Cricket's burst of garish neon

Hunter S. Thompson observed that the truth in Washington is "never spoken over a desk or in daylight hours". Those of us who report on cricket, terminally stricken as it is by that useless charade known as the press conference, can but nod in weary agreement.

Except, that is, when Percy Sonn was at the podium. In fact, the International Cricket Council (ICC), which is so bent on squeezing the last buck out of the game, missed a trick by not selling tickets to its late president's public appearances. There would have been many takers, this reporter included.

Whether Sonn always spoke the truth will be disputed by those who did not share his politics and his drinking habits. He launched into both of those pursuits with an uncommon passion.

But while Sonn invariably generated grumbling in cricket's more reactionary quarters, much of it was muttered: his arguments were as watertight as the glasses from which he swigged his drink.

Sonn, who died in Cape Town on May 27, was as sharp of mind as he was of tongue, and entirely entertaining besides. He was never boring, often inflammatory, and always quotable.

When cricket reporters gathered in a pressbox it wasn't difficult to see which of them had Sonn on the other end of a telephone line. They were the ones whose pens jerked into life across their notebooks as urgently as the needles of a Richter scale signalling a major seismic event.

"Please, please, don't call Percy," became the bleated refrain of one United Cricket Board (UCB) media officer whenever a crisis erupted. Which, in Sonn's time as UCB president, seemed to be every other day.

"You've got my number - give it to him," Sonn told a reporter who, in the aftermath of Hansie Cronje being banned for life, called to ask when last he had spoken to South Africa's crooked captain.

It was Sonn who said that Cronje "won't even be allowed to play beach cricket" after some of the latter's dark dealings with cricket's underworld were dragged into public view. It was also Sonn who was said to have been drunk enough to have "almost fallen out of his trousers" at a 2003 World Cup game in Paarl.

Those familiar with the world according to Sonn were not a bit surprised when controversy followed him into the ICC president's office. On who else but Sonn's watch would a Test umpire offer to resign in exchange for a bung of $500,000? Sonn also melted perfectly into the mangle of events that surrounded Bob Woolmer's death during the 2007 World Cup.

The truth is that Sonn deserves a better legacy than he will no doubt be lumped with. He was one of the architects of unity in South African cricket, but the UCB he became president of in 2000 was, in large part, a clubby collection of recalcitrant reprobates who feared nothing so much as real change.

So there was horror all round when Sonn had Justin Ontong inserted, at the expense of Jacques Rudolph, into the South African team to play Australia in the second Test at Sydney in 2002. Sonn's argument, as usual, was irrefutable. Ontong was black, Rudolph was white, and the UCB policy held that black players were to be given preference over whites of similar ability in competition for places in the national team.

In a world of grey suited little men who thought grey little thoughts and lived little grey lives, Sonn was a loud burst of the most garish neon. How terrified they must have been of him. As a South African, Sonn came from a country where the words "black" and "white" hold special significance. Perhaps that's why he never dealt in shades of grey.

Away from cricket, he lived in the entirely real world of crime fighting as a public prosecutor, an advocate, an acting judge, the deputy director of public prosecutions in South Africa, and as a legal advisor to the police.

He was also the first head of the Directorate of Special Operations in South Africa - a police unit known as the Scorpions which is the country's answer to the FBI. Sandra, Sonn's wife, and the couple's three children know that they are immensely poorer without him.

Cricket doesn't know that yet, but it will.