As Oscar Pistorius was led away to begin a five-year prison sentence for the culpable killing of Reeva Steenkamp, it emerged that under South African law he will be considered for house arrest in a little over 10 months. In the eyes of many, the athlete had got away with murder. The fact that the judge in the non-jury trial was herself a woman – a black woman with an extraordinarily impressive history – seemed all that stood between her verdict and outright popular rejection of it.
Imagine if the judge had been a white man and the victim a black woman?
The question is, what should happen to Pistorius next? In 10 months’ time, he will be 28, probably fit enough and gritty enough – a boy who lost his mother when he was 15, a double amputee who won an able-bodied world track medal, remember – to resume competitive running. Will he be embraced as someone who has done – or is doing – his time or will he be shunned?
The furore around Ched Evans, the former Wales international, Manchester City, and most recently, Sheffield United footballer, might serve as a guide. Evans was released on parole last week after serving half of a five-year prison sentence for raping a 19-year-old woman.
He is still only 25, relatively talented and has – say many headlines – “served his time”. So why shouldn’t he simply press the reset button and step back into his old life? Sheffield United, which let his contract run out rather than sack him after his conviction, is still deliberating about re-signing him, so clearly it hasn’t dismissed the idea out of hand (it paid £3 million for him after all). The fact that 150,000 have signed an online petition asking Sheffield not to re-sign him, or that the usual frenzied, social media regiments are shrieking about his right to return, shouldn’t detain us here. Many decent, thoughtful people believe in the fundamental principle that he is no different from any other convict who has paid his debt to society and should be able to go back to normal life. For Evans, normal life is professional football.
Moral maze
This is a moral maze, reaching far beyond sport. It touches on fundamental principles of justice, on our common values, on the notion of sportspeople as heroes, on the fierce underground pushback against women’s credibility on matters of sexual consent and domestic violence.
Evans continues resolutely to protest his innocence. “Ched Evans was wrongly convicted of rape on 20th April 2012”, runs the headline on a website set up to publicise his cause. It features CCTV of the “complainant” walking mainly on her own two feet, though shod in “extremely high wedges”, as the text points out.
This is the Evans riposte to the judge who pronounced that the victim – who remembered nothing about the night’s events – was in no fit state to consent to sexual activity. Denied a right of appeal, Evans took his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which announced on Sunday that it has decided to prioritise it, “because of issues raised by his legal team”.
Ostracisation
“You have thrown away the successful career in which you were involved”, the judge told Evans after the 23-year-old’s conviction by a Welsh jury. That might have been the case in another time or place where shame and ostracisation would have done the job. But now?
Evans is a test case of sorts. Leaving aside the protestations of innocence, there is no precedent for a convicted rapist leaving prison halfway through a sentence to trot back into the well-paid, glamorous, life of a professional footballer.
This is what distinguishes the Evans and Pistorius cases from others. With this public influence comes social responsibility, says Rape Crisis England, one that obliges football to send out the right message about cultural values, a message that says “violence against women . . . will not be tolerated within football”.
Which is hard luck on Evans, since neither he nor his peers ever signed up as role models, as Planet Football apologists never tire of telling us. They’re just young lads with a talent for kicking a ball. Young lads with cars the price of an average fan’s house, their pick of women and lifestyles that most young people can only dream about.
Sure why would any schoolboy want to model himself on someone like that? If personal behaviour is irrelevant, why wouldn’t sponsors line up to fund Pistorius, a convicted killer, in his post-prison career?
Some argue that by re-signing Evans, Sheffield would be hammering out an important message to the public week after week, a reminder that even footballers get banged up for rape – so don’t rape, people. But couldn’t the message equally be: rape someone, serve a bit of time, resume life as if nothing had happened, people?
In any event, once we accept the premise that sportspeople are vehicles for any kind of message – whether it's about disability/depression/racism awareness or a sickly power drink – the inference surely is that they are role models.
If there is no actual clause in a footballer’s contract that obliges him to behave accordingly, the only question is why. Its absence might explain the moral contortions induced by this case, with all those inner conflicts of the “I really believe Evans has a right to resume his footballing career but I’d be very uneasy about my club trying to sign him up” variety.
It is striking how many see this as a case of either/or. There is substantial middle ground between “ban him for life” and “resume former life as if nothing had happened”. Reeva Steenkamp is dead. The life of the 19-year-old victim in the Evans case has been trashed by a concerted hate campaign and the publication of her name on Twitter, forcing her to leave her home town.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy,” said Martin Luther King. Would the lights go out all over Europe if Ched Evans were to retreat voluntarily from the public gaze, trained up to become, say, a proud groundsman, used his talent to become a children’s coach and served out his life as a true role model?
The ultimate measure of Oscar Pistorius remains to be seen.