You have to hand it to Luke

You really have to hand it to Luke Watson for his apparent complete unwillingness to do what most people would consider the right thing.

When he was let off the hook in the charge brought against him by the South African Rugby Union on what, from my vantage point 10 000 kilometres away in Edinburgh, seemed to be a technicality, it presented the perfect opportunity for Watson to come out and say what he should have said when the controversy surrounding his utterances first broke.

There were several things he was alleged to have said that were reported in the media. Of course, he may be right when he says he was misquoted, misrepresented or the comments were taken out of context. But it is a fact that his comments were put into the public domain, and what he said was insulting to the various cultural and language groupings that fell into his line of fire.

A colleague of mine made the point recently that Watson and Geo Cronje, who was effectively banished from South African rugby four years ago because of allegations that race underpinned his infamous clash with Quinton Davids, share something in common. Neither of them ever apologised for the perception that was created.

Watson is surely not naïve enough to feel his acquittal by the Saru judicial committee automatically washes away the perception that he is anti-Afrikaans. Those quotes that were run in the media did enormous damage and caused great hurt, and regardless of whether they were meant or not, something needs to be done to rectify it.

Hopefully Luke will do that, for the sport which happens to have made him a public figure and given him the platform to preach about his beliefs is rugby, and rugby is a team sport. I was at a Western Province Awards dinner recently, and unless I have an over-active imagination, it did seem he was being shunned by those players who should have felt offended.

I was inclined to feel sorry for him, or I would have were there any public indication of any regret or remorse. But unfortunately there is none of that, and instead we just have more potentially harmful invective, with him attacking Saru for their “incompetence” etc etc.

When he does that, he reminds me of someone who takes his landlord to court over a minor issue and then wonders why his lease is not renewed when the contracted period ends. Sometimes you just have to have common sense.

I was a big supporter of the Watson cause two years ago, but then he went and mouthed off to a sports magazine, accusing the Bok coach Jake White of lacking integrity. It was an idiotic thing to do, and after that it was hard to defend him as he had publicly shown that White was quite right when he claimed that he was potentially bad for team morale. He is not a team player.

Watson makes this mistake time and again, and yet what really worries me is that he doesn’t appear to see it as a mistake. The alarming thing about Watson is not his convictions, because everyone has a right to those, but that he just doesn’t seem to care about social convention and mores. He insults people and then wonders why they appear insulted.

And his convictions would impress me a lot more if it were not for the nagging feeling that those might change as his personal circumstances change. A couple of weeks ago I ran this piece in a newspaper column in the Cape, and I would like to repeat these quotes here, for they say everything about what I am getting at:

“Playing for the Boks would be a great honour. It has the potential and it has the ability to become one of the most powerful emblems this world has seen. It stands for equality. It stands for unity. It stands for a once divided nation that now stands together. It stands for everything this world doesn't have, and everything this world wants. It stands for people of different cultures and races, former enemies, coming together and forming an alliance.”

That was Luke speaking in Sports Illustrated in 2006. It is a complete contradiction of he said this week about not wanting to play for the Bok emblem again. What has changed in the interim apart from his inability to take the opportunity his political friends gifted him to establish himself as a worthy Springbok and international player?