No half measures
21 Sep 2010
Francois Hougaard lives his life at breakneck speed, writes RYAN VREDE in SA Rugby magazine.
It’s a white, sex-on-wheels, 420hp, R850 000, all-the-extras, 2009 BMW M3. If it were a woman it would be Angelina Jolie – poised and sophisticated, but with a wicked, brutal edge. Francois Hougaard bought it from close friend, paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, to replace a Mercedes Benz C63 AMG (A Magnet for Girls). ‘It was fast, but it was a four-door and those are for older guys,’ he explains. That machine preceded an electric blue Golf GTI R32, which looked like Megan Fox and drove like Jonty Rhodes on an ecstasy binge.
Swimsuit model Jenna Pietersen rode shotgun in the Beemer, until their recent split.
He dates with the ferocity at which he drives. His relationship with Loui Fish, a former model …
‘It was wrong, I knew that all along. I was 21, she was 36. I hurt my family deeply. What’s more, the people she keeps company with were doing stuff that, if I was pictured in the background for example, would have ruined my career.’
Fish tried to sell the story of their relationship, intimate details included, to a popular South African magazine. They rejected it.
‘I’m not surprised she did that,’ Hougaard says. ‘But I’m over that. I was wrong. I said sorry to the people who matter. Case closed.’
He has a fast-paced social life – house parties at the Tuscan-style apartment he shares with blood brother and Bulls team-mate Stephan Dippenaar which have earned them warnings and fines from complex management; and midweek jols, often with Gauteng’s hip set, which he says are less frequent than they used to be and no longer include the consumption of alcohol.
The urban dictionary defines ‘baller’ as ‘(n) 1. One whose status in society has been earned by one’s possession of “game” (that is, proficiency at the game of life)’. They may as well have attached an image of Hougaard to the definition.
But there’s substance to this showman. The playboy can play. And he seemingly has all the attributes to suggest a promising future.
He’s had an epiphany, which is the first step in realising his immense potential.
‘I used to go out and party hard in the week, drinking and everything, then make practice and think all would be fine,’ he says. ‘That lifestyle catches up with you eventually. I started to feel it when I trained. I realise now that I can really do something special with this talent. I didn’t appreciate it enough before. Now it’s different. I realise natural ability can only take me so far. I want to go beyond the ordinary. That requires sacrifice.’
In terms of the measurables, he is poised, decisive and has an exquisite feel for the game. But that sterile checklist doesn’t begin to capture what moved Bulls director of rugby Heyneke Meyer to sign Hougaard in 2007.
‘When you’re trying to find the difference between a good player and a great one you have to feel it, it’s something that lies deep within their character,’ Meyer explains. ‘Everyone was warning him not to come to the Bulls because Fourie du Preez was here and Heini Adams was his back-up. He didn’t ask me to commit to playing him before he signed. He told me he’d force his way into the team.’
It’s a level of self-belief shared by the great players. A young Dan Carter told Robbie Deans the same thing when he started at the Crusaders. By the end of the season he’d replaced the legendary Andrew Mehrtens.
Hougaard replicated that rise to prominence, albeit not in his preferred position of scrumhalf. He simply couldn’t be left out.
‘We discussed it among the senior players and the coaching staff,’ recalls Du Preez, the world’s pre-eminent scrumhalf. ‘He was sensational in training and in the limited opportunities he had, and he was mentally tough too. We wanted him on the field, even if it was out of position at wing.’
Meyer admits to being impressed with Hougaard’s attitude in their initial exchanges, but he wanted to test his mettle further when he joined the Pretoria franchise.
He recalls a pre-season camp in George in December 2007. Hougaard was invited along to be measured in what has become renowned as the most gruelling pre-season training in the world.
Meyer’s directive to conditioning coach Basil Carzis was to push Hougaard to his breaking point.
‘I drilled him,’ Carzis says. ‘He came up to me during one of the sessions and you could see he was absolutely exhausted, but he told me: “You’ll never break me”. I tried and failed. He never relents.’
‘Some senior players told me to slow down. I couldn’t understand why I had to. I wasn’t there to play,’ Hougaard recalls.
Meyer says: ‘I knew then that he had the character to go with his immense talent. The one is nothing without the other. He has a quality you can’t define. It’s magic.’
