Former South Africa winger Cornal Hendricks dies aged 37
Former South Africa winger Cornal Hendricks has died at the age of 37.
SA Rugby said in a statement that Hendricks suffered a heart attack on Wednesday evening.
Hendricks, who made his Test debut against Wales in 2014 and won 12 caps for the
Springboks
, was diagnosed with a serious heart condition 10 years ago and retired from professional rugby.
But he returned to the game after receiving a second medical opinion and spent five seasons with the Pretoria-based Bulls.
READ MORE
Bulls rugby director Jake White said: 'Many people were shocked and sad when his career was cut short in 2015.
'When we had the opportunity to get him back on the park, he took that with open arms and made a remarkable use of his second lease in professional rugby.
'We all witnessed him leave no stone unturned as he inspired his team-mates and the South African community through his story of hope and courage.
'It was a privilege and honour to have been his coach, a fantastic role model for the next generation and his appetite for life was infectious. Rugby has lost one of the good ones.'
SA Rugby president Mark Alexander added: 'Cornal was one of those players who loved the game and he worked extremely hard, but he always did so with a smile on his face, treating all people with respect.
'His energy and love of life, on and off the field, lifted his team-mates and those around him. His contributions to the sport and his unwavering dedication will always be remembered.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
LIV Golf shows what happens when a niche sport goes to war with itself – rugby should take note
This R360 stuff is interesting for the thunder that isn't rolling. Normally, when you come across a sport being sized up for attack by an outside disrupter, you can't move for sirens wailing and cannons firing in opposition. That doesn't quite seem to be the case with rugby in this instance, which raises the fascinating question of why that might be. It feels like a little more than just the usual rugby confidence in itself, although that is certainly part of it. World Rugby hasn't said anything about the proposed breakaway league spearheaded by former England international Mike Tindall. There hasn't been a peep out of any of the unions. None of the players' bodies have chirped up, either in support or in high dudgeon. Since nothing is yet official and all anybody has to go on is a strategically leaked business pitch and a year-old podcast rumination by Tindall, it's maybe no surprise that everyone is holding fire for now. But somewhere in the silence lies the uncomfortable truth that has set this thing in motion in the first place. Rugby is in a precarious place right now. Nobody can say with any confidence what it's going to look like in, say, a decade's time, but it probably won't look like this. Particularly in England, where three Premiership clubs have gone to the wall in recent seasons and seven of those remaining are losing money. READ MORE England is one of the great rugby nations on the planet and it is struggling to make the sport a viable business. Same goes for Wales , where the WRU is reducing its funding to two of the four regions. Same Down Under , where Rugby Australia recently announced a loss of $36.8 million (a shade under €21 million) for 2024 – and had the chutzpah to pass it off as good news because the Lions tour and next year's World Cup will bring in the bucks. So much jam tomorrow. Into this world, the arrival of an idea that is apparently attracting new sources of funding can't be dismissed out of hand. Especially when some of the people interested are reportedly established owners from the big, sexy, moneymaking leagues – the NFL, the Premier League, Formula 1. These are the lads with a proven record of turning existing sports into spun gold. If they think they have a way of making rugby viable, there's probably more rugby people than you think who are willing to give them a hearing. Instinctively though, it feels like the whole idea has two glaring issues. One, rugby is too small for a breakaway league to work. And two, rugby players aren't famous enough to build a breakaway league around. They're both variations on the same problem, but let's take them in order and use the most recent sports league disruptor as a case study. [ 'Crampgate' tells us rugby's code of dignity counts for little when lucrative online views are at stake Opens in new window ] Bryson DeChambeau celebrates his birdie putt on the 18th hole with a record 58 to win the LIV Golf Invitational - Greenbrier at The Old White Course in August 2023 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Photograph:The first LIV Golf tournament took place this week in 2022. Since then, LIV has unquestionably gone on to establish itself as a player in the golf ecosystem. Whatever future the game has, LIV and its players will have to be dealt with, one way or the other. It's maybe no surprise that some of the people involved in R360 have worked on LIV. Plenty of commentators pooh-poohed LIV from the start and didn't envisage it lasting the course. That it's still here at all will be proof enough for some of those involved that a successful template exists and that rugby is ripe for its application. But the reality is that LIV has been a disaster for golf , simply because golf is far too niche a sport to be going to war with itself. By breaking away from the PGA Tour , LIV is running an unprofitable sports league that is bringing in pitiful broadcasting money and is only surviving because there's a bottomless well of Saudi oil cash to feed it. Rugby is played seriously in nine countries on the planet. In only two of those is it the number one sport – arguably only in one, given that football at least has parity in Wales these days. Rugby's problems stem from the fact that there are already not enough people who want to pay to watch it, be that in person or on the TV. Slicing the sausage even thinner makes it highly unlikely that more people will suddenly think it's worth shelling out for. That's especially true when you take the second lesson from the LIV disaster. LIV's signature achievement has been to slough off most of the interesting players away from the PGA Tour and hide them in a league that nobody watches. Jon Rahm , Bryson DeChambeau , Brooks Koepka , Phil Mickelson , Patrick Reed – these are (in some cases, were) some of the best players in the world and some of the most watchable. But they may as well be bog-snorkelling for their dime now, for all that anybody tunes in to see them. And yet, whatever LIV's problems, at least the idea of following individual sportspeople is already established in golf. People don't follow rugby players. They follow rugby teams. The international game is the financial engine of the sport not because Antoine Dupont plays for France and Sam Prendergast for Ireland, but because millions of people are invested in the outcome regardless of who is the blue nine and the Ireland 10. [ Craig Casey to captain Ireland for summer Tests against Georgia and Portugal Opens in new window ] [ Tiger Woods son Charlie fires 66 to clinch first career AJGA title Opens in new window ] Let's say – and this is entirely for argument's sake before anyone's lawyers get twitchy – that Dupont and Prendergast are R360 players in a couple of years' time, taking each other on in São Paulo, LA and Barcelona. Are you watching? Maybe. Do you care who wins? Not a chance. If it means that neither of them is playing for Ireland or France, will it stop you watching the Six Nations? Even less of a chance. Rugby will change in the coming years. It has to. But the R360 proposal seems to want to (a) chop an already small sport into even smaller pieces and (b) build a new entity around a group of players who are pretty much interchangeable to all but the sport's most engaged devotees. LIV Golf gets away with it because the Saudis seem comfortable emptying barrels of money into it indefinitely. Hard to imagine R360's backers aspiring to their munificence.
