Snor: Perhaps they thought they were getting a monkey

By Peter de Villiers | From The Citizen

If what happened on my first day in the job was odd, what followed next was even odder – and confirmed how reluctant the South African administrators were to have me as the Springbok coach.

Not only did they not have a contract drawn up when I was appointed, it seemed as if they hadn’t even thought through its terms or what I was going to be offered. It’s hard to imagine that when Heyneke Meyer was appointed, there hadn’t been a discussion with him before the announcement.

So I had them over a barrel, although for me, it wasn’t about the money. Money has never meant much to me. After becoming Springbok coach, I continued to live in the same area and followed the same lifestyle as before.

I fought the package they offered as a matter of principle, as it was just ridiculous. It was significantly less than Jake White had been paid, and it made me feel as if they thought that with me coaching the Springboks, the standards would drop. If you were offered the position of CEO at a top company and you learnt that you were going to get paid only a portion of what the previous CEO was getting, you’d think that too. Surely if you wanted the company to continue at or exceed the previous level, you would pay the new CEO the same as his predecessor?

That old saying that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, crossed my mind. Perhaps they thought they were getting a monkey.

I was determined that the Springboks’ game would remain at the same high level. It made no sense to allow standards to drop – as coach, I didn’t want that to happen. But I wanted to be paid what the coach of a world-champion team should get paid, not only because that was the right thing to do, but also because it would impel me to produce the goods.

So I called Rian Oberholzer to negotiate the contract on my behalf. Rian, a former chief executive of Sarfu and SA Rugby, knew his way around contracts of national coaches. When he saw what I had been offered, he wasn’t happy.

Another cause for concern was that the contract did not include a performance clause. Why the hell not? So I fought for a performance clause.

I wanted a performance clause because, if they were going to fire me, I wanted to know why; I wanted to know the reason for it. Also, the initial contract was for only two years, which meant that regardless of my results, once the two years were up, they could just send me on my way.

I wanted a four-year contract. Most of all, I wanted all the finer points included in the contract so that I could be judged the same way all the other coaches had been judged.

Unfortunately, Saru landed a few low blows.

They leaked information that gave a false impression of the money I would be earning.

They claimed that I could earn as much as R14-million. Yes, I could possibly have earned that much, but I could also have won the lottery. I would have made R14-million if I won every tournament and every match over a period of several years. Which team wins every game?

This misleading information would make people think that I was just in it for the money. If Saru wanted to turn people against me and make me look greedy, they were doing a good job of it.

In the end, both sides made compromises, but I basically got what I wanted. Although I can’t recall exactly what Rian compromised on, I know it involved the money, which was of less importance to me than some of the issues.

Most crucially, I was given the right to have the last say in selection.

I had no problem working with selectors, but if I was going to take the rap as the coach when things went wrong, then I wanted to have selected the team.

I was quite unexpectedly also given something I hadn’t even asked for.

The previous year, controversy had surrounded Oregan Hoskins’s decision to add Luke Watson as player No 46 to Jake White’s World Cup training squad. As the president of Saru, he had the right to do so, as he signed off the team.

So it came as a surprise when Regan publicly stated that he would no longer do so. I was now in total control of selection, which was a privilege not even my predecessors had enjoyed. And I hadn’t even asked for it.

Perhaps I am being unkind to Oregan, and if I am, I am sorry, but it crossed my mind that his decision to no longer sign off the team was motivated by a hidden agenda. As I was most emphatically not Oregan’s choice as coach, he didn’t want to be held accountable.

Another oddity was Saru’s decision not to link the rest of the Bok management contracts to mine, as is normally done in international rugby. In other words, the futures of the assistant coaches were not dependent on my results. Were Saru waiting for me to fail so that they could replace me with one of the assistant coaches, Dick Muir or Gary Gold? To his credit, Dick opted to throw in his lot with me and demanded that his contract be linked to mine. So if I was fired, he would be fired too.

At the time of my appointment, several negative stories that were never properly verified did the rounds. For instance, Jake White was quoted as saying that none of the Springboks wanted to play for me, and one newspaper even conducted a poll. And on the day I was appointed, one story even alleged that the South African Rugby Players Association (Sarpa) was against my appointment.

Of course the rumours made me very uncomfortable. How was I going to coach the players if they didn’t want or support me? When the newspaper announced the result of its poll, it did not state what number of players in the country had been canvassed, but they still came up with a percentage. How did they measure that?

So I went to see the guys at Sarpa, who couldn’t enlighten me. Piet Heymans, the CEO, told me that Hennie le Roux had been against the appointment and he might have spoken to a couple of people and drawn some assumptions. My concern was what level of support and co-operation I was going to get.

The combination of the above factors made me feel very alone and prompted me to look for allies outside of SA Rugby. I needed someone to talk to – I wanted a sounding board I could rely on, which I could not find at Saru.

It was against this background, and with the knowledge that I had lots of enemies within Saru, that I assembled a reference or support group that I could use as my sounding board. But in choosing Cheeky Watson as leader of the group, I would again expose my naivety.

Cheeky, the Eastern Cape activist who had turned his back on white rugby in the Seventies, seemed to be driven by both a political and a personal agenda – he and his supporters wanted the Springbok emblem removed and Luke Watson included in the Springbok team.
Just a couple of months after my appointment, Hoskins had fought off a challenge by his vice-president, Mike Stofile, for the presidency of Saru. Mike, who had been one of my big supporters at Saru, subsequently turned his back on rugby.

I went to Cheeky and said, “What is going to happen now? I feel all alone here”. Cheeky responded by suggesting that we set up a committee that would help me make the right decisions. Included on his list were the names of quite a few guys who were high up in government. I thought the support group was a great idea, as were the names Cheeky suggested.

Besides himself, the committee Cheeky suggested included Butana Komphela, the chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Sport and Recreation, Cedric Frolick, the deputy chairperson of the same committee, Dr Asad Bhorat, the secretary of the Transformation and Anti-Racism Rugby Committee, Mike Stofile, the former rugby administrator, Neil de Beer, the manager of the age-group rugby teams when I coached them. Because we were anticipating that Neil would be on my management team, he would be the direct link between me and the committee.

I thought things were suddenly looking up for me, as I now had access to some wise counsel.

These people would be able to help me with the thorny issue of transformation, a very important factor in South African rugby, and they would act in my best interests. Well, if it all seemed too good to be true, it’s probably because it was.