Player contracts need not be a prison sentence

After a week of confusion the various parties involved in the overseas contract saga at last started to talk some sense.

If we were to award a prize for pragmatism, it would have to go to the Newport official who said that if Joost van der Westhuizen did not want to come to Wales then his club did not want to have him on their books. What is the sense, he argued, of having a player who does not want to be there.

Rob Wagner, essentially the chief official at Western Province these days, expressed similar sentiments when he said that if Cobus Visagie really wanted to go to Leeds Tykes and the English club was happy to compensate WP adequately, then his organisation would not stand in the player's way.

Bob Skinstad, the Springbok skipper, also weighed in. He said that if those players would rather be playing somewhere else, he did not want them in his team.

Rugby being the team game that it is, all of this makes a lot of sense. Natal learned this when at the start of 1997 James Small made it plain that he wanted to further his career with Harry Viljoen at Western Province.

At the time Small was contractually bound to Natal so understandably the Durban union dug in its heels. But it soon became apparent to Ian McIntosh and the rest of the Natal officials that having Small around while he was wearing a long face would impact negatively on team spirit. So in the end they let him go.

But perhaps the best thing about the statements made by Newport and by Wagner were that they threw the ball into the player's court. Since Sarfu started with their fighting talk and made it clear that they wanted to keep Van der Westhuizen contracted - which is still contrary to what they announced by press release in June - there has been nothing but a stoney silence from the player himself.

Does he still want to go to Newport? Where would he prefer to continue his career? A few months ago he definitely wanted to go to Wales, but the about- turn on the part of the SA Rugby company on the issue suggested that Van der Westhuizen may have had a change of heart.

Wagner tells me that in the whole time that the debate over Visagie raged in the Press, the player himself never so much as mentioned Leeds Tykes to him.

Journalists who have tried to contact the prop have not had their calls returned, so it is impossible to tell what his wishes are.

By passing the ball into the players' court, the various officials at least forced the players to take some public responsibility for their actions. Joost has a week now to decide what he wants to do. When he comes back with a decision, he will have to stand by it.

The uncertainty and the confusion of the past week must have confounded people who are involved in sports codes which have been professional for longer than rugby has. To most people, a contract is a legally binding document which requires you to properly think through all the implications before you sign it, not afterwards.

In rugby, at least when it comes to the players, it sometimes appears it all happens in reverse order. Sign the document now and then take some time out to consider whether it is really what you want to do.

Rian Oberholzer, the managing director of SA Rugby, was spot on target when he said players in this country too often forget that contracts are a two way street. They are there to protect the employer or contracting agent as much as they are there to protect the player.

As he put it on a radio show this week, imagine the outcry from the playing side if Sarfu suddenly decided that they would stop paying the players a couple of months or even weeks before their contracts were due to expire.

Of course, there are times in sport when a contract does have to be terminated.

Someone reminded me this week that Sarfu did not worry too much about the contract they had with Nick Mallett when they decided to axe him as Springbok coach.

But that is not entirely true. They did worry, and they worried a lot. There was much speculation afterwards on the size of Mallett's pay-out, but the point was that he was paid out. And had he not been paid out we might have been subjected to a long and drawn-out hearing over the allegations that Mallett, by criticising Sarfu over ticket prices, had reneged on the terms of his contract.

As Wagner reminded me, contracts bind players but in the professional era that does not mean they imprison the players. Had Leeds Tykes approached WP with a formal request, not to mention a sizeable chunk of money for transfer fees, Province might well have been happy to enter into negotiations - if that was what Visagie wanted.

When you talk about a long-term contract like the one that Visagie has signed with WP account has to be taken of the many variables that can change a rugby player's life on a seasonal and at times even monthly basis.

Gert Smal was the coach of WP when Visagie first signed his contract with the Cape union? But what if he wasn't and the change of coach was not to Visagie's liking. For argument's sake, let's say the new coach decided that Visagie, who bases his whole game around his physical strength, should lose 20 kilograms so that he could run all over the field like a back.

Would that not be an instance where the player could justifiably claim that his contract, if the union insisted on keeping him bound, was an imprisonment which prevented him from doing justice to his rugby career?

Full marks then to Province for stressing that they have no problem with outside organisations approaching their players - it must just be done formally and through the correct channels.

Hopefully the press release announcing Visagie's decision to stay loyal to local rugby was accurate when it stated that Visagie's agent, who represents most of the Boks, and SA Rugby Ltd had come to an agreement on how negotiations be conducted in future.

If that is so, then maybe the whole charade of the past few weeks will have had a positive spin-off for a South African game that is going to come under increasing pressure in the years ahead.

Hopefully too the players will have learned to tread more gingerly and circumspectly whenever the word contract is mentioned in a conversation. They owe it to those players who really do want to go to Britain but who might now find it more difficult to convince overseas clubs of their commitment.