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Gerry Thornley: Talk of a breakaway rugby competition odd at such a perilous time for the sport
Rarely a season or two seems to go by without some talk, or not so idle threat, of a breakaway rugby club competition to lure the best players with vastly increased riches. But while the odds remain against the latest grandiose concept, namely the R360, well-placed sources do give it some chance where previously they would have given it none whatsoever. The founders and people behind R360 are former England international Mike Tindall, Stuart Hooper, who spent seven years as the director of rugby at Bath, player agent Mark Spoors and John Loffhagen, who was the chief legal adviser for LIV golf for a year. Their proposal is to create two superclub competitions based on franchises, one between eight men's sides and one between four women's sides, which would compete initially in a seven-match season rising to 14 matches, to be run on consecutive weekends in two windows from April to June and then August to September. Rounds would take place in a different city each week, with São Paulo, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles all mentioned as potential venues to weeklong events, involving concerts. They want to hire the best 360 players in the world by doubling their salaries and claim to have interested backers from Formula 1 and the NFL, with eight franchises already agreed in principle at €55 million apiece. READ MORE They have conducted several meetings with player agents and representatives, and also the game's governing body, World Rugby. Players from countries, including Ireland, have signed non-binding heads of agreement and, potentially in some cases, contracts which are predicated on the premise that the R360 starts up by next September. For players in their late 20s or more, promises of doubling salaries would be an attractive end-of-career segue. While the R360 has been in the planning for a while, and is reasonably well advanced, next September is a tight timeline and must count against the project taking off. It seems unlikely the unions and federations will give the R360 the green light, in which case World Rugby won't do either. In that scenario, it's harder to envisage players sacrificing their international careers. It's also puzzling to see how the project could even begin to make a profit any time soon. Comparisons with the hugely lucrative, franchise-based Indian Premier League in cricket and LIV golf hardly seem remotely apt. The IPL had a ready-made fan base in a country of one billion people, which dwarfs cricket's global popularity. It's hard to conceive of a major sport where its popularity is so concentrated in one country. The Indian Premier League has been a massive success, but it takes place in a country where cricket dominates the sporting interests among the population of over a billion people. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images LIV golf is backed by a trillion‑dollar petrochemical fund. Furthermore, when golfers on the LIV circuit pitch up at golf's Majors, they've tended to be less competitive and this would inevitably be the same were players to take a detour into a franchise-based mini league. Imagine, say, franchises with amalgamated squads rolling into Dublin for a week, even ones with some leading Irish players, complete with new names and new strips, and tens of thousands of supporters buying into these teams as the R360 claims is the potential for this venture? Rugby has tried something like this. They're called the Barbarians. They've held their place or worked, to a degree, thanks in large part to their longevity but they're not the attraction of yore for spectators. That's just not the way rugby works. Supporters' loyalties have been generated over time, through family heritage and a strong sense of identity, be that local, provincial or national. It's hard to see R360 filling out Energia Park, much less the Aviva or Croke Park, and is even less likely to do so in the aforementioned cities in non-rugby territory. Television money would also seem critical, but since the pandemic that has been a shrinking market, which is partly why rugby is facing such a perilous time. There is talk of the R360 initially being televised by Premier Sports, but they are not big spenders. At best, this latest concept will not be a breakaway per se, but will be World Rugby-approved and somehow be squeezed into an already overcrowded calendar. At worst, it will cause a huge schism in the game which will do untold damage. Most likely, it won't happen and will serve as a working template for the next breakaway-type concept. Because the drivers behind R360 are right about one thing, namely that the rugby keeps drawing from the same well, the international game, to fund pretty much everything else, including the club/provincial game, which save for the French Championship, is unsustainable. There are too many self-serving, competing parts in rugby which are pulling in different directions. It seems ridiculous that every competition does its own deals, with no leverage from the World Cup down. The sport is ripe for the plucking, perhaps even by this R360, which is not entirely out of the question. And if not this one ...
