Gustav Thiel
The South African Rugby Football Union’s newly appointed communications manager Anthony MacKaizer wants to resurrect Louis Luyt.
No, Luyt hasn’t died, but his image has taken a battering with bothersome nepotism scandals and frequent run-ins with the Minister of Sport and Recreation, Steve Tshwete. MacKaizer will try to show in Luyt’s last two years as Sarfu president that the bulky businessman can become a streamlined, accessible package that “the public will buy”.
Whether the South African public can digest this new package is another question. Brought up on a steady diet of anti-Luyt information, one of the few things they trust Louis Luyt to do is put his foot in his mouth.
As happened after the Springboks won the 1995 World Cup.
Luyt told the All Blacks, who were still
licking their wounds, that the Boks would have won the World Cup in 1991 and 1987 had they been allowed to participate.
Edward Griffiths, the chief executive officer of Sarfu at the time, said he knew after Luyt’s World Cup speech that any attempt at transforming his boss’s public image would be futile.
“I have tried to swim the Atlantic Ocean and also endeavoured to climb Mount Everest, but these tasks were simple compared with my attempts to improve Luyt’s image,” Griffiths said laughingly.
But MacKaizer still believes that Luyt will be seen as a media hero when his tenure as Sarfu president expires at the end of 1999. Sarfu is working on a still-secret Luyt communications “master plan”.
If MacKaizer has his way, the ex-fertiliser salesman and provincial rugby player who became the ruler of rugby in South Africa and one of the richest men in the country, will become a popular figure in rugby folklore in the next century.