There is no torment of regret so fierce, no prostration abject enough, than those the moral columnist must undergo when he sees that his work has done cruelty to an entirely innocent party. Callous and cavalier, he has broken a true and honest heart, a heart that knew only love and hope before his cyanide paragraphs killed forever that irreplaceable spark of joy.
It was the least I could do — for yes, amazed reader, I am the ghoulish bounder who has done this irreversible mischief — to visit the victim of my thoughtlessness, at her home, a modest concrete enclosure decorated with some straw and a tyre on a rope. Mrs Bojangles was not at home, so I left my card and retreated. I have not heard from her since.
However, I have since received word from those who know the Bojangleses that her condition is morbid. Her plunge from the heady euphoria of believing that her husband was going to be the next Springbok coach (a fiction invented in this column five months ago) to the horror of learning that it had all been a crude literary device, cheap laughs stolen at the expense of her dreams, has been more than her little three-foot frame can take. Worst of all, she had already paid the deposit on a new tyre for the baby’s hutch, and had to face the humiliation of returning it and some bananas she had bought on credit.
Three Tests into Jake White’s tenure as coach it is clear that opportunities for chimps are now pitifully few. Gone are those heady days of Rudi Straeuli, when, hindsight now suggests to us, entire troupes of primates were recruited to handle tactics, team morale, media liaison and public relations.
But perhaps I have toyed enough with the emotions of chimps, and should say no more on the matter. The reality is that one could probably prove in court that Straeuli’s entire coaching team was human, given DNA samples and the testimony of priests who baptised them and didn’t remember more than the usual covering of hair on the infants’ backs.
So given this revelation and the grace and effervescence of White’s team, the question begs to be asked: what on earth was Straeuli doing for all that time? Sawing at players’ Achilles tendons to toughen them up? Telling them that tries were for sissies?
Rudolph is gone with Prancer and Dancer and Staaldraad and all his other assistants, but mysterious Danish rot still lingers, if a Weekend Argus columnist is to be believed.
It seems that the recent scrapping of contracts is upsetting the ickle snookums ruggy-kicky players. Where once they could wander off towards the bench, gatvol and tired, and still get a seven-digit cheque at the end of the year, now the poor devils have to stand cap in hand for one-off appearance fees.
In line with this new exploitative system Springboks who play all the Tests in an average year — 12 or 13 — stand to make between R900 000 and R1,2-million. But it gets more shameful.
In tones usually reserved for discoveries of bootlegged porn DVDs in scoutmasters’ trunks, the piece reveals that because of his injury woes Ashwin Willemse is staring at the horrifying possibility of pocketing just R300 000 over the next 12 months.
‘Does Sarfu really value our top rugby players?” bellowed a front-page tagline. Clearly this was intended as a sort of Wasp ‘Amandla!” requiring an ‘Ngawetu!” about how poorly our lads are paid in comparison to, er, other rich people.
But somehow it all seems a little obscene when one looks over to the constable sitting in the dead-ball zone in a gentle drizzle of naartjie peels, on a blessed sabbatical from gunfights and exponentially multiplying case dockets, who takes home about R3 000 a month. That’s what our hard-done-by Springboks are likely to earn in a day. Any day. Every day. A Sunday by the pool. A slow round of golf, a leisurely braai.
Of course the industry will insist that players’ earning life is short. The implication of this line — that these boys are uneducated, unskilled, and unprepared for real life — never seems to be recognised by those who recite it.
It’s a hard life, they insist, with real sacrifices. No. Being a policeman is hard. Being Mrs Bojangles is hard. Earning 95 times the national per capita income for playing a game is not hard.
In the meantime: flowers and a written apology, or just bananas and a beach-ball? Now this is hard.