Andy Capostagno Cricket
It was the Somerset and England all- rounder Len Braund who refused a second benefit on the grounds that he had lost money on the first. And Bertie Buse, another Somerset man who coached for many years at King Edwards in Johannesburg, chose a three-day game at Bath for his benefit. Neglecting to inform the groundsman of his intentions, however, Buse watched forlornly as the match was concluded on day one as 30 wickets fell on a dog of a pitch.
Northerns Titans and South Africa all rounder Steve Elworthy now knows how Braund and Buse felt. The launch of his benefit season was at Supersport Centurion last Friday. Western Province were the visitors, a bumper crowd was expected, the Titans were on an early season roll and then the inevitable happened, the heavens opened.
Five overs were possible, during which time Roy Pienaar and Mike Rindel underlined the richness of their collective form with a blistering assault on Jacques Kallis and Paul Adams. But even to get those five overs in, the groundstaff had worked like Trojans (Trojans? Titans? It’s all Greek to me) and when the rain returned just after 7pm there was never any prospect of getting back on.
So Elworthy’s benefit season got off to a standing start and, no, he didn’t have the event insured because that undercuts the margin too much and anyway, as Spike Milligan wrote, insurance is the white man’s burden.
The Northerns hierarchy were equally non-plussed, losing the revenue of a crowd that might reasonably have been expected to be in the 10 000 range, losing also the chance to instil in that crowd what golfers know as “muscle memory”, the building up of automatic responses to external stimuli.
Or, not to drown in jargon, to convince people early in the season to get their bums on seats at Centurion at every possible opportunity. It is doubly important to do that now that the rugby season has elbowed into both the start and the finish of the cricket season in this country.
The Currie Cup final this year is on October 31, by which time the cricket season will have been going for a month. The Standard Bank Cup final is scheduled for March 31 next year, by which time the Super 12 and the Vodacom Cup will have been going for a month.
That’s two months of crossover out of six, exactly one third. The stuff of marketing departments’ nightmares.
It goes without saying, however, that beneficiaries do not have marketing departments behind them. Usually it is one or two (unpaid) friends and after a stressful year of fielding phone calls and collecting cheques they are sometimes not even friends anymore. Then there is the problem of losing potential revenue to rival beneficiaries.
Elworthy’s counterpart in Gauteng is Clive Eksteen and the two seem to have found it relatively easy to avoid treading on each others toes in the money-raising stakes. But a few weeks ago Jonty Rhodes, Natal’s beneficiary in 1998, organised an exclusive sportsman’s dinner in Johannesburg which raised a tidy sum for one of South Africa’s finest.
It can well be argued that Rhodes is a national figure who should be able to seek funds wherever he likes, but try telling that to the boys who actually play their provincial cricket on the highveld.
It is something that the United Cricket Board is going to have to address sooner rather than later, not to mention the fact that Michael Katz and his buddies in government are currently in the process of re-evaluating the way that tax is paid both by sporting bodies and by their employees.
But above and beyond the quibbles over how things should be done lies the fact that sportspeople who give the public pleasure over a period of time should be rewarded.
Uli Schmidt told me that he finds it hard to accept money for speaking engagements because he does not regard himself as a good speaker. At which point I reminded Schimdt that people do not want to give him money because he is a good speaker, but because he was a great rugby player.
And anyway, most of the money available from sporting functions tends to be corporate. People do not often buy bad paintings and signed jockstraps with their own money, no matter how efficient the auctioneer may be in coaxing cash out of merry customers.
All of which makes it more touching when members of the public actually put their hands in their own pockets to support the likes of Elworthy, Eksteen and Rhodes. It may not amount to much more than a handful of change, but in the eyes of the beneficiary it could well appear to resemble the widow’s mite. Or, as Max Miller put it, “In our village the widows definitely do.”