Have we forgotten about Hansie?

Adam Wakefield: Though South Africans might want to forget about international cricket BS (Before Smith), some will remember a South African side that earned the respect of the cricketing world through hard-nosed attrition tactics and a fierce fighting spirit.

This South African team wasn't stacked with the luminaries of Kallis (before he became a run-machine), De Villiers, Smith, Prince, and let us tentatively say Duminy. This South African team was the one in which Neil McKenzie made his debut, for which Gary Kirsten opened, and Darryl Cullinan batted at four so stylishly (and didn't commentate). Also, Lance Klusener added value as a Test player, and Jonty Rhodes was the definition of fielder.

Other names which might ring a bell include Brian McMillian, Paul Adams (frog in a blender stuff), and a tall gentlemen from the Free State named Allan Donald. It was during this period that Pollock, then a bit stronger and less sun-burned, formed one of the most lethal opening partnerships around. Allan Donald was the closest thing South Africa had to Dennis Lillee, carrying the attack very much on his own until the emergence of Pollock. At that point, he had one of the nastiest bouncers in international cricket.

This merry band of Africans (though that term is a philosophical contest in the Republic) were led by one Wessel Johannes Cronje, more well known as Hansie Cronje. Cronje epitomised team manager, as captains go. He practised hard, and demanded commitment from his team.

SHOOT: I think the grudge people hold against Hansie is because we loved him so much. If we liked him less forgiving him would have been easier. We should try to remember and embrace the good, because there was a lot of good.

Hansie deserves our support.

clipped from bleacherreport.com clipped from bleacherreport.com The current South African Test team has performed remarkably well over the last two years, winning Test series in Pakistan, England, and Australia. Their achievement of defeating Australia is even more prestigious since the Proteas were the first team to beat the wearers of the Baggy Green at home for over 15 years. They also drew a series in India after leading 1-0, with the pitch for the third Test being tailor-made for the home sides spinners. While Graeme Smith represents a leader who has grown into his roll as skipper of one of the world's best cricket teams, this is not the first time that a South African team has laid claim to be one of the best sides on the planet. If you are thinking about Shaun Pollock's tenure in charge of the national side, then you might be slightly mistaken.

Hype, Hubris, Hansie - and the Lord Our God

When I started working on research and digging up the history on Hansie, this was the title that sprung to mind. It was based on what you got googling 'Hansie' a few weeks ago (that has changed quite a lot recently). The title's allusion to 'Hype' really reflects the way - in Hansie's heyday - he was such an iconic South African. Loved by us and loved - it seemed - by the world.

Hansie lived in that warm Mandela time when we also won the Rugby World Cup - where South Africa seemed a blessed country, healing, stepping forward heroically, reclaiming all the lost time, lost lives. Hansie epitomised that exuberance, that passionate embrace. The prodigal country had returned, and Hansie was one of front runners in our reclaiming our place on the world's stage.

During the inquisition into Hansie, there was also a lot of 'Hype', and if Hansie's fame was a high pressure system, the inquisition was a series of cold fronts, low pressures that swept by again and again, seeking to bring equilibrium to equation. I don't know if you remember, but the headlines then were quite nasty. Newspapers sometimes attempt to assuage, mimic and even lead their reader's sentiments. I mean they go beyond reporting to inciting emotions. Recently we've seen Sunday Times headlines yelling at Mugabe to 'pack his bags', or calling the Minister of Health a Liar. This isn't always credible reporting as much as it is a sort of sensational barometer of an estimated average sentiment. With Hansie it was 'The Devil Made Me Do it' and other 'traitor' based allegations.

The Hubris though was in part Hansie's and ours (and the media's) in collaboration. Hubris is a good way to summarise Hansie's attitude to cricket, and to living. Hubris is not necessarily a bad thing. Love is filled with hubris. So is hate. Wiki defines Hubris as follows:
...a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, self-confidence, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution. In ancient Greece, hubris referred to actions which, intentionally or not, shamed and humiliated the victim, and frequently the perpetrator as well. It was most evident in the public and private actions of the powerful and rich. The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist's downfall.

Hubris, though not specifically defined, was a legal term and was considered a crime in classical Athens. It was also considered the greatest sin of the ancient Greek world.

I went to Grey College, and so I saw Hansie through many years develop the incredible confidence of a school that hero-worshipped him, and only in the Vrysaat agterplaas can a newspaper like Die Volksblad fawn so exclusively over their hero as this newspaper did. Right now Die Volksblad's golden idol is Bloem's own Ryk Neethling (soon to do a book launch just outside the city).

