Poor old P Divvy. The word has got around the world that he is well, eccentric

My great friend Mike Greenaway is on tour with the Boks as senior rugby writer for the independent group in South Africa and he has a weekly piece that goes into the Natal Mercury and I thought I would put it up on my blog as it is a very funny read…So enjoy the read as written below my Mike .

Poor old P Divvy. The word has got around the world that he is well, eccentric, if we could euphemistically put it that way and at each new Springbok destination the media lie in wait, licking their chops in anticipation of bizarre entertainment and the chance to wade into a public figure.
In professional sport, the personalities of coaches generally remain deeply hidden behind a carefully constructed wall of boring “media speak”, in which the trained coaches endure they say nothing.
As Roger Gardner, the coach of the Natal rugby team said many years ago to his players: “You are welcome to talk to the press, just don’t say anything.”
And then you get a reporter’s dream, a one-off maverick that goes off like the notoriously trigger-happy Uzi sub-machine does when it is dropped to the floor.
Beautiful – if you are a reporter.
A banker for every newspaper when the Boks hit town is the growing collection of “Divvy-isms”. In New Zealand and Australia earlier this year, newspapers in essence carried Divvy’s Greatest Hits, including the string of No1 singles during his golden era of the Lions tour of 2009, plus many more mangled metaphors, tangled tenses, and inventive imagery including Boks in ballet tutus, dogs trying to run and urinate, and so on.
And then the Aussies got stuck in on their TV rugby show, derisively calling him a clown … which actually was not funny at all if you consider this was a coach of a national sports team. There was a bullyboy attitude to the way they attacked the coach and the laughing, tongue-in-cheek apology they were forced to give Div was revealing.
Last week, on the eve of the Test against Ireland, The Irish Independent reserved a double-page spread for De Villiers’ compendium of antics.
Yesterday in Cardiff, the front page picture of the Western Mail was of none other than Divvy at a Springbok training session at Glamorgan University. Was he in serious repose, in deep contemplation of match tactics? Not quite. He had the hood of his rain jacket pulled half over his face while he laughs at the camera, looking like, well, a clown, but that could happen to any coach who was is followed by a camera for a lengthy period of time at a rainy rugby practice.
The headline read “De Villiers goads Gatland”, and the story was about the Springbok coach telling the Wales coach who he should select at scrumhalf and flyhalf.
Those of us at the press conference concerned know Div did not say anything of the sort. He was asked of his impressions of certain Welsh players, he gave them, and the unscrupulous reporter did the rest.
This kind of thing would not happen with the respected Graham Henry or Robbie Deans. Div, though, is now seen across world rugby as fair game for the media, a rare free ticket to ride with an international coach.
What has happened is that the Div reputation has taken on a life of its own, there has been a snowball affect with his utterances and fact and fiction have become one, and that in turn will mushroom.
It would appear that this column is an apology for De Villiers. Not really. He has made a rod for his own back, he has made the bed that he now has to sleep in and most unfortunately for him, he has given opportunity for the dark side of journalism to come to the fore, the side where the boot is put in simply because it can be.