Rewind a decade and Hougaard is an aspirant swimmer, top of his age division in the country for most of his junior career. His alarm sounded daily at 4am for 5am practices at Maties (Stellenbosch University) swimming club. He’d be back in the afternoon for two to three more hours in the pool.
He chose to relinquish his promising swimming career in Standard 7 (Grade 9) at Paul Roos in order to focus on rugby, but his work ethic never ceased.
‘He never missed a practice session in five years at high school,’ Hougaard’s school coach Frans van Niekerk recalls. ‘One day he was so sick he looked like death wrapped in a blanket at training, and he was wearing literally five or six layers of clothing. He refused to stop training. He doesn’t quit.’
A vicious competitive streak amplifies his potency. Dippenaar is well placed to give insight into this aspect of Hougaard’s character. They met as 11-year-olds and have been inseparable since.
‘We’d play games when we were kids; you know, touchies [touch rugby] or board games, whatever. Hougie would get pissed off if he lost and would do everything in his power to win the next match. Even now when we play Tekken 6 on PlayStation and I whip him, he loses his mind and wants to smash the control. He hates losing. If he’s in a team that loses on a Saturday, forget about talking to him. He usually cools down by the Monday.’
His father Rikus says there’s one quality that has marked Hougaard’s life.
‘I taught my children that what they start, they finish. In between, if they give anything less than 100%, they’re cheating themselves and the people depending on them.’
That energy, work ethic and refusal to succumb is everything the Springboks lacked on the Australasian leg of their Tri-Nations tour. Could this kid be the galvanising force they need?
Here’s a man-child who moved from Cape Town to Pretoria with the prospect of having to outplay the world’s best scrumhalf if he wanted to start. No problem. He then made such an impression on coaching staff and senior players known to demand impossibly high standards that they created a place for him in the run-on side. They needed a replacement for Bryan Habana, widely recognised as one of the world’s best wingers. That’s cool. He proceeded to excel against some of the planet’s finest players, and in a position he’d never played in before, scoring a number of decisive tries, none more so than the last-minute winner in the epic penultimate league-phase match of the 2010 Super 14 against the Crusaders. That 40-35 victory secured a home semi-final and he then scored the Bulls’ only try in their 25-17 win over the Stormers in the final, outplaying Habana.
Big talent, big self-belief, big match temperament, no fear of failure. When the quartet exists in the same package it makes for a preternatural athlete and a formidable opponent.
Bold predictions about his future, even those from Du Preez – ‘He is the future of the Bulls and Springboks at scrumhalf’ – need to be tempered with caution.
The vote of confidence is no doubt flattering, coming from a player who, in his spare time, walks on water, heals the terminally sick, raises the dead and will ultimately sacrifice himself for the sins of mankind.
But it must be remembered that Hougaard is essentially just a rookie, and so is prone to rookie errors. He has yet to fail. Yet to endure real criticism. Yet to have his self-belief dented. How he responds at those times, and indeed, how he negotiates the liberal praise being showered on him at present and the plaudits that will come in future, will define how he progresses.
Any absolute conclusion on Hougaard is premature. For now we’ll appreciate him for what he is – a baller.
– This article first appeared in the September issue of SA Rugby magazine
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87 Comments
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21 Sep 2010, 14:26 pm
Speedy Dragon!
21 Sep 2010, 14:31 pm
bloody ryan vrede!
21 Sep 2010, 14:37 pm
Well written Vrede.
21 Sep 2010, 14:40 pm
Terrible prose and over-writing.
And wow, Hougie makes his mentor Fourie look like *****.
21 Sep 2010, 14:41 pm
Sounds a bit winty this oke, but at least he backs it up on the rugby field.
21 Sep 2010, 14:41 pm
@money_man(money_man)-4:
Jeesus!
21 Sep 2010, 14:42 pm
@John Galt(John Galt)-5:
Bot of a ‘whigger’.
21 Sep 2010, 15:09 pm
I’m shocked at the gratuitous way in which you added a totally unnecessary paragraph of offensive blasphemy into this otherwise interesting article.
Unless Simon Borchardt added it, which would not surprise me in the slightest.
