As of filing this column I haven’t seen or heard but a small percentage of what’s been written in newspapers or broadcast on radio and television after Hansie Cronje’s death. I nonetheless firmly believe the race to see who could be the most feverishly banal on this subject was won at just after seven last Sunday evening when M-Net’s entry, Carte
Blanche (ridden by Derek Watts and trained by George Mazarakis) fair romped home. Nothing could possibly have been more unremittingly tasteless, of such oven-fresh, slobbish sentimentality.
In winning the Great Hansie Tearjerker Handicap, Carte Blanche, — with not a dirty bookie in sight — managed to stick together about 12 minutes of such stomach-heaving material, so concentrated an essence of tabloid secretion as to make you want to run for the anti-nauseants.
What on earth persuaded Carte Blanche to haul in an inarticulate prat like Gary Kirsten, to look pained, scratch at his cement intellect and offer up comments like: “It is a tragedy beyond measure.” Shame. I can’t help wondering at what level of human calamity Gary assigns things like the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Stalin’s purges, the Dresden fire-bombing. Probably up there with that time when he played on at 96. Surely organisations like M-Net keep someone around to edit out Kirsten’s sort of inanities. It certainly pays specialised sanitation staff to go through all its movies and bleep out all the “goddamns”. Why not cretinous utterances too?
Worse was to come as Carte Blanche finished off its tribute to fallen greatness by excelling even its own celebrated seediness. The insert ended with some shots of the immortal Cronje in his heyday, faded up on the screen to the accompaniment of a warbling flute, trembling harp and a chorus of distant virgins. In particular, Derek Watts should hang his head in shame for allowing himself to take part in this sort of schlock. Surely his contract has some sort of “out” clause where he can refuse to be sucked into the Mazarakis crevice.
Runners-up there have been many and it’s hard to imagine who was the worst. Naturally the politicians leapt in, led by Thabo himself: but then it is a tradition of South African politicians to be purblind to the moral consequences of corruption and theft. Lying and thieving is, after all, their daily bread. Those other professional sucker-fish, the so-called sports administrators, were ably represented by the South African Official Cricket Mortician, Dr Ali Bacher, who vented one of the single most grotesque of all statements about Cronje, saying that Cronje’s “bravery” in confessing had helped clean up corruption in international cricket — something Ali and his mates patently hadn’t been able or even prepared to do. Presumably Hitler should also be remembered for his bravery in showing up anti-Semitism as a bad show.
Bravery, this time in the face of the mountain of slime, came from Maureen Issacson of The Sunday Independent who, in a short and elegant front-page piece, wrote about the sleazy side of Mr Cronje’s doings without trying to drown everything in ersatz sorrow. Issacson reminded us of the single grimiest example of the Cronje match-fixing swindles, the one where a shady bookmaker asked him to offer Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams $25 000 each to swing a match. Hansie, in a flood of Christian charity, told the two that they’d get $15 000 each. His intention was to pocket the $20 000 difference, an obscene agent’s fee for placing the careers of two young players on the line. Gibbs and Williams still face criminal charges and should either ever set foot in India he will be arrested and tried for what heroic Cronje talked him into doing. Perhaps this is what lugubrious apologist, Kepler Wessels, was thinking about when he referred to Cronje as “an inspired leader of men”?
I suppose fair mention should be given to another runner-up, SABC television news. Its uplifting line was: “South Africans were able to put aside their grief for a while as they watched Bafana Bafana play to a thrill-packed draw.” Someone should tell Barney and his boys that, in fact, about 90% of South Africans don’t give a blind fart whether Hansie Cronje lives or dies. They’re far too busy trying to survive the Mbeki government. The other 10% feel sorry for themselves because that’s what the sponsors expect them to do.
That the reaction to Cronje’s death has been so treacly is not surprising. Commerce has taken over much of sport and so commerce’s core values have superseded all others. This sad truth was reiterated a couple of weeks ago by the great British racing driver, Stirling Moss. Speaking of the pitifully corrupt state of Formula One motor racing, as evidenced in a recent Austrian Grand Prix, Moss said he was happy he’d raced when racing was still a sport.
As indeed cricket used to be a sport, until the sponsors and the administrators moved in. The slushy media reception of Cronje’s death is a fitting reflection of their imposed rites.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby