a hurry.
These schisms are on the international front though. What faces us all in this country is a rendering of all the good that was done in bringing a nation so close together during the euphoria of the World Cup triumph.
Van Rooyen’s insistence that the game’s administration become more transparent and that development of the game become more of a priority than anything else, may well prove to have some merit. Certainly, from an outsider’s standpoint, both calls have real merit.
It has to be remembered that rugby is still thought of in many circles as a bastion of the colonial and apartheid eras.
Certainly, the picking of a convicted killer in the national side, the axing of Francois Pienaar as Springbok captain and the racial expletives of former national coach Andre Markgraaff have not done anything to change that attitude among the bulk of the citizens of this country. Especially when Pienaar, who left with dignity to ply his trade overseas, was given a send-off by President Nelson Mandela and yet not so much as contacted by the rugby authorities. Pienaar, it will be recalled, dedicated the trophy to every citizen in this country on that tumultuous day in 1995.
Now both Van Rooyen and Tobias are determined to beard the biggest Gauteng Lion in his den, take on Luyt and get some real sanity back into a game that has, in very general terms, become one man’s personal fiefdom.
For no matter what Luyt has accomplished as an administrator – and these accomplishments are numerous – he has destroyedthem, from a public point of view, by a crassness and insensitivity that often defies belief.
Van Rooyen and Tobias alone cannot change things. The machinery of officialdom is too ponderous and imbedded in the concrete of loaded constitutions for this to happen overnight. But both are equally determined that the next generation of South African rugby players and followers of whatever hue have a right to free access to the game.
Alone they may not succeed, but the machinery of rugby governance will have to change as surely as the computer has taken over from the abacus.
One only hopes that Van Rooyen does not have to fully exploit the looming racial issues in a situation that Sarfu have seemingly vastly underestimated to make it happen.