The worst part is that you probably don’t have the insight to understand just how offensive the sentence was, or how sick the individual you were trying to compliment in that manner will feel to his stomach when reading it.
You people really are a piece of work over at HSM.
21 Sep 2010, 15:12 pm
Pre RWC2011 the Bok 9 jersey will be his for a very looooong time
21 Sep 2010, 15:19 pm
@Tacitus(Tacitus)-8: oh please….
21 Sep 2010, 15:21 pm
“The vote of confidence is no doubt flattering, coming from a player who, in his spare time, walks on water, heals the terminally sick, raises the dead and will ultimately sacrifice himself for the sins of mankind.”
You think thats funny? More importantly, do you think Fourie du Preez would think that’s funny?
21 Sep 2010, 15:30 pm
@Tacitus(Tacitus)-8:
Didn’t Ryan Vrede write the whole article?
@race of tan(race of tan)-9:
I think you mean POST RWC2011….
21 Sep 2010, 15:35 pm
i saw francois @ OR Tambo around the time he was still dating Loui Fish, the place was packed with British & Irish Lions tourists, i thought about greeting him when i passed near him but i banished the thought & carried on to the parking.
21 Sep 2010, 15:48 pm
@Taahirah(Taahirah)-11: Simon should go over to FDPs house and stick his tongue straight down the back of his trousers..
any proof he walks on water? how does he heals the terminally sick, raise the dead and sacrifice himself for the sins of mankind ?
you guys wouldnt know journalism if it up and smacked you on the side of the head Simon… its no wonder SA’s in general have a reputation for arrogance…
21 Sep 2010, 15:48 pm
whatafuckinglegend…
in the making.
pal don’t get sucked in to the hype.
and don’t start talk about yourself in the third person.
keep it real.
remember transie is watching you.
21 Sep 2010, 15:50 pm
@Transformation(Transformation)-13:
Loui?
There is a jock sniffer if ever there was one.
21 Sep 2010, 15:53 pm
Is the blasphemy really necessary? I don’t even see how it fits into the article at all, except for being incredibly offensive.
21 Sep 2010, 15:58 pm
bly om te **** die WP knaap beweeg daar in die Noorde
21 Sep 2010, 15:58 pm
@Schmacky(Schmacky)-17:
what blasphemy being compared to fourie du preez.
21 Sep 2010, 16:04 pm
He was smiling during the Haka (which of course is allowed but probably not for much longer) and when he milked a penalty in the same game he winked at one of his team mates,far too cocky for guy who hasn’t done very much on a rugby field.
21 Sep 2010, 16:07 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-20: He was smiling during the Haka (which of course is allowed but probably not for much longer)
21 Sep 2010, 16:09 pm
@Taahirah(Taahirah)-21:
I’ve set the line now let them take the bait.
21 Sep 2010, 16:13 pm
@gunther(gunther)-16: yeah, footballer Mark Fish’s ex-wife! Reading the article it sounds like francois lives like hip hop star
, ryan even calls him a ‘baller’. If he was in the States he’s be in Kanye West’s music videos…
21 Sep 2010, 16:16 pm
He’s a cockier version of James Small, whatever happened to that guy?
21 Sep 2010, 16:25 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-24: Lives in Camps Bay,looks fat and pasty.
21 Sep 2010, 16:30 pm
@Provincejoulekkading(Provincejoulekkading)-25: Not much has changed then? Kidding.
21 Sep 2010, 16:30 pm
@Provincejoulekkading(Provincejoulekkading)-25:
Too many wines at Cafe Caprice.
21 Sep 2010, 16:36 pm
@Transformation(Transformation)-23:
if he was in the states he’d be a mini-me (not not you JR) of dennis the rodman.
21 Sep 2010, 16:44 pm
Anyone know what time Heavens Game crawls out from under his rock?
21 Sep 2010, 16:47 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-20: Fark, the opposing team and the whole crowd should turn their backs on the haka – give it the contempt it deserves as a response to the new IRB reg where a team is forced to stand beyond 10m from halfway and be completely motionless… this reg will come into force in the 2011 WC…
Farking preciousness of Kiwis knows no end….