And then there was also Hansie, the person - beyond the Hype, beyond the Hubris - the guy who went hunting with his boet and with an animal in his sights, suddenly felt the terrible loss of his own life and youth...at the point of pulling the trigger and taking this animal's life, he felt his own life slipping away... and as my research continued, I started to read his biography - by Garth King. It's a good book in the sense that it is comprehensive. What I appreciated immensely from reading the biography was it took me back to my alma mater, and made me see a dimension to Hansie, and even my school, that I saw once again...and then beyond that...all the going's on that I didn't see.
I remember seeing the guys running around Loch Logan, but I had no idea they had been running to Naval Hill as schoolboys 365 days a year. I had a pretty unpleasant high school experience at Grey College, and I expected King's book to somehow reinforce the not-so-great memories I had of High School. Some people hate Grey College, and in a bizarre way, I expected - specifically in the sense of following the Hansie story at Grey - that I might find myself agreeing with them. I didn't. At Grey if you were a good cricketer or rugby player you were a god. The teachers loved you, so did everyone else. I excelled at swimming, athletics to some extent, and hockey. I was still a nobody, an Engelse bliksem, a rooinek, and a Dutchman. My point is I am not part of the Cult of Hansie, or the Cult of Grey College. In the movie the footage of the school comes through as very authentic, a point Frans also made to me. I have to say, I truly believe the highest virtue there is is probably loyalty - and Grey is all about that. Yes, there is misplaced loyalty, but we live in a time where loyalty is seldom seen.

I experienced a major paradigm shift - quite unexpected - reading the biography. I realised, for example, how hard Hansie worked from the get go. And that he really did deserve the accolades he received. He achieved a great many things, and he worked bloody hard for it.

And then after reading the book I phoned up Frans Cronje and spoke about the movie and the book. Frans asked what I'd thought about the book and I told him I had been unexpectedly moved by the book, and this freed Frans to speak sincerely about his feelings. He even shared with me that he still has dreams of Hansie, and always 'wakes up sad'. It was at this point that I realised an article titled Hype, Hubris, Hansie - and the Lord Our God was not only inappropriate, it wasn't true, and it was misleading. It also seemed to swing wildly away from the emergent bottom lines of this story. One bottom line was this:

Hansie got screwed by the bookies because they felt he had betrayed their trust. They had insidiously attempted to win him over, and he had played them, and when they lost a phenomenal amount (expecting Gibbs to lose a wicket at 20 runs etc), they decided to get Hansie back. The irony is that while Hansie isn't innocent, and while he was greedy, he was punished to a large extent for failing to deliver to the bookies. Not many South Africans seem to see this subtle but important point.

Yes, it is true that Hansie should never have entertained the bookies in the first place. Yes he should have brooked no favours from them. So too should you not ride over 60km in a 60km/h zone, and so too should I pay my TV license fee. Nobody is perfect. We all makes mistake, and yes, Hansie made a big one. I think his mentor Mr. Volsteedt (principal at Grey College) provides the best example. Vollies had the most to lose by openly supporting Hansie. He may have felt that supporting Hansie in the full glare of the public spotlight would attract shame on the school. Vollies went with his gut and elected to say Grey supported Hansie but not what he did. You might think that a facile attitude, but I wonder how you would treat a brother, a son, or a father that made a public blapse. Would you join the madding crowds, add your voice to the clamour? Or would you be like a loving, loyal (Heavenly) father?

For me, what irks me the most about the Hansie story is 'the Lord our God'. Even in the book, I didn't like the amount of page space devoted to what I consider Christian schmaltz. In the movie, Hansie's baptism and rebirth irked me as I don't subscribe to that (although I used to once). I also remember back in 2000 I felt an awkward feeling of anger when Hansie was on trial that he still wasn't being entirely honest. In this context, the idea of God and truth becomes a bit flawed and suspect, lame and ridiculous for me. However, having read the biography, I realised it wasn't as simple or as black and white as that. Initially Hansie did lie, and tried to keep what he had done a secret. Then he faxed a confession to 6 different people. And then his lawyer told him to admit as little as possible. In the end, it was Hansie's own confession that provided virtually all the ammo the media and the prosecution would need. No cellphone transcripts ever saw the light of day.

