Springbok great Bryan Habana says he hasn’t had a relationship with his father Bernie Habana over the last 15 years. Bryan Habana, a legendary Springbok player and global rugby player, has talked candidly about how he discovered his father had been defrauding him while serving as his agent. After making his debut with the Lions in 2003, Habana had one of the most incredible rugby careers in the game’s history.
Between 2004 and 2016, Habana played over 100 Tests for the Springboks, scoring 67 tries, the most by a Springbok. He was also a key member of the Springboks’ 2007 Rugby World Cup-winning squad. Today, he sits in second place on the list of top international try scorers, two behind Japanese great Daisuke Ohata.
In the early years of his career, Habana was represented by his father Bernie, whom he credits for signing one of the biggest contracts in South African rugby at the time when he moved from the Bulls to the Stormers in 2009. And at the height of his fame, Habana was one of the faces of Gillette’s “Champions/Best a Man Can Get” advertising campaign alongside tennis great Roger Federer, French football star Thierry Henry, and golf icon Tiger Woods. However, it was during that move to Cape Town that Habana painfully discovered his father, who he had trusted to run his financial affairs, was taking money off the top.
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Speaking in theBusiness of Sportpodcast, Habana detailed how he found out and how it affected his relationship with his father. “Trust is a really difficult thing to understand. My trust rested with my dad, who was managing that side of my life [finances] from a very young age, only to find out eight years later that the trust I thought I had was not being had,” Habana told the podcast.
“I unfortunately lost quite a bit of money because the one person I thought I could trust mismanaged my funds and used them for his own over the course of eight years.” Detailing how he found out, he said it was while trying to buy a house in Cape Town after moving to the Stormers. “We had to put down a deposit on a house, and I went to my dad and said, ‘Listen, I need to take a bit of money out of my nest egg because I need to buy a house,’ and he said, ‘It’s coming.’
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