OPINION - PAT Symcox has been pretty consistent in his call that his contemporaries should be running South African cricket, given that their record while playing the game attests to the highest ethics and excellence.
In the wake of Lungi Ngidi’s call to support Black Lives Matter (BLM), Symcox has returned to this theme once more.
For cricket aficionados, Symcox burns in the memory for his performance in the 1996 World Cup quarter-final game against West Indies. After losing to Kenya, Brian Lara ignited a fire-storm in the aftermath: “It wasn’t a bad thing losing to you guys. Now a team like South Africa is a different matter altogether. You know, the white thing comes into the picture. We can’t stand losing to them”.
Some in the Proteas camp bristled and the chair of selectors, Peter Pollock, met West Indies manager Wes Hall over coffee to iron out 300 years of racial exclusion.
The key to the Proteas plan at the National Stadium in Karachi, as Gary Kirsten reflected, was Symcox: “We had a ‘plan’ for Brian Lara. It involved Symmo bowling wide and fullish outside the off stump with a heavily packed off-side field including two men fielding behind square leg. This was going to keep Lara quiet. This was going to frustrate him into making a mistake Lara murdered him. It was painful to watch.”
Lara fell on 111 made off 94 balls, an innings punctuated by smashing five fours off one Symcox over. While Symcox had forgotten his lines, the Pakistani crowd concocted theirs. With Symcox cowering at silly point, one section shouted, “Chicken Tikka”, while the other responded with “Sies Kebab”. Symcox’s ears burnt like a naan bread in a tandoor.
As if to exemplify Symcox’s inadequacies, Jimmy Adams, a journeyman slow bowler who turned the ball slower than Eugene Terreblanche on his horse, claimed the top order scalps of Hudson, Cullinan and Cronje. South Africa fell 19 runs short of victory.
But Symcox would always be in the team.
He was Hansie’s keeper of secrets. In Cronje’s statement to the King Commission, he recalls:
“Shortly before the first One-Day International final against Pakistan in the Mandela Cup in Cape Town in January 1995 I was approached by an Indian or Pakistani man, who described himself only as ‘John’ he offered an amount, I think about 10000 US dollars, for the team to throw the game. I consequently discussed this with Pat Symcox.”
Symcox was the loyal confidante and always at Hansie’s side when further offers were put under the table. In a team meeting held in India in 1996, Cronje tried to persuade his players to throw a one-day game for $200 000.
As Mike Atherton points out, “it took four team meetings for the offer to be rejected, meetings at which the essential distinction between right and wrong became blurred”.
In a Mumbai hotel room, Cronje approached a number of senior players. One of them was David Richardson. Richardson, an attorney, made the calculations. “I do remember thinking though, immediately, that if you divide by 15, it’s not going to be that much money.”
According to Herschelle Gibbs, “Pat Symcox - always an oke willing to look at all sides of the equation - thought it was definitely worth some consideration (emphasis in original)”.
As Colin Bryden put it, the senior players “did not tell Cronje that the very idea of accepting such an offer was repugnant”.
Brian McMillan, however, did remember his commitment to ubuntu: “Our attitude was that if the money was right, we should open it up to the whole team to discuss.” According to Gibbs: “The first thought that popped into my head was, ‘Well, my mom’s house needs to be paid off. I might as well try to make some money.”’
Atherton admits that he was fascinated with this particular team meeting and the subsequent events:
“Over time, I’ve spoken to many of those who were in that room. Most say that Andrew Hudson, Derek Crookes and Daryll Cullinan were the only ones to recognise the issue for what it was; the only ones who were able, as the dollar signs whizzed in front of their eyes, to know right from wrong. But for them, the money could have been accepted. Others found ways to convince themselves to take the offer seriously. One talked of the healthy exchange rate against the rand... another unbelievably asked whether any gains would be tax free; and another voiced a triumphant opinion that they had finally made the big time now that they, too, were being offered the kind of money he had heard other teams talking about. Unbelievable, but true... that it was contemplated at all and debated at length is remarkable.”
In a sense, Atherton is too generous, even to the nay-sayers. In factories and office complexes across South Africa, an employee who knows about a corrupt offer and fails to inform the top authorities about it commits misconduct. This is because, under South African law, an employee is bound implicitly by a duty of good faith towards the employer. He or she breaches that duty by remaining
silent, knowing that the rules and interests of the employer are being improperly undermined.
This particular failure goes under the name “derivative misconduct” and, by deliberately withholding from the coach and administrators that Cronje was spearheading discussions about taking bribes, even Hudson, Crookes and Cullinan appear to have fallen short. In fact, many of the players went on to play high-profile roles in South African cricket.
As Gideon Haigh reflected, there was no action taken against South African players who sat on the information about match-fixing, with “shame in short supply.”
In 1996 at Karachi, Symcox forgot the game plan. Subsequently, he forgot to report Cronje’s nefarious dealings with MK Gupta (not the brother of Duduzane).
In 2020, he continues to suffer memory loss. We must never stop Symcox from forgetting, as some zealots have argued. And we must never refrain from reminding him.
In 1996, chief of selectors, Pollock, was unhappy that Mandela phoned the team before the West Indies game in order to motivate them.
This, after Mandela’s role in inspiring the 1995 rugby World Cup victory and lending a boot to the 1996 African Cup of Nations triumph. As if the gods had decreed, Lara only stopped his punishment of the hapless Symcox when shouts of Nelson echoed around the Karachi Stadium.
A year before, Symcox was told by Hansie of the machinations of a corrupt gambler at the Mandela Cup.
In 1990, when rogue English batsman Bill Athey was asked about the possibility of Nelson Mandela’s release, he replied “Nelson Mandela? He can’t bowl can he?”
Mandela wielded a long handle, as his imminent release stumped the tour. If only Pollock had not been churlish about a call from the country’s sporting talisman, a hat-trick might have followed. Mandela. The name must torment. But it will always offer the hope of redemption. You see to deepen Mandela’s legacy;
“A man needs... to laugh and cry with the same eyes... to make love in war and war in love ... to hate and to forgive and remember and forget to re-arrange and confuse, to eat and digest what history takes years to do” (Yehuda Amichai).
Maybe on July 18, Mandela Day, Symcox should take a knee and ask forgiveness. And we all pray he does not fluff his lines.
The writer is professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg and author of Reverse Sweep: A Story of South African Cricket Since Apartheid, published by Jacana.