When Hansie was at the Centre for the Book I wasn't far away. I was studying up the road at an advertising school in Cape Town. But it did occur to me that at Grey, it is not difficult to develop the hubris that comes from the combination of collectively believing in God, the confidence that comes from being a dominant sporting force in the region, and the way the boys idolised their heroes. Hubris is at its most dangerous when mixed in with religion, and that's what happened to Hansie:

In the film 300 the narrator says “The God King (Xerxes) has betrayed a fatal flaw: hubris. Easy to taunt, easy to trick ...

Having watched the movie, I can honestly say it is not a perfect portrait of Hansie. There are some mistakes. But I think the movie can be forgiven for its faults - it is good enough. I was moved. Many reviewers were crying in the film, and I understood what Frans meant when he said the film really comes into its own from the King Commission onwards. For me it is a really sad story; especially where we see Hansie all alone, in the dark, in a plane buffeted by a ferocious storm. And in that dark and terrifying place his life came to an end.
How sad.
I think what the Hansie parable teaches us is how radically our lives can change, and how cruel life can become (even if we are at fault and 'deserve' to account for our sins). I think if you closely follow the story of Hansie's life, you cannot come away other than to feel tremendous compassion for him. He worked really really hard, and achieved so much, but the story doesn't end happily ever after. What disturbs me are the clever-as-I-am articles like this one, comparing Hansie to Elvis, where the writer basks in his own wordplay glory but really has no real sensitivity (and I believe a very limited understanding) to the real life person he is writing about. I find it really sad to see this.

If the point of having heroes like good Hansie is so that we can learn from his example, surely the point of having villains like bad Hansie is also so that we can learn from his example? Because, after all, both are undeniably the same Hansie. And in fact, if you're a fan of Shakespeare, or the Bible, or the Harry Potter movies, you'll probably agree with me that all the best heroes are the complicated ones.

It's like being a fan of the cool Elvis from the 60s, but getting upset when people talk about the drug-raddled Elvis from the 70s (or "The Fat Bastard Years", as my friend Stuart refers to them). Both Elvises are important to fans of music, and you can approve of the early Elvis at the same time as thinking the stuff he made in the 70s is rubbish. [Continues below]

clipped from www.news24.com Both have fanatical followers who believe that they are guardians of the true flame, and that only they have the right to talk about, and judge, Elvis or Hansie. And both have become much more than the people they were - they're now part of the language of culture, and as such belong to everyone. One of the readers commented on the "Hansie deserves closure" column, and wrote this: "DW says: I read the Hansie Cronje story and I think he got a raw deal. He was wrong and was rightfully punished but he was definitely used as a scapegoat to try to teach everyone else a lesson, a lesson clearly not yet learnt as there is still match fixing in various sports." It's an intelligent comment, although the conclusion is flawed. Hansie is being used as an example, rather than a scapegoat ("scapegoat" implies that nobody else is being accused of the same thing). [In fact, Hansie was the only one accused - nothing happened to Gibbs or Boje or Donald or any of the others implicated. Hansie took the fall for everyone. He was a scapegoat AND and example.]

Funny thing that...

18/06/2008 12:37
Hansie was dragged off to court and went through all kinds of legal BS, lost his job and was banned from cricket for life. At the end of the day he was just a captain of a cricket team. Mr Zuma on the other hand was Vice Prez the country and took part in some seriously dodgy deals with some dodgy people went to court for rape etc etc and he gets made president of the ANC and possibly the country. Make's you wonder? If you're an ANC politician the law does not apply to you? - Mikey

The Sunday Independent has a movie review titled Film, like its hero, has feet of clay. Mary Corrigall spends 95% of her article ripping the movie to shreds, calling the movie a schmaltzy, made for TV disappointment. She says it is an embarrassment to the film making community of South Africa.

I don't know if that is a very nice thing to say. Mary - really? Corrigall also criticises the director for the movie's singular 'pot shot' at the media. She argues that the director ought to have used this 'valuable screen time' otherwise. Actually, there is one very short scene - perhaps 10 seconds long - where one previously obsequious reporter changes his tune on Hansie. The media did far worse - so I think Corrigall is hypercritical and overly strict in her assessment. She describes Hansie in the film as 'nauseatingly squeaky-clean'.

