Publications
Partners
We get ourselves into these hypocritical tangles when we transform some overgrown high school jock into a role model just because he can catch a ball and owns a pair of shorts. We may call them sports heroes, but this doesn't make them actual heroes. The fact that Joost van der Westhuizen knew what to do with the ball when the bigger guys passed it to him simply isn’t enough to make him a role model for anyone’s children. The most they can learn from him is what they should do if they happen to find themselves in a similar position. And by that I mean on a rugby field with an egg-shaped ball in their hands - not in a room with a stripper and a pile of cocaine.
Kids, if Joost van der Westhuizen tries to give you advice on what to do if you find yourself in a room with a stripper and a pile of cocaine, don’t listen to him. You heard it here first.
This week, wage slaves all over the country finally get the chance to spend their coffee break watching the already notorious sex video that might not (but probably does) feature the man himself. Despite the fact that all sex tapes are anticlimactic and about as titillating as a prostate exam, it’s on my Highly Recommended Viewing list, if only for the delicious irony of the soundtrack. Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac is the very song former US president Bill Clinton used in his first presidential campaign. Wow. It’s almost poetic.
Authentic or not, Van der Westhuizen wouldn’t be in this mess if he hadn’t used his mad ball handling skills to promote himself as South Africa’s golden boy. The guy’s such a shameless camera whore he could challenge Princess Di for cover stories in Huisgenoot and You magazine. At one point it seemed as if I couldn’t get away from him. Whenever I went to the supermarket there he was, grinning beside his disturbingly bleached wife with the Skeletor frame and the Shar Pei skin, peddling conservative Christian morality to me from between the chocolates and the breath mints at the checkout counter.
Apparently, this was all the motivation the producers of the sex tape needed. “We decided to make the video because Joost was our role model and he just can’t do all that stuff,” they wrote in a statement to Heat magazine, proving for once and for all you don’t have to be too intelligent to fool a rugby player.
“Our role model”, they say? How old are these people? Eight? You’d think that anyone over the age of puberty would have realised that, like singers, actors, and whatever the Hell Paris Hilton is, sports stars make for lousy role models. They throw the ball, they catch the ball, they surreptitiously knee their opponent in the nuts... and that’s it. That’s what they do, and that’s all we should ever expect from them. If we ask for anything more, we deserve all the disappointment we get.
