Bryan Habana has revealed that he has not had a relationship with his father for 15 years after he mismanaged the Springboks legend’s funds.
South Africa’s record try-scorer appeared on the Business of Sport podcast to discuss his life and career when he spoke about how trust broke down with his dad.
The 42-year-old thought he was the person he could put the most faith in, but that proved to be not the case.
Misplaced trust
“Trust is a massive element that’s not always easy. When you’re young, who are the people you trust? Is it your parents? Is it your family? A lawyer?” Habana said.
“Trust is a really difficult thing to understand and my trust rested with my dad, who was managing that side of my life for a very young age, only to find out eight years later that the trust I thought I had was not being had.
“I unfortunately lost quite a bit of money because of one person I thought I could trust, who mismanaged my funds and used it for his own over the course of eight years.”
Habana’s father was tasked with managing his commercial deals, but it was the Springbok legend’s now wife who first suspected that something could be up.
“One of the first things she said when we started going on our journey together was, ‘how do you manage your finances?’” he said.
“I was like, ‘sorry, who are you and why?’ I just had a feeling that she feels I’ve got to manage my money better.
“My dad was managing it and I trusted him but she was like, ‘are you sure that’s the right thing?’”
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It then came to a head when Habana and Janine Viljoen got married in June 2009, with the former wing star becoming suspicious of his father’s activities.
“When we got married, I wanted a quiet, intimate wedding and my dad sat me and Janine down, ‘oh, you can’t do this, you’re like the Will and Kate of South Africa, you have to have this public marriage’. I’m like, ‘no we don’t’,” he said.
“I had obviously put a lot of trust in my dad and I believed the best. We then went on this journey of sort of having this public wedding, which we had zero control over, so my dad was managing everything and it just became an absolute s***show.
“On the Friday night, Janine was crying because her mother had been lambasted by my dad and the event organiser of the wedding phoned me and was like, ‘listen, I’m not being paid’.
“I phoned my dad – we’d also had a bit of an argument – but he was like, ‘I will sort it out’.”
Going from Bulls to the Stormers
The wedding also came at a time when Habana was making the high-profile switch from the Bulls to the Stormers.
“When we finally got married our wedding day was amazing but there was a real behind-the-scenes sadness for the both of us,” he told the Business of Sport podcast.
“I had signed to go to the Stormers from the Bulls, which was also horrible – it was going north to south – and we had to put down a deposit on a house.
“My dad was managing all my commercial elements so I was still getting my rugby contract salary and my dad was managing my commercial sponsorships.
“I’m like, ‘listen, I need to take a chunk out of my nest egg because I need to buy a house’, as houses in Cape Town are a lot more expensive than houses in Johannesburg.
“He goes, ‘it’s cool, it’s coming’. The more I’d ask the more the money wasn’t coming. At that point the estate agent in Cape Town went, ‘if you don’t pay the deposit now, you’re going to lose the house’, and it was our dream home.”
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Although Habana didn’t sever ties at that point, at the start of 2010 he finally knew the full extent of his father’s actions.
The tipping point
“There was a time period of about three months when nothing was forthcoming and then at the end of 2009 I was in talks with Adidas and Canterbury about an apparel sponsor,” he said.
“I had been with Adidas as a boot sponsor my whole life, but Canterbury were really good to me and on January 1, 2010 I sent out an email – I started finding out things had been dodgy – to all my sponsors saying: ‘Any negotiations or contractual negotiations that have been handled with my dad up until December 31 is null and void. Any future contractual negotiations need to come directly through me or my lawyer’.
“The CEO of Canterbury International immediately emailed me back going, ‘Bryan, we’ve signed you for five years. We’ve paid a very big re-signing fee to sign you for the next five years.’
“I phoned my dad and said: ‘Listen, where’s this money?’ He said that he didn’t receive any money, but I had the contract in front of me.
Habana added: “I thought we had signed a trust document for the Bryan Habana Trust which I then find out never ever existed.
“For some weird reason, I signed another with my legal lawyer in Pretoria at the Bulls which was the only live trust that I had.
“The actual Bryan Habana Trust which I thought all my commercial money was getting paid in to was actually my dad’s bank account.
“They were living off it unfortunately, so he was living a life off it.”
Habana was not lacking in money given that he was South Africa’s best paid player at the time, but he could not forgive his father for betraying his trust.
“To be fair, I was living pretty well as a 26-year-old,” he said.
“I couldn’t share that with the world because there was this outward facing view that myself and my dad, and the relationship we had, was phenomenal.
“To my dad’s credit, he did give me the biggest contract in South Africa in 2009 going down to Western Province.
“But unfortunately we’ve not had a relationship in 15 years because when I did approach him with the facts he denied everything. All the money was gone.
“The Gillette money, I didn’t actually get one cent of that. Not only did I not get that money, I had to pay tax on that money I didn’t get.”