Hansie Cronje Ten Years On

It is ten years since former South African cricket captain died when his plane crashed into Cradock Peak in South Africa’s Outeniqua mountain range.  Newspapers, radio and television have all marked the anniversary.  BBC Radio Five devoted two hours to a review of his life.

Instead of providing clarity, all of this renewed publicity has merely served to increase the pile of unanswered questions, both about Cronje the man and the match-fixing scandal that has forever tainted his name.  Are there others equally guilty who managed not to get caught?  Was he a good Christian man who succumbed to temptation or a psychopath?  Was the plane crash an accident or the outcome of a plot to get rid of him in case he decided to tell everything that he knew?  Is there a link with the death of Bob Woolmer in Jamaica several years later?  Who was on the alleged list of 62 players with secret off shore bank accounts?

It’s quite likely we will never know the definitive answers to these questions.  There are those such as South African journalist and broadcaster Neil Manthorpe who could, if they chose, tell more of what they know; and ex-cricketer Paul Smith has apparently been asked to write a book about the whole match-fixing affair.  If it gets past the lawyers, it will make riveting reading but I’m not holding my breath.

As for Cronje, it is hard not to marvel at his hypocrisy.  Here was someone who wore a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) wristband whilst lying and cheating for personal gain.  He received not just the infamous leather jacket but also the $140,000 that he admitted to the King Commission and maybe much more.   It’s a long time since I was an attentive Sunday School pupil so I’ve forgotten some of what I learnt.  Maybe there is a passage in the New Testament where John the Baptist says to Jesus: “Hey, Jesus, that’s a cool jacket.  What did you have to do to get that?”

Possibly the key to the hypocrisy is that, in Hansie’s mind, the answer to the question “what would Jesus do?” was simple: “He’d forgive me.” After all, when Frans Cronje, Hansie’s brother, was asked if he thought Hansie had gone to heaven, his answer was an unequivocal “yes”.

It’s one thing to do wrong, regret it and seek forgiveness from those you have wronged and/or from your God.  It’s an entirely different matter to do wrong because you believe in advance that your God will forgive you. In Hansie’s case, he may have expressed his regrets to the King Commission but he never apologised to Henry Williams and Herschelle Gibbs , his fellow cricketers whom he drew into his match-fixing net.

Had he lived, Hansie Cronje might have been able to reach a point of true repentance and might have rehabilitated himself by both his words and his actions.  Instead, a mountain got in the way.  So maybe the obligation to be charitable passes to us and we should feel compassion for a man who was, like all of us, a fallible human being.  Ok, underneath a pious surface, Hansie was probably not a nice man. But in that, he’s not alone.  As someone once observed, there are more horse’s a*ses around than there are horses. And possibly, just possibly, in his last moments as the mountain loomed, he faced his God, sought true forgiveness and found it.