I don't know if we watched the same movie. The movie I saw, Hansie accepts bribes over the phone. A large part of the movie focuses on his dealing with bookmakers. What's squeaky clean about that?
In parallel to Corrigall's almost entirely negative review, I have one good thing to say about her attitude, and also Chris Roper and all the other people who think Hansie is one of South Africa's biggest jerks: at least it says something about the standards we feel our heroes ought to reach. We don't like them to make mistakes, disappoint us, they must be honest. Is that about right? I would love to see those standards, those judgements, focused on our political leaders, the career criminals, the serial killers. It's great to have these high standards of honesty, but please apply them to the real world, to our crime-infested country, to the daily corruption we read about in the newspaper, and also, at a last resort to oneself. Right? If you find yourself hesitating after this paragraph you might feel the need to secure your bullshit.

I guess, in the end, Hansie's legacy - when viewed up close - leaves you either hating him more, or loving him more, and that is a choice I think. And that choice says a lot about the person you are.

Read my Movie Review of the Hansie movie here.
Read my article published in the Sunday Independent here.

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

NVDL in SA's Top 30 blogs

I have a few articles coming out over the next few weeks in mainstream media. Hansie deserves our respect in the Sunday Independent in 2 weeks (ahead of the movie, which opens on 24 September, one day before what would have been his 39th birthday), a 4x4 story in a magazine (more on that later), a cycling story in Ride (just the letters section though) and some other stuff that I'm not going to talk too much about right now.

I'm going to start insisting that as a postscript to these articles, they add the following text:
For more on the author visit [this website].

Things are certainly getting intwisting.

Sinking Standards and the Dark Night Before the Dawn

Paul Ash's article in this weekend Lifestyle is pretty good. The last paragraph is brilliant. That said, the cover of the supplement is festooned with Standard Bank graffiti which shrilly shrieks: swipe your credit card 50 times (or whatever) month and win this. Swipe it 40 times and win that, etc etc. Now I dunno about you, but every time you 'swipe' a card, that usually involves a transaction. So you have this incentive to spend to get something for (apparently) nothing. Er....we are facing chronic interest rates, and nosediving markets in general. With fuel and food prices where they are, should we really - responsibly - be swiping away?

Now I am a fan of Standard Bank for a variety of reasons. My buddy works for the company, and I'm a member of the Standard Bank cycling club (and its an excellent club with lekker perks). As such, I'm disappointed in this frankly irresponsible marketing jaunt. Are marketers just plain dumb, or just plain ruthlessly greedy?

Some people are going to shake their heads at this, but amongst health professionals it is common knowledge that drinking the likes of milk (and milk products) doesn't increase the amount of calcium in the bones, by consuming milk products you tend to discharge or flush out calcium. This is assuming the person doesn't have chronic calcium deficiency to start off with (in which case milk would do some good). See how it works in healthy people is that a person's skeleton acts as a calcium bank. So when calcium is needed (and the blood levels are a measure of this), more and more calcium is withdrawn from the skeleton bank. People become calcium deficient not by consuming too little calcium (in fact, most people consume too much via too many milk products), but by drinking highly sugary beverages like soft drinks, and coffee. Coke and coffee have a leeching effect on the skeleton. I think many people are aware that high volumes of daily cola consumption dissolve the teeth over a relatively short period of time. Btw - teeth are made of bones. Coke (and similar high fatty, high sugar foods) have a similar impact on our skeletons.

There is currently a radio ad - by either Parmalat or Clover - where Alex Jay intones the myth that milk = calcium. It is similar to the myth that meat = protein or 'the only way to get enough protein is by eating meat'. The milk and meat industries rely on this deception to prosper, and while we're at it - so do the egg industries. We get egg in everything these days, including an ordinary chocolate. We don't really need more than a single egg a month, and even then, the albumen is what might come in handy. The rest is cholesterol, exactly what a mature adult doesn't need - in a society where the number one cause of death is heart attacks. Heart attacks are caused principally by poor diet and lifestyle choices (lack of exercise, stress, drinking, smoking) and to some extent from genetic predispositions.

My point is, Alex Jay/Clover or Parmesan blah de blah are not doing anyone any favours either. What would be great would be if the milk industry could find a useful way to do something with that white stuff. Maybe make it into a kind of biofuel. I'm guessing they can't. In fact, the meat industry is the greatest cause of global warming on Earth - so give those cows (the dairy aisle at your supermarket) a miss if at all possible.

