Betrayal and bravery of Hansie Cronje, by the person he confessed to

Times

a day ago

April 11, 2000, just after 2.30am. An executive suite of the Elangeni Hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean on Durban's Golden Mile.
'All the lights were on: it was as bright as day even though it was the middle of the night,' Rory Steyn recalls. 'Hansie's kit bag was packed and lying by the door. As I walked in, he proffered this three-page handwritten document, saying, 'You might have realised that some of the stuff that's been said about me in the media is true.' '
Hansie Cronje, the captain and poster boy of the post-apartheid South Africa cricket team, is about to bear his soul. Days before this impromptu rendezvous, the Delhi police had made public allegations of match-fixing against Cronje which related to a one-day international series in India that year.
Attention would soon turn to a previous tour to the same country in 1996, and the rain-ravaged Test against England in Centurion in January 2000, when Cronje convinced the visitors to join the Proteas in sacrificing an innings to set up a final-day run chase. It later emerged he had been paid by a bookmaker to engineer a result.
That October, the South African government-appointed King Commission banned Cronje from playing or coaching cricket for life. Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams, two team-mates he had attempted to coerce into spot-fixing, were banned from international cricket for six months.
Steyn, now 62, was the first person to whom Cronje confessed. A man whose working life has also encompassed stints as the chief of the South African police's VIP unit and then as the head of President Mandela's personal protection team, the father of the Glasgow Warriors and Scotland wing Kyle Steyn was also in charge of security for the All Blacks at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, when preparations for the final against the host nation Springboks were overshadowed by allegations of a deliberate poisoning of their food by a hotel waitress.
Steyn, then, has long been used to juggling all manner of dangers and delights, but nothing could have prepared him for the scene when he answered Cronje's early-morning distress call.
The pair were staying on different floors of the same hotel, Steyn as the head of security for the touring Australia team and Cronje as the skipper of the South Africa side due to face them in an ODI at Kingsmead that day.
Instead, the then 30-year-old was about to spill his guts to a man who had become a familiar face around the Proteas camp as he guarded all manner of visiting teams, including the Mike Atherton-led 1995 expedition, England's first post-apartheid tour to South Africa.
'At that point, I had actually left the police to become the first ever safety and security consultant to Cricket South Africa, but the best I can come up with was that Hansie still thought of me as a cop and so thought I was the right person to unburden himself to,' Steyn says.
'I'm good friends with Tugga [Steve Waugh] from working with the Australia team, and when this whole thing started to break, he said to me, 'I don't think there's nothing there.' But before I heard it from Hansie himself, I didn't for a second believe any of it. And now I'm trying to react to what I'm being told and at the same time trying to remember I have a job to fulfil.
'I had to wake up Dr [Ali] Bacher [the head of the United Cricket Board of South Africa]. He'd taken the Australian president and CEO out to a game lodge. They were in the sticks with no cell phone reception. I had to call the lodge and say, 'You've got to send a ranger with a rifle.' He would be walking through Big Five game territory to get to this lodge and alert Dr Bacher.
'When this police commissioner in Delhi called a press conference and made these allegations, Dr Bacher had called Hansie and said, 'I'm only going to ask you one question: is there any truth to any of this?' When Hansie said, 'No,' Dr Bacher said, 'That's fine, that's all I needed to hear. We will back you to the hilt.'
'Dr Bacher called the deputy minister of foreign affairs [Aziz Pahad] and objected in the strongest terms, saying, 'This is now a diplomatic issue, because he has accused our national captain.' In turn, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs went to the Indian High Commission and objected, then a week later, here was Hansie putting up his hand.
'He knew he had let his team-mates, his family, his country and himself down. And while I am, on the one hand, mad at him for letting all of us down, on the other, I do admire his bravery, because he came to a point where his upbringing, his background, his schooling, and just his own ethics made him say, 'I can't continue. I'm putting my hand up and I'm saying I was wrong.' Despite the fact he had betrayed so much trust, I will always admire that: when you mess up, you own it.'
Steyn says that even now he is 'genuinely torn' when it comes to how he views the fallen icon.
'I'm so mad at him and so disappointed because he was a proper hero to South Africa. Right across the colour board, probably the first white person to be truly universally loved. You could say Francois Pienaar, because he won the [Rugby] World Cup in 1995, but he wasn't as publicly loved as Hansie was. It was said that after President Mandela, Hansie was the most popular South African.
'He was elegant, supremely talented and self-confident. Through the captaincy decisions that he made, it was like watching a guy play chess. People trusted him and got behind him. That's what the whole country did and why that feeling of being sold out was so hard to take.'
Wrapped up in this sense of betrayal, however, was another approach that Steyn believes relates to the post-apartheid process of reconciliation.
'Hansie remained, and remains, hugely popular,' he confirms. 'As South Africans, we've had to look our demons in the eye. By no means are we out of the woods on that score, about the hurts and the wounds of the past, and the impact it has had on people's lives. But as a nation we have been prepared to do what Mandela urged when he said, 'It's better to sit down and talk to your enemy than to fight with him.'
'Think of the magnanimity that statement takes. I witnessed it up close the day he swore the oath of office. His car drove up to an old-school, apartheid-era police colonel. And he puts out his hand and says, 'Today you have become our police. From today forward there's no more you and us. You are our police too.'
'He started to cry, this old warrior. The president patted him on the shoulder and said, 'I just needed you to hear that from me.'
'That colonel represented the system that pursued Mandela and arrested him, tried him, convicted him and sent him to prison for life, narrowly escaping the death penalty. And on the very day he's got all the power, out comes, not the fist of retribution, but the hand of forgiveness. That takes a level of magnanimity and humanity that I don't know I have the words to describe. It made such a profound effect on me that I questioned everything I'd ever been brought up with as normal.'
Steyn stayed in touch with Cronje, popping in to visit him down in George whenever client work with his own security company took him to the coast. He had also brokered a meeting between Cronje and Gerald Majola, Bacher's successor at the helm of the union, 'to try to find a way of making use of Hansie's great experience and his skills', but in June 2002, Cronje, aged only 32, died — the victim, alongside two pilots, of an air crash amid poor visibility on the outskirts of George.
'There is this quasi-conspiracy theory that he was murdered; that Hansie knew where too many skeletons were buried, and so he was offed, but the cop in me tells me that's rubbish,' Steyn says. 'The simple truth is that had befriended these mail pilots whom he would call at extremely short notice to see if they had a spare seat that night.
'What happened was desperately, desperately sad, not least because I'd had dinner with him not long before and he was really upbeat. He was doing an MBA, he'd been offered a job with Caterpillar, the earth-moving people, and he was getting his life back together. He wasn't quite ready to walk into a restaurant publicly but it was almost as if he had finally, to the extent that one can, put these demons behind him. But then this awful news. Again, you struggled to know what to say or even think.'
Test debut/last Test April 18 1992 v West Indies March 2 2000 v India
ODI debut/last ODIFebruary 26 1992 v Australia March 31 2000 v Pakistan
Domestic teams played forFree State, Leicestershire, Ireland
Records at Test level/ODIMatches: 68/188 Runs scored: 3,714/5,565 Batting average: 36.41/38.64 100s/50s: 6/23 — 2/39 Top score: 135/112 Balls bowled: 3,800/5,354 Best bowling: 3/14 — 5/32