Fark the stupid wardance – i used to enjoy the confrontation, but no more… an opposing team can’t even respond in the way they choose…
Farking kiwi cnuts and their irish IRB sycophants…
21 Sep 2010, 16:52 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-30:
There you are right on cue.
21 Sep 2010, 16:58 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-31: Does it hit the spot – that little kiwi duplicity bone?
You chaps are actually making a good attempt to fark up rugby…
Its been spotted in the NH though – a few journos like Stu Barnes, Nick Cain and peter Bills have observed this Kiwi preciousness with the Haka, rule tweaks and blatant cheating etc…
21 Sep 2010, 16:59 pm
@gunther(gunther)-16:
Cool.
21 Sep 2010, 17:00 pm
What’s this about regulations regarding the haka? Can anyone explain?
21 Sep 2010, 17:01 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-32:
In my opinion smiling when the Haka is performed should be banned and if the smile is for 7 seconds or longer a yellow card can be issued at the referees discretion.
21 Sep 2010, 17:04 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-32: what kiwi preciousness? have you spoken to any kiwis about their thoughts on responses to the haka?
probably not… the fact is, every kiwi I have ever spoken to has no qualms with how other teams react to the haka..
in fact most kiwis love to see other teams confront it..
it adds to the atmosphere and the intensity of kickoff a few minutes later… but then I understand where youre coming from, xenophobia eventually becomes paranoia, and next youll start going on about conspiracies..
oh hang on, you already do..
21 Sep 2010, 17:07 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-35: in my opinion the most appropriate response for that anthropological remnant of kiwi’s cannibalistic tendency’s is for a team to turn around, drop their pants and give a big collective browneye before laughing at you primitive fools…
21 Sep 2010, 17:12 pm
@poppa69(poppa69)-36: The Rugby Paper, issue 105, Sept 19 2010… a nice one page article on the preciousness of the kiwi wardance… and the sneaking through of a law for the 2011 WC where teams have to stand 10ms in their own half, and stand still and silent while facing the haka…
Don’t fib now…
21 Sep 2010, 17:16 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-37:
Wink – first warning
Smile – yellow
Browneye – red
21 Sep 2010, 17:23 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-39: Ja, and then a big farking middle finger…
21 Sep 2010, 17:23 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-38: Im not fibbing… most kiwis couldnt care how a team reacts to the haka… but continue believing everything you read… explains a hell of a lot..
have you spoken to any kiwis personally about the haka? gauged their response to how teams should react?
and you know there is medication for your problems, but then I guess your wife wont let you have them huh? you might actually gain some of your manhood back, rather then being continually pussie whipped huh?
21 Sep 2010, 17:24 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-38: best you run along to France and hide again, like the gutless coward you are…
wimp..
21 Sep 2010, 17:25 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-40:
Dude leave it be, after 2011 RWC New Zealand will be severly “crocked”
They dont have no money!!!
21 Sep 2010, 17:27 pm
@jondood(jondood)-43:
Wouldn’t that be terrible if the best rugby side in the world ran out of money, maybe you could lend us some?
21 Sep 2010, 17:28 pm
@poppa69(poppa69)-42: HG is here soixant-neuf… don’t pretend things, fantasise or fib again… its not becoming… no, wait – its perfectly in character…
21 Sep 2010, 17:29 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-44: nah, we take enough of their money as it is..
like candy from a baby actually…
bend over oregan
how far messrs Oniel and Tew?
21 Sep 2010, 17:30 pm
@Heavens Game(Heavens Game)-45: isnt your wife calling, best you run along now, you know how angry she gets when you dont listen..
21 Sep 2010, 17:31 pm
@NZINCHINA(NZINCHINA)-44:
Dude dont get me wrong I was just pointing out a fact, I love NZ rugby.
You guys inspire us and vice versa.
21 Sep 2010, 17:33 pm
@poppa69(poppa69)-46:
Yes my friend you are bending us over with your current 25k capacity stadiums.
21 Sep 2010, 17:33 pm
@poppa69(poppa69)-41: spoken to a bunch of fibbing halfwit little hobbits with dreads about their wardance… yeah, right…
***** whipped is better than the sheepshaggng wool being pulled over my eyes which probably happens many times in a Waikato swinging party or wherever you hail from…
cliches must with a little porky telling kiwi….
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