Now, believe it or not, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking why is van der leek fucking pontificating about clacium and proteins and heart disease? What do these arbitrary health issues have to do with anything? Thanks for the question. Right now, financial troubles are placing large swathes of middle class suburbia under severe stress. It's financial, but it expresses itself as hopelessness and increasingly - desperation. The upshot of all this (shouldn't it be downshot) is a severely stressed population that is susceptible to disease, depression and disorder. Each of those D's is significant, not least of which DISEASE. People under extreme stress start to suffer increasingly from infections, limiting their already increasingly limited ability to dig themselves out of the financial cemetry that is suburbia. Depression and disorder will feed unopposed in this shark tank filling with the bleeding middle class. So there is very good reason that even at this fairly early stage (let's call it The Beginning) we maintain ourselves as far as possible in good condition. Stay fit, eat well, sleep well, maintain discipline.

In Nedbank this morning I joined a queue ending in a solitary human being perched behind a wooden desk. The queue was moving at 0.000001 km/millennium. A woman in front of me started to complain about the service there (ironically, I did the same thing in the same bank several weeks earlier). Curiously, 4 people including me immediately joined in for a group rant, including an old gentlemen who said he had once been a manager at Nedbank, and called current service levels 'deplorable'. It was not so much the subject of our discussion that I found fascinating, but more the increasing readiness of consumers to bitch and moan. I believe this irritable zeitgeist is spreading around the shopping malls of the world like AIDS through Africa.

That's another thing. Have we forgotten about AIDS. It's a disease you get that kills you but it goes under the radar long enough for you to infect a dozen or so people before you start feeling kak, which boosts its human kill rate. From the behaviour of certain people I know, the AIDS bedfellow is a matter of time (if it's not already there). Shudder.

Last night I was in a movie and since I had no date, had a seat open next to me. H13. After a few minutes a guy comes along, asks if the seat is taken and I say 'No.' He sits his ass down, but about an hour into Dark Knight, when the Joker is doing nurse-duty to Two Face, he starts gabbing with his wife on the phone. I can hear what he's saying, and I can hear what she's saying. I'm actually at the cinema to hear what the characters on screen are saying, but instead, while Heath Ledger is saying I can't remember what, the character beside me is saying:
"I'm in a movie."
"What?"
"A movie. I'm in a movie."
"Oh are you in a movie. When does it finish? And what are you watching..."
The guy goes on and on, and despite a nudge from me, he goes on gabbing for about 2 minutes in all, then signs off and turns to me: "Don't push your arm against me. What's your problem?" He explains his phone is on silent, and he has right to talk to his wife dammit.
"But not in a movie."
The guy goes on to argue with me, when the point is we'd all like to watch the movie, that's why we're here. He tells me if I'm not happy I'm welcome to call security and discuss my problems with them after the movie. I tell him to shutup but the comments keep on coming. So I exit the cinema, call the manager, and have his bum removed from seat H13, a cursed seat that I unfortunately had put money (and a no-show gymnast) on. My point is, you've got a guy sitting in the wrong seat chatting to his wife and asking what everyone else's problem is...

And finally...driving home from work I saw two posters from two different newspapers:
ATM BOMBINGS SOAR
STROOM MENSE UIT SA WORD RIVIER
In today's Mail&Guardian: KEBBLE: SHOCKING NEW CLAIMS
Let me put this into some sort of perspective. During my troubled viewing of Dark Knight, I noticed 2 things which I find frankly scares the bejesus out of me.
1) Just before Dark Knight was a preview of the movie HANSIE. A lot of people - when this came on - were chuckling in the packed cinema, and I daresay someone jibed: the devil made me do it. Thing is, if you watch that preview, it has a lot of gravitas in it. It's not meant to make you chuckle. There ought to be a lot of pain linked to the Hansie ethos. The movie is I think a catharsis for the family, who knows, perhaps the rest of us. In any event, it suffices to say that laughing during the preview presents an astonishing lack of manners from what appears to be the average South African
2) In The Dark Knight many of the Jokers appearances were associated with similar giggling. To clarify - the Joker presents a very disturbing series of escalating scenarios. The Joker is funny peculiar, but everyone knows he isn't really funny. I found the audiences levity (and my seat-neighbors arrogance) galling.
God help us (if there is one), because the night time of this world is approaching...we can allfeel it...this growing sense of gloom...and it really is growing darker. Except, you know there is no Batman, no Commissioner Gordon out there to save us. There's just Gotham, the dark and us.

Batman impersonator to Batman: What's the difference between you and me?
Batman: I don't wear hockey pads.