Irish Times
19 hours ago
- Irish Times
Matt Williams: Unless Leinster's defence wake up they will be left dreaming of what might have been
As a 17-year-old, fresh out of school, I told my dad I needed a car to be able to drive so I could find a job. Without looking up from his newspaper, he told me I had it all back the front. What I needed was a job to earn the money to buy a car, because borrowing his much loved automobile was not going to be an option for his teenage son. Not for the first or last time in his life, he was trying to teach me that I was focusing on the outcome and not on the process. I wanted a car, but I didn't want the process of earning the money to buy one. In life and rugby, the process delivers the outcome. If you get the process right then the outcome will look after itself. READ MORE Dreaming of lifting trophies is the easy part. The reality of achieving this is not glamorous. Winning championships is the outcome produced by players whose daily practices are at constant levels of excellence. In professional sport, it is known as 'The Grind'. Sustaining high standards in every area of preparation, across each minute of the week, produces the outcomes that makes winning on match day possible. As the US basketball coach Kevin Eastman says: 'Champions don't become champions on the court. They become recognised on the court. They become champions because of their daily routine and commitment to excellence. Players do not decide their future. They decide their habits and habits decide their future.' Good habits are produced when athletes get into the grind of repeating their best processes. Much of this has nothing to do with athletic talent. An attitude of commitment towards diet, hydration, recovery strategies, mental preparation, reviewing video, punctuality, politeness, maintaining high standards, accepting feedback – all powered by the mindset of being coachable and wanting to improve each day – have zero to do with sporting ability. Many players make it into professional sport even though they may possess a lowly 'B' in talent, but have a wonderful 'A' in possessing the right mindset. This type of athlete will grind away every day, laying another brick in the wall, constantly building towards success. The sporting world is full of talented athletes who failed because they lacked the required commitment to the arduous rigours of the daily process. As David Brockhoff, the late former Wallaby player and coach, so poetically put it: 'If you want to play in the symphony, you have to practice your scales.' This type of dedication requires a deep motivation. Leinster's Jordie Barrett tackles Kyle Steyn of Glasgow Warriors in last month's URC game. Photograph: Ben Brady/INPHO TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote in his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: 'All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake the next day to find that it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dream with open eyes to make it possible.' It is Lawrence's daydreamers who make it. They nurture their motivation towards obsession, to do whatever it takes to win. These people make it to the top. It is no accident that in rugby, almost without exception, these athletes are great defenders. In rugby, defence requires huge amounts of fitness, combined with a burning passion to physically intimidate your opponent – a dash of technique but little talent. There is little doubt that defences win titles. With the United Rugby Championship (URC) once again proving to the rugby world its unique character with a semi-final in the southern and the northern hemispheres, it will be the areas of the game that require gut-busting effort and little talent that will determine who makes it to the final. In recent seasons across URC knockout stages, attacking talent and home ground advantage have not been the deciding factors. There would be few who would disagree that Leinster have been the most talented attacking team for many years. Despite topping the table six years in row, the men in blue have not been capable of winning the competition in the past five years. In the last two seasons alone, Munster and Glasgow have won their finals away from home in South Africa. So Leinster must completely disregard their recent thrashing of Glasgow in the quarter-final of the Champions Cup and remember the pain that Northampton inflicted in Dublin last month after having taken a beating the previous season. While taking nothing away from Northampton's exceptional attacking display, in that devastating semi-final defeat the Leinster defence lacked commitment, enthusiasm and energy creating a huge problem for Jacques Nienaber . Northampton Saints' Tommy Freeman scores his third try of the Champions Cup semi-final against Leinster in Dublin last month. Photograph: Billy Stickland/INPHO Against Northampton, Leinster made only 97 tackles, but missed 41. If they produce another set of defensive stats like that then elimination will be inevitable. Renowned for their creative attacking flare, it is paramount Leinster discover a deeper commitment to the physical processes of defence if they are to win this year's URC title. This is particularly important in the five minutes before half time and after half time, the crucial period of the game we know as the 'championship minutes' when any points scored swing the momentum of the contest. There is no doubt that the repeated knockout defeats in recent seasons have mentally damaged Leinster. They are human, and these heartbreaks have left a scar tissue. Leinster must desperately believe that in every match what has gone before is irrelevant. All that matters is the next 80 minutes. This is a double-edged sword for Leinster, who have dominated the URC regular seasons so convincingly. To win, they must focus on the physicality of their tackling and the cohesion within their defensive system. Areas that require bucketloads of effort but little talent. If they get their defensive processes right, their attack will look after itself. However, the Champions Cup semi-final proved that if they do not find a way to considerably lift their defensive performance then sadly they will face another crushing exit.
