Danie Craven biography
Danie Craven, byname of Daniel Hartman Craven, (born October 11, 1910, Lindley, South Africa—died January 4, 1993, Stellenbosch), South African rugby union soccer participant, coach, and administrator who was some of the influential and controversial figures within the historical past of the game. He was generally known as “Mr. Rugby” in South Africa.
Craven performed 16 Test (worldwide) matches for South Africa, primarily as a scrum half, between 1931 and 1938. He served as vice-captain of the crew on its 1937 tour of Australia and New Zealand and captained the crew when it traveled to tackle New Zealand at Carisbrook stadium in Dunedin after which once more within the sequence towards the British Lions (now the British and Irish Lions) in 1938. He additionally performed quite a lot of different positions, together with fly half, centre, and quantity eight, and even performed a recreation at fullback for South Africa towards Queensland. He was credited with perfecting the dive go, which extra quickly delivered the ball from the scrum to the backs.
Craven held three doctorates, and he turned the primary professor of bodily training and head of the division of bodily training (now human motion research) on the University of Stellenbosch in 1947. He additionally served because the college’s rugby coach. He had been director of bodily training on the Military College in Pretoria in 1938 when he turned the primary captain of the newly shaped Northern Transvaal Rugby Union. While serving within the military (1944–48), he based the Physical Training Battalion and turned many medically unfit males into troopers.
In 1949 Craven turned selector and supervisor/coach of the South African nationwide crew (generally known as the Springboks), and he served in that capability for a number of years. In 1956 he turned president of the South African Rugby Board (SARB), a place he held till his loss of life in 1993. In 1959 he was elevated to chairman of the International Rugby Football Board (IRB).
Craven was an enigma, liked by many who knew him, but additionally hated for doing little to problem segregation in South African rugby, a sport central to white South African identification, through the apartheid period. He did, nonetheless, try to guard rugby from undue political interference as the key Afrikaner-Broederbond group tried to affect choice coverage. He was derided for allegedly having acknowledged that there could be a black Springbok “over my dead body.” A reality little identified to outsiders was that Craven did present occasional teaching experience for a “Coloured” (combined race) rugby crew within the Forties and ’50s. He led the SARB into unsuccessful negotiations for rugby unity in 1987 when South Africa was excluded from the inaugural IRB Rugby World Cup.
Respected by rugby males internationally, Craven was made an honorary vice chairman for lifetime of the French Rugby Federation in 1992. Craven Week, South Africa’s nationwide youth match that was begun in 1964, was named for him, as was the University of Stellenbosch’s rugby stadium, which hosted matches through the 1995 Rugby World Cup.