It was a heartwarming moment. In June 2017, in the absence of injured Captain Warren Whitely, Springbok lock Eben Etzebeth was chosen to captain the team in the third rugby test against France, with a 35-12 Springbok victory. When he approached the microphone in the media center after the match, he said, unprompted: “Welcome to the best day of my life.”

Spend enough time paying attention to elite sport and you end up jaded. The players come across as automatons programmed to spew clichés and to avoid saying anything resembling human emotion. This was different. This was a young man who had been a Springbok for five years, who had grown up with dreams of Springbok glory, and who had achieved the ultimate honor of leading his team in a victory with the captain’s armband conferring on him a status that relatively few in the long history of Springbok rugby have attained.

Forget that Bok coach Allister Coetzee, only the second black national team coach, had inexplicably chosen Etzebeth to captain the squad against France rather than Siya Kolisi, Etzebeth’s teammate and captain at the Stormers, the Cape Town Super Rugby side. Forget that naming Kolisi captain would have made him the first black Springbok captain, representing a watershed moment in rugby history. Forget Etzebeth’s reputation as an occasional hothead, something customarily not suitable to the captain of a rugby squad, one of whose duties is to keep the calm among his teammates, and to be the interface between the referee and his teammates.

Forget all that. At that podium in Ellis Park Stadium, we were all reminded that these are human beings. We were reminded how much wearing that jersey and that armband means to these young men. We were reminded of children playing with friends in their back yards, announcing their own play like a television commenter, always the stars of their own dramas.

Yet that little bit of humanity, honest as it was, as much as I believe it to have been earnest and true, does not mean that we know Eben Etzebeth.

Human beings are complicated. They can get up in front of an assembled media horde and even a massive, world-class athlete can evoke childhood. But they can also find themselves accused of “racially abusing” a man, late on a Saturday night and into the small hours of Sunday morning, when they had already been involved in a fight outside of a bar in Langebaan in the Western Cape. Which is what Etzebeth is accused of doing in late August 2019.

It is an incident about which we know very, very little despite the passage of several weeks. It is an event about which we should know so much more. But it is an event about which one gets the sense that South Africa’s rugby potentates want to know as little as possible. There was a fight after a conflict in a bar. So far, run-of-the-mill stuff. But where it gets tricky is with the allegations that the fight was racially motivated, and that the racism came from Etzebeth’s camp, and according to some observers, likely from Etzebeth himself.