Why are sportsmen so often such absolute pricks? It’s one thing to watch the heroes of the rugby or cricket field, the wizards of the courts and fairways, but now that television has taken over so much in the way of communication, we get these people and their opinions shoved right into our faces.
We’ve all heard the drivel our sporting personalities are obliged to emit. What is sickening is when high-profile players decide they are going to impose their garish sentimentalities on us. I refer in particular to Allan Donald and Jonty Rhodes who, in some bizarre need to prove themselves prime dipsticks, last week proposed that the South African cricket side should dedicate its matches in the
forthcoming World Cup to the memory of Hansie Cronje.
No one denies the contribution to South African cricket fortunes made by players such as Rhodes and Donald, but the frequent public expressions of solidarity made by these two to the loathsome fraud artist that was Hansie Cronje try forebearance. Cronje’s squalid legacy is best forgotten, besides which everyone of any discretion has long since had quite enough of the slobberings over him. If Rhodes and Donald, or anyone else in the national squad, pine to drool over the ‘tragedy” of their former team leader — and, God help them, mentor — they are free to do so in their dressing rooms — preferably not even there where they might infect younger minds.
That much was made of fellow players seen attending the Cronje funeral and memorial services is not the players’ fault, but that of the SABC and e.tv chapter of the media. Notwithstanding that sort of oblique exposure, what Rhodes, Donald et al might well do is to remind themselves that they have been chosen to represent South Africa at cricket, not to present us with a spectacle of clap-along Christianity. They might also remind themselves that with their cricketing jobs comes the supplement responsibility of behaving with some sense of restraint. They should keep their poignancies to themselves and, if they feel they can’t resist exhibiting the finest of their feelings, why haven’t these two gone public on the matter of World Cup matches scheduled to be played in Zimbabwe? The English cricket team has had to protest without any help from the mighty Proteas. Such hypocrisy aligns snugly with the behaviour of the International Cricket Council.
The media should takes its fair share of the blame for the inanities of ‘celebrities”. In the United Kingdom, home and breeding ground of ‘celebrity culture”, the football star, David Beckham, is a case in point. Elevated by the popular press to the status of national idol, Beckham has become more of a national embarrassment. Recently, along with that most noxious of media-crawlers, Princess Diana, Beckham was voted by British tabloid readers to be among the top three or four Britons of all time. (Diana, not unexpectedly, was first. Shakespeare wobbled in about seventeenth, John Lennon was fifth with Churchill making a poor showing at eleventh.) With such an estate of adulation, when daily every second newspaper carries pictures of him and his ornate ex-singing star wife, it is little surprise that David Beckham believes his intellectual talents are also something everyone is desperate to share with him. The same seem to have occurred with Donald and Rhodes: victims of their own myths.
With the encouragement of the hindquarters of our media, Hansie Cronje’s untimely death has been turned into an exercise in seediness. The bum-kissing displays that were the SuperSport/Mike Haysman post-scandal television interviews with Cronje set the whole thing off. Since then it’s been down-gutter all the way. Now, some frightful businessman in George has had the wreckage of the aircraft in which Cronje died brought down from the mountainside. The mangled aircraft will be installed in a new shopping mall, as a memorial to tragic Hansie.
There can be few expressions of bad taste quite as decomposed as that. Coming close, though, are Mr Eddie Eksteen and his revivified Bats group who have just released their World Cup inspirational song Wave the Rainbow Flag. It includes the line: ‘Let’s win this one for Hansie.” If intended as a parody of Rhodes/Donald-type sentiments, indeed the whole glitzy cricket public-relations circus, the song is quite brilliant. In sad truth, though, it only seems to show you how low Eddie Eksteen needs to stoop these days to connect with those who might still find him relevant or amusing.
As a South African, I really don’t want the efforts of our national cricket team tainted by any nostalgia for Hansie Cronje, more especially the flamboyant grievings of his family and former team mates. Hansie Cronje was an underhand shit, a venal conniver who brought the whole game of cricket into disrepute. He even tried to drag some younger players down with him. A lot of his disgrace rubbed off on South Africa.
If Allan Donald and Jonty Rhodes need to worship at Cronje’s grubby shrine, will someone instruct them to keep their venerations to themselves.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby