The good, the bad and the ugly have been in the spotlight at the hearings of CSA's Social Justice and Nation-building (SJN) project this week. Like the fixers who came before him, Thabang Moroe tried to use the platform to polish his tarnished reputation. AfriForum, a pressure group that stinks of white supremacy, was intent on ignoring the elephant in the room - racism - and railing irrelevantly at the supposedly greater evil of quota selection.
SJN HEARINGS
Prince among paupers at SJN
Prince looked, critically, at the realities of cricket as they have been shaped by the wider realities beyond © Getty
And then there was Ashwell Prince, who was everything Moroe and AfriForum were not. In the best way: clear, considered, constructive, and firmly connected to reality. Listening to Prince testify on Monday (August 2) was like watching him bat. It wasn't always pretty but it was no less damn fine for that; hard, uncompromising, an honest struggle with the truths of the matter, and good luck getting him out.
"I regarded my career as a war," Prince said. His testimony was no place for poignance, but every cricket person who heard or has read those words should be shocked enough to think long and hard about what they mean and why he felt that way. Cricket becomes a career for a select few and, for exponentially more others, a passion. Never, under any circumstances, should it invite comparisons with war. What did the game put Prince, and many like him, through as punishment for daring to be part of it?
Moroe's submission amounted to little more than a vilification of the media - who, according to him, wrote him out of his job as CSA's chief executive, from which