Lucky Maree
This time, Elton Jantjies’ determined efforts to end his career as a Springbok rugby player may have succeeded.
Jantjies and dietician Zeenat Simjee have both been sent home from Argentina after allegations of misconduct on the weekend the Springboks played the All Blacks in Mbombela early last month.
Sources in Mpumalanga’s capital city told Rapport last week how Jantjies had rampaged around the streets of the city in a sponsored BMW.
Jantjies has misfired on the rugby field lately, but his commitment and performance off the field has apparently been energetic and full of passion and fire.
Various sources have come forward to say that Jantjies was in fine form.
He did not stay at the hotel with the rest of the team, preferring to ignore that 100-year-old custom and booked into a private guesthouse. When his credit card was rejected, he promised to pay the next morning. During the night he and his companion had such a fight that the other guests complained about the noise.
When Jantjies was asked to stop making so much noise, he asked: “Do you know who I am?”
Instead of paying his bill, he sneaked out of the guesthouse at 6am the next morning, only paying the R4,000 bill after weeks of arguing.
Then he booked into another guesthouse.
The five-star guesthouse, which appealed to the SA Rugby Union (Saru) to get Jantjies to pay his bill, said Jantjies racked up a no-holds-barred bill of about R26,000 for things like expensive champagne and flowers, spa treatments and romantic candlelit dinners.
One of his fine romantic gestures was a note in which he declared his love for the woman and a bunch of flowers in a heart-shaped arrangement on the bed in the honeymoon suite.
Needless to say, the lady with him was not his wife and mother of his three children. Sources have confirmed that Zeenat Simjee, the team’s 30-year-old dietician, was the one who partied with him.
After the appeal to Saru, Jantjies paid R21,000.
The last R5,000 was only settled after Rapport made enquiries about the matter to Jantjies, his agent and Saru.
It’s not the first time this year that the Bok flyhalf has been accused of misconduct in public.
Earlier this year, he was arrested at OR Tambo International Airport after apparently having run amok on an Emirates flight. It was alleged that he harassed a flight attendant and hit a toilet door with his fists. He appeared in the Kempton Park Magistrates Court but Emirates withdrew the charges.
The Springbok team management have declared they were satisfied no team protocol had been broken in Mbombela.
Jantjies and Simjee did not respond to questions sent to them.
But a declined credit card, refusing to pay the bill, and (most of all) demanding privilege because of who you are, is in the category of “distasteful”, and that can’t be attributed to the behaviour of a bad boy.
The Boks face Los Pumas at Estadio José Amalfitani in Buenos Aires on Saturday.
