The day after Hansie was accused

BUSINESS DAY, 13 APRIL 2000

IF HANSIE CRONJÉ is guilty, we might as well all go home, tell our children there is no Father Christmas and start watching WWF wrestling. If Hansie Cronjé is guilty, I might as well be a lawyer.

In 1992 the SA cricket team were playing in the World Cup in Australia. The matches started shortly before midnight and carried on till the pearly half-light of coffee and alarm clocks. At the same time I was writing final law exams. On the morning SA were to play England in the semi-finals, I was scheduled to write a four-hour law exam. If the match ended on time, I would be able to make it from my friend Mark the Shark’s house to campus (by taxi and on foot) to start writing.

I need scarcely remind you what happened that day. SA were batting second. First there was one rain delay, then there was another. “If you leave now,” said Mark the Shark, “you can make it for the exam.”

On the screen, Dave Richardson and Brian McMillan were squinting at the skies, willing it to stop raining. Peter Kirsten chewed his nails. In the background Hansie loomed darkly, his eyebrows knitted like cumulonimbus. I stayed.

We lost the match but I never regretted my decision. If I had left, I would not have deserved to feel a part of the team. I would not have been able to say, for the next eight years, “We’re playing Australia tomorrow”, rather than “They’re playing Australia tomorrow”.

During the eight years that have passed since – years I have spent happily not being a lawyer – Hansie has come to represent all that was good about feeling a part of South African cricket. As much as Fanie de Villers in the Sydney test of 1992, it was Hansie’s miraculous pick-up, turn and throw from the boundary to run out Alan Border returning for a third that set up the SA win. It was the birth of Hansie’s slog-sweep against Shane Warne in 1993 and 1994 that made us realise the fat boy did not walk on water. It was Hansie’s bludgeoned 80-odd on the last day of the 1998 Centurion test match against Muralitheran and Sri Lanka that showed us how to win, and win well.

In my household, Hansie has become an untouchable: not in the Indian sense, but in the Elliot Ness, crime-busting incorruptible sense. If the other three are guilty it will be a source of shame; if Hansie is guilty, it will be a source of unimaginable pain. As I write this, we have had no further news. There is a news conference scheduled for tomorrow. If Hansie is guilty, neither South African sport nor the game of cricket will ever be quite the same again. Please, Hansie, say it isn’t so.