Krige's exit is a sporting tragedy

It was the late doyen of South African cricket commentators Charles Fortune who once pronounced during one of his broadcasts that nothing in the world of sport should really be deemed a tragedy. After all, sport is supposed to be about fun and escapism.

But for my money what has happened to Corne Krige comes pretty damn close to a tragedy of major proportions. After being denied, or more precisely denying himself, the right to say farewell to Stormers rugby in proper style, the likeable Capetonian stands on the brink of saying a most ignominious goodbye to South African rugby.

After an equally sad farewell to the Springboks in the World Cup quarterfinal, the only possible redemption for Krige now lies in him leading his beloved Western Province to another Currie Cup triumph.

But while people in the Cape will see that as a fitting farewell, the Currie Cup is not exactly an international competition. The people of Auckland, Christchurch, Brisbane and Sydney won't be taking too much notice of any Krige achievement from here on, and it seems that internationally he will be remembered for a failed World Cup, a distastrous 50 point defeat at Twickenham and that ridiculous double headbutt.

Why it saddens me is because I know Krige better than that. He really does deserve more, and he has an international record as captain that belies his abilities. Krige has attracted much criticism for appearing to transgress what is decent in his rugged and physical approach to the game, but he is not just a bully boy, and never has been.

Many of those who have played under Krige speak glowingly of his leadership ability, and those who have decent memories will know that here is a rare breed among South African captains in that he has frequently made a successful mid-match adjustment of the Stormers tactics, sometimes with dramatically positive results.

Not for nothing was the Stormers' implosion in the latter stages of last year's Super 12 widely attributed to the loss of Krige through injury. In his last full game before his departure, Krige led a severely depleted Stormers team to a dramatic comeback win over a high-riding Waratahs team in Sydney.

The hosts led 21-0 shortly before halftime, and it was a tribute to Krige's inspirational leadership that they fought back to win. It was a similar story when the Stormers recovered from a 22 point deficit to win handsomely in Cape Town at the start of the home leg of the Super 12. Several players afterwards paid tribute to Krige for keeping them calm.

And while there are many who would lampoon Krige for his abysmal record as captain of the Springboks, let it not be forgotten that it is not the Springbok captain who selects the national team. He has to go with the coach, and over the past few years there have not been too many of those who have managed to keep the playing unit stable for more than seven days at a time.

We will never know for sure, but my feeling is that if Krige had captained the Boks at a time when Nick Mallett was coaching them, his record might have been a whole lot different.

But I digress. Or do I? The point of this article is to explain why I regard the whole Krige incident, and the way it has cast a pall over his farewell to Super 12 rugby, as one of sport's genuine tragedies.

For ultimately Krige's record and perceived failings as a Springbok captain might not be as irrelevant to the incident that ended his southern hemisphere career this past weekend as at first it might appear.

I have been asked several times how an intelligent player, which Krige undeniably is, can come to do something as crass as aim a headbutt at another player. When you speak to Krige off the field, you would never in a million years imagine him capable of such an act.

But then there are many things I have been ill-equipped to explain over the years. One of them was the incident which saw former Bok prop Toks van der Linde get sent home from a previous Super 12 tour for throwing racial insults at an exptriate South African women in New Zealand.

As everyone who has met him will testify, Van der Linde is one of the nicest people you could ever meet. What he stood accused of was just so out of character. It was only later that I learned that Van der Linde was a troubled individual at the time and was undergoing personal problems that might have led to the frustration and ultimate explosion.

The perfectionists among us will say that in a professional sport frustrations should never be allowed to boil over to the extent that a player can be guilty of the sort of acts that Krige and Van der Linde were.

But it is inevitable that off-field problems will at some stage transgress into the professional life. It happens everywhere, and it happens in rugby too. A colleague, in saying he could not understand how anyone could stoop to headbutting, pointed out that he often has big problems with the communications on his laptop computer but he has never reacted by headbutting the machine.

My response to that was that laptop computers do not punch you and kick you in loose-scrums, lie over the ball illegally and hit you with sledgehammer tackles that leave you jittery and physically shaken. If mine did any of those things, rest assured I would more than just headbutt the thing.

The point of all of this is that if there is one person in this country I would not like to be it is Corne Krige. I will let him tell his story himself and in his own chosen forum, but I know from having spoken to him a few times this year that some of the events that he had to be party to both before and during last year's World Cup have left him a deeply frustrated person.

He has admitted to me a couple of times during the course of the season that he has had trouble sleeping at night as he tosses and turns mulling over the inequities he believes South African rugby players have had to suffer. All of those of us who have been the victim of injustice must know what that feels like.

It is understandable then that Krige should have felt that leading the Stormers to a surprise Super 12 title might just help redeem him in the eyes of a public who due to circumstances might have been led to judge him a little unfairly.

Up until last Friday it appeared that he had made a good fist of that goal. Until the Chiefs game the Stormers were on the brink of clinching a home semi-final and were an ace away from achieving the remarkable achievement for a South African Super 12 team of winning three successive matches overseas.

When things started to go pear-shaped on a day when the Stormers performance was only exceeded for ineptitude by the Sharks 30 hours later, it might have been understandable that Krige started to get just a little desperate. That might have led to his inexplicable act, one that he is going to have to live with for the rest of his life.

Make no mistake, it was a complete no-brainer. Krige probably deserved a much harsher punishment than just an eight week ban, but then being forced to end his career in that awful game in Hamilton was surely enough of a punishment for a man who gave so much to the Stormers in the past six years.

He deserved to go down for what he did, of that there is no doubt. Foul play has to be stamped out, the incident, as shown on television, was ugly. I am sure once he has had time to think about it, Krige will be the first to admit as much, if indeed he has not done so already.

But sometimes in sport there are incidents which do not lead to death yet still deserve to be ranked as tragic. Often they are self-destructive acts which defy explanation. This was one of those. I feel sorry for Corne Krige for that few seconds of madness that may just enter his name in the hall of infamy instead of the more proud place Corne Krige the man deserves to take up in our rugby history.