DAVID ISAACSON | The time I went head-to-head with Hansie but played and missed

OR Tambo can be a small place, and planes even smaller.

I bumped into golfer Lyle Rowe at the airport on Monday evening, on his way to Britain to try to qualify for the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool next month.

He had the misfortune of playing with me for the Gary and Vivienne Player Invitational at the Lost City course last year.

Not even Brian Mitchell, another member of our four ball, could help lift us from the bottom of the field. He might have climbed off the canvas a couple of times to keep his WBA junior-lightweight title, but not in that competition, not weighed down by my poor play.

On the plus side, it can only get better for Rowe.

On the same Emirates flight to Dubai was the Team South Africa advance party for the African Beach Games in Tunisia.

Also on board was TV commentator Gerald de Kock, heading to London and mainland Europe for a well-earned holiday.

I myself was en route to Munich for the BMW International golf tournament that kicks off on Thursday and will feature several South African golfers.

This trip marks the 30th anniversary of my first sports junket as a journalist, which started with the 1993 Maccabi Games.

And while I’ve had the good fortune to do a lot of travelling, only once before have I flown through Dubai, and that trip represented one of the great missed opportunities of my career.

We were returning home after the South African cricket tour of India in early 2000. The team, captained by Hansie Cronje, still had an ODI tournament to play in the UAE, but my Rapport colleague Essie Esterhuizen and I were flying through to Johannesburg.

We were even on a separate flight to the cricketers.

To this day I joke that, had the interview taken place, Cronje might have had a sudden rush of conscience and confessed all and given me the scoop of a lifetime.

Our last night in India was spent in Mumbai, having flown there from Nagpur, the scene of the final one-dayer where Herschelle Gibbs claimed he forgot he was supposed to throw his wicket and instead won the final contest with a superb knock of 74 off 53 balls. India still won the series 2-3.

I was keen to do a sit-down interview with Cronje in Mumbai and he had agreed, warning me he was going out on a jol and would get back to his room only late.

I knocked on his door intermittently through the night, and it must have been around midnight when I finally gave up. 

One of the questions I had planned to ask him was if he’d been approached by any bookmakers. I had no idea of what had been unfolding in the dark, but had included the question because Indian cricket and gambling were already synonymous.

To this day I joke that, had the interview taken place, Cronje might have had a sudden rush of conscience and confessed all and given me the scoop of a lifetime.

I’m sure the reality would have been different, though he might have given off a signal, maybe something small, to indicate that something was amiss.

When the first allegations surfaced he denied them outright. I sat at a press conference at Kingsmead where Cronje dismissed the claims of match-fixing, but his words and his actions didn’t align.

He failed to hold eye contact when responding to one question I had asked, and though I believed, or rather wanted to believe, he was innocent, his inability to look in my direction gnawed at me.

Cronje had been notably accessible to the South African media on that tour, not only after winning the Test series 2-0 but also when they began struggling in the ODIs.

Injuries had been a problem, and one or two key moments seemed to have cost the visitors dearly. Nobody was guessing any sort of manipulation.

Cronje was not one to avoid looking in the eye, yet there he was at the press conference, offering the biggest clue and I refused to acknowledge.

After the press conference I met up with a friend who was more cynical than I, and I recall insisting that Cronje was innocent, but I still mentioned his lack of eye contact, which I had found curious.

So how might he have responded to my question had the interview in Mumbai taken place?

More than a year after the match-fixing scandal, I attended a public talk given by Cronje. He was a good orator, but having heard him before his downfall, I noticed that much of his speech was the same.

At one point in the evening we came face to face. Cronje greeted me politely, but he blushed, his face turning beetroot.

Had I got to ask my question back in Mumbai, I have no doubt he would have given off a tell. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up for what it was until after his confession. 

But nearly half a century later and that still ranks as my greatest miss. 

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