Robert Kirby
LOOSE CANNON
It makes me extremely happy to announce that I am also suffering from deep clinical depression. What’s more I didn’t own a shade of the material assets acquired by Hansie Cronje during the period in which I became so deeply clinically depressed. I got my deep clinical depression without any help from endorsements, sponsorships, the subtle financial manipulations of Merril Lynch, benefit seasons, a stupendous salary from the United Cricket Board, profitable ventures in the estate market and stock exchange, even more profitable bribes or, for that matter, with the help of a sturdy biblical foundation.
True I went to Sunday School but any felicitous moral consequence was rather spoiled by a predatory middle-aged Anglican curate who insisted on keeping me behind after the others had left on the grounds that I exhibited an unusually greater need of salvation than my coevals – and then tried to run his hand up my shorts. I have distrusted the church and its staff ever since.
Where I do match Cronje closely is in the symptoms of his deep clinical depression. It makes me quite proud to know that in some humble ways I am a tad like a national sporting hero. I feel that pride swell when I, too, wake up in the small hours and lie there in the clutches of symptom no 1: trying to fight off all the hostile green incubi which swoop down at me from the dark corners of the room.
Somewhere out there, I reassure myself, Cronje’s darkly tramping the same nocturnal battlefield. Hershelle Gibbs is there, too, lurking around in the trenches of self- recrimination. There are Henry Williams and Ali Bacher, flogging each other with athletic supporters.
Then there’s the matter of irritability (symptom no 2), another of leading national mental patient Cronje’s psychic warning signs. I, too, am continually irritable and often call other people by unpleasant terms. But my self-disgust is tempered by the fact that Cronje probably did so too. I’m not suggesting he said anything like “you remarkably sordid bookie gutterdog” and “you bloated curry-drenched shitbag”. It’s just that he didn’t say those sort of things when he was in India. When he’s in India, Hansie doesn’t give a subcontinental.
Symptom 3: poor concentration. Another big down-sign. I, too, have difficulty in concentrating and, when it comes to memory lapses, well you only have to remember what Roberta Durrant recently pointed out: I am rather old and doddering. Being about six years younger than I am, she should know.
Symptoms no 4 through 7: do I often think of death? Yes, especially when I watch lawyers at play. Thanks to Cronje and the lads, watching cricketers at play will in future be about as rewarding.
When it comes to a drop in appetite (symptom no 8), I must say that I can’t match up. According to the expert evidence of Cronje’s shrink, Dr Lewis, these days Cronje can scarcely look a poached egg in the eye – never mind a reporter. What Lewis forgot to explain was exactly which one of Cronje’s appetites was suffering a loss? Never mind the egg; try putting a few leather coats and a cellphone case full of dollars in front of him and see if he drools. I know I would.
What I am trying to say in this stunted essay is that all is not lost for our crippled national sweetheart. He’s not all that badly damaged, not when we can find more or less the same symptoms in ourselves. Granted we don’t run around opening secret bank accounts, lying like a flatfish, praying for help while blaming it all on Old Nick. But we do see simi-lar weaknesses in ourselves and we don’t even need professional help.
All Cronje is doing is going through a bad patch. He openly admitted that in his numerous global financial dealings he occasionally “burnt his fingers”. That’s what’s happening to him right now.
So let’s put paid to rumour which has it that Cronje threatened not to give evidence unless that nice Mr Balfour and Mr Pahad were there to give him moral support; also that he was denied what his lawyers are calling his built-in constitutional right to have his day- shift nurse and emergency medical revival cart parked next to him during testimony.
It’s just a bad patch. As Standard Bank reminded us soon after The Fall, such heroes are strictly part-time.