Cry for the embittered Country - and the Hansie haters

I hope there are not too many Janet Smith's around in this country. This hysterical, self righteous, Hansie-hating article may be the first of a backlash...and I have to say...I'd rather not know I share this country with such vindictive, hatefilled people.

While I have mixed feelings about the saga, and I share Frans Cronje's sense that most of all Hansie let himself down, reading the book I was overcome with sadness and compassion where his wife is carrying Hansie's remains on the sportsgrounds of Grey College - where Hansie was once head boy - to a memorial wall, and Hansie's mother says to Bertha:

"Did you ever think you'd be carrying Hansie like this, in a box."

If you knew Hansie at all - he was a mischievous, energetic, and passionate person. He was ambitious and talented. He had an enormous life - and the book captures the vast dimensions of it. The tragedy then is that first it was stolen from him, and then what remained was placed in a box in a wall.

This article by Janet Smith gloatingly challenging the Hansie movie - what is an honest, earnest effort at finding truth and meaning and goodness. Smith completely misses the point. Smith alleges that Hansie was worse than we think, that he emerged unscathed by riding high in Fancourt, when in reality he was seeking refuge from the evil glare of exactly the kind of people Smith represents. Hansie suffered from chronic depression and feared appearing in public, and gained 11 kilograms in a short space of time.

His time with Bertha was also the first time in their marriage they had to spend with each other. Ironically the two became so close that Hansie could not bear to be away from her, which prompted his decision to catch the midnight flight on a cargo plane.

Smith would rather remember the dead Hansie Cronje as someone she would like to be ashamed of, someone characterised by lies. Do lies sum up who Hansie Cronje was? I don't think many South Africans would agree with that. He was a fantastic cricketer who meant well.

It is incredibly sad that Philistines such as Smith feature so prominently in this country. South Africa is like a young adult that was severely abused as a child. When will we put the past behind us? When will we move forward in love and respect? When will we stop revelling in our own rightness? Because until we can, national pride and self respect will elude us, and the pain of the past will continue to paralyze us, and our critical judgements will continue to jab and impale us, like the razor sharp shards of a broken mirror.

clipped from www.iol.co.za Hansie was a liar, a greedy liar, and a damned cheat, and that is why he was banned from cricket and abandoned. But the simple question which those who are now being labelled detractors have asked is: Should we have felt sorry for him? What exactly did he do to deserve our forgiveness except make his way through the passage of time? And that is the critical issue around the movie, which has all but bankrupted Frans. Are you an enemy if you cannot forgive? Despite what Frans Cronje the filmmaker needed to do as a brother whose love is necessarily unassailable, many observers of the cricketing world would agree that his film doesn't quite tell the whole story. The beatification of St Hansie