Chris Rattue: When the media officer spun the wrong way

COMMENT

People keep asking: "Who's going to win the World Cup."

One answer is obvious at the moment. Not South Africa.

Apart from catching the wrong plane, or copying the diabolical Welsh who refused to catch the right one as part of their pay claims, there's not much more the Springboks could do to wreck their World Cup chances after the scandal of racism descended upon them.

The World Cup is just weeks away, but the chances of South Africa winning the Webb Ellis Cup under these circumstances - with their coach apparently on the verge of being sacked - must seem a world away to their supporters.

In the process, the scandal has done much to wreck any impression that rugby could lead the way in transforming old thinking as South Africa tries to build a future out of the wreckage that is apartheid.

A remarkable aspect of the scandal is that we owe the revealing information from inside the Springboks camp to their media officer.

It started with the revelations that lock Geo Cronje refused to room with black player Quinton Davids and grew to include black players feeling devalued because of their race and players avoiding using the team's black physiotherapist.

Extraordinarily, coach Rudolf Straeuli dealt with the Cronje/Davids disaster by making them and a couple of other players involved run 140 times up and down a hill as punishment - an old Army tactic.

There's always been something very mysterious and different about the way South African rugby teams operate. But employing a media man who blows the whistle on internal skulduggery - in this case racist attitudes and practices - is about as different as it gets.

I always thought Laurie Mains was taking the theory of keeping things in-house a bit far by employing his wife as media officer when he coached in Johannesburg. Now it's obvious why.

Laurie obviously realised that media officers are a dangerous lot in South Africa. In the rest of the world they cover up scandals, in South Africa they blow them up.

They say success in big-time sport comes down to paying attention to detail and Straeuli should have taken heed because he forgot to consider the really crucial selection decision - who should handle media inquiries.

It's all very well working on lineout calls and making sure your scrum is solid, but when the bloke who is supposed to be typing out the team lists is roaming the corridors compiling a damaging dossier, things are on a slide.

Rudolf should have taken Laurie's lead and got Mrs Straeuli the job. Instead of that, Straeuli was playing with fire.

Mark Keohane, the media officer he ended up with, was nicknamed "Cowboy" in his days as a journalist.

Keohane once applied for the job of South African rugby coach, just to see where the process would take him. And he was also on the personal bankroll of a previous Springbok coach, Harry Viljoen - an insurance millionaire - as a team adviser.

Keohane has a dogged story-hunting reputation and has exposed internal strife in the Springbok camp before.

The Springboks took a "poacher-turned-gamekeeper" attitude when they employed Keohane, but "Cowboy" turned out to be a poacher-turned-gamebreaker and demanded action when Cronje refused to room with Davids and Straeuli tried to cover it up.

A real press officer would have sent out a release declaring, "Geo gives Quinton more space to press his selection claims" or "Geo says his snoring will wreck other players' chances - demands his own room for their sake."

Until this point, Keohane had been a real press officer. He admitted that during the past three years he had been involved in "manipulating facts," "spinning" the reasons for team selections, "bullshitting journos" and deliberately "distracting" them, trying to throw them off the trail of potentially damaging or embarrassing stories.

No wonder his fellow journalists could hardly contain their laughter when this self-styled fearless journalist was originally appointed to the Springboks media role.

Sports teams attempt to contain all sorts of bother and scandal in the search for unity, but "Cowboy" Keohane turned on the Springboks in the worthiest of causes.

In the process he re-emphasised the obvious - that throwing out the rules of apartheid was only the beginning in the long and difficult road towards building a new society in South Africa.