Talking Point: Why player mental health issues could get worse

It was the year after Natal’s first ever Currie Cup triumph and rugby interest was at fever pitch in the province and expectations were at an all-time high. Natal had just narrowly won a game where they hadn’t played particularly well when a circle of people around a braai stopped me while walking through the packed Kings Park outer fields.

It felt like everyone was reading the newspapers back then, so it wasn’t unusual to be asked what I thought about something by people who didn’t want to wait for the Monday morning report. On this occasion the subject up for discussion was Joel Stransky, who at that point of his career was the Natal flyhalf. The consensus was that Joel wasn’t playing well but I was ignoring it and didn’t have the guts to write it.

My view was different to theirs, probably because I understood the Natal coach Ian McIntosh’s strategy of direct rugby better than they did. Even though the team he coached were Currie Cup champions, there were always going to be teething problems. Mac’s flyhalves, and even more so centres for that matter, found themselves doing things that were counter-intuitive for the rugby cognoscenti of the time.

Anyhow, suffice it to say that the people talking to me, who I didn’t know from a bar of soap, were pretty unhappy with Joel’s performance. When a loud thunderclap was let off by some reveller nearby, someone remarked that “Hopefully someone has just shot Stransky!”

It was probably not two minutes after that that the huddle went quiet as I received a tap on the shoulder. It was Joel, wanting to chat. The subject of the discussion escapes my memory, but what has always remained in the memory is the way the fans around that fire suddenly just changed personality.

A few moments before they wanted Stransky lynched, but when he was in their personal space, they suddenly became all fawning and obsequious: “Well played today Joel.” “That was an excellent job you did out there, Joel.” And, almost unbelievably given how they’d just been trying to convince the local rugby reporter to adopt an anti-Stransky line, “Don’t listen to the critics Joel, they know nothing.”

SOCIAL MEDIA HAS CHANGED THE LANDSCAPE

That incident stuck with me as a salient lesson on many things, and it is mentioned now in reference to some of the things that have been said around the decision made by England flyhalf Owen Farrell to take a break from international rugby for mental health reasons.

Within an hour of the announcement being made, the comments forums in the English newspaper I subscribe to had people making light of the troubles that Farrell was going through, questioning his mental strength on the basis of what others before him apparently went through without complaining.

Oh yes, they were much tougher back in the day, weren’t they? Rubbish. What has happened since the early 1990s, when I started out in sports writing, is the advent of social media. And it has changed everything. In my early days I wrote things that make me cringe now. And there were definitely times that Joel was the target too. But at least back then the players and personalities taking the brickbats knew from whence the criticism came, the forums you got attacked from were limited.

And a player could phone you up to discuss what had been written. Getting calls from irate players came with the territory, and it led to better understanding for both parties.

Now it, meaning the critics and the comment, is all pervasive, and those people around that braai fire would not have needed to enlist the local scribe to get their views across. They’d have been able to just shoot from the hip, even while the game was still on, into a space where it seems there are no rules and none of the checks and balances that govern the mainstream media.

HEYNEKE WASN’T ALONE

Heyneke Meyer told me in an interview I did with him for a book I was writing back when he was Springbok coach about how social media had made life a nightmare for his kids, who were constantly being harassed about his coaching. It wasn’t, he said, like the old days when you could just decide not to read that particular newspaper or listen to that particular radio station. Heyneke wasn’t the only person to experience that.

There is some irony in bringing social media into a discussion around Farrell, as it was probably the line taken by the mainstream rugby media in the UK that fed the social media attacks and the booing of the England captain by his fans that was probably the tipping point.

Yet is it undeniably social media that has made modern sport such a savage and difficult place for those who get on the wrong side of the hatred that is spewed, and which has had some proper low points recently with death threats being issued to the likes of referee Wayne Barnes and Bok player Cobus Reinach.

REACTION TO PROTEAS EXIT WAS SHEEP-LIKE

For me the ridiculousness of the situation was summed up recently when every man, woman and their dog suddenly conformed sheep-like to the view that the Proteas had choked in their Cricket World Cup semifinal against Australia.

But dig just a little bit and it transpired that none of the people making that point to me had actually watched the game, they were just following on from what others had said and endorsing articles they’d read or comments they’d seen - “Well said”; “Exactly”; etc etc…

It was a working Thursday so of course there were limited numbers of people watching that first hour when the ball was seaming around and when Australia, who have the Springbok ability in their sport to get up at the sharp end of a tournament, bowled so well and fielded so brilliantly. The Proteas did remarkably well to get to beyond 200 from there, and David Miller’s hundred was one of the best there’s been in the ODI format from a fighting under intense pressure perspective.

If you watched it, that was definitely not one of the Proteas chokes, and with Gerald Coetzee flying in seven overs on the trot while suffering from cramp, they fought until the last ball. And yet because everything goes on social media, and people do unfortunately like to be sheep as independent thought is alien to lazy brains, the narrative was led by people who either didn’t even watch the game or didn’t/don’t understand it.

BRINGS NASTY EDGE THAT SPORT CAN DO WITHOUT

The vilification of sports people is not something that has just been spawned out of the social media era. There was no Twitter, or X, or FB or any those other things from memory, when David Beckham was booed and threatened in the year after his red card at the 1998 Fifa World Cup, and ditto poor Jack van der Schyff, who apparently never ever lived down the missed kick that lost South Africa a test against the British Lions in 1955.

But it has brought a nasty edge to the tribalism that drives sport and while those who were there describe this last Rugby World Cup as the best yet, the rancour that enveloped it both during and post the event has left a bitter taste and tainted the memory of what should really be recalled as a wonderful eight weeks for rugby.

Yet I fear we may not have seen the worst of it, and when it comes to Farrell, it was interesting to see some England players coming out and saying that the media don’t know Farrell the man and have portrayed him wrongly. That may be true given the way the administrators in sport have managed media interactions to the point, particularly since Covid, where the interpersonal contact outside of the odd press conference where players get coached into putting out the same wooden line that often tells us nothing about them as people, is down to zero.

It’s not an environment like it was back in the 1990s when if you were in doubt about something you could just pick up the phone and call the player or where a player would tap you on the shoulder to open up a chat about the game.

That interpersonal relationship is no longer there, and if you just leave people to draw their impressions of Farrell from what he does on the pitch, then it isn’t hard to understand why people dislike him and even hate him.

Back in the day there were rugby players who behaved like they were axe murderers on the pitch, Robbie Fleck and Butch James are the ones that spring to mind, and yet they were and are the most likeable people off it. You only know that though if you get to know the people, and perhaps that’s not happening anymore.

If that braai fire scene of the 1990s was re-enacted I wouldn’t be able to defend the player like I did Stransky back then just because he might have been as much a stranger to me than he was to them.

It is important though to remember that sports people, and that includes referees, are just human. And for goodness sake, while at times we think of sport as war, particularly when the Boks are driving towards World Cup glory, it isn’t really.