Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen (15 page)

It’s little wonder that when Oscar arrived at our house in September 2012, after the Games, he was a broken man. Now 15 kilograms lighter, he was a shadow of his usual self, with dark rings haunting his sad eyes, which looked so tired from all the crying. Sammy was just as thin and frail.

We all embraced and then burst into tears as we hugged each other; my heart broke for him. We sat down for dinner and he was very quiet. After the meal he found a quiet space and he and Sammy spent time together chatting upstairs – she was still uncertain whether she was going to give him another chance. In fact she had really not wanted to see him but he told me on the phone that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer and he was coming to see her, no matter what.

I made them tea. They spoke for a while and it seemed like they came to some kind of agreement to give the relationship another chance. He vowed to change, to put in the effort that was needed to sustain a relationship and give Sammy the love and respect she deserved. It looked like everything that had happened up until now was resolved. I really believed that the Oscar who returned from London was a different person.

At the end of the night, he left to stay somewhere else as they did not want to rush things. I think Sammy was trying to abide by the boundaries she had put in place.

I had also given a very strict condition to him: in order for him to be allowed to date Sam, he needed to start seeing a psychologist on a regular basis, immediately. I believed he really needed help, due to his instability.

But after this heart-wrenching evening, the next day he was off to a
GQ
cover shoot and it didn’t take long for him to be the man about town again.

In fact, a day or two later, his vagueness about his whereabouts and activities began again. Almost without changing gears, he was back in fast cars, clubbing with the boys, flirting on Twitter with girls and screaming in anger at Sammy on the phone.

There was no sign of the sad, tearful person we had seen only a few days earlier. This display now finally convinced me that there was something very seriously wrong with Oscar.

In the
Vanity Fair
article published in June 2013, writer Mark Seal interviewed a “former confidant” of Oscar who told Seal that the Olympics changed Oscar for the worse. “He was bragging about his adventures. He was like, ‘I’m the man, I’m Oscar. The world owes me.’ That sense of entitlement. He wasn’t like that; he was made into that.” Seal also wrote about how after getting back from the Games, in training sessions at a gym his “swearing would astonish the mothers and children also using the gym,” said an unnamed reporter. “He would storm out of the gym midway through a workout. He would be surly, rude. It seemed as though he survived on energy drinks and caffeine pills.”

As part of their plan to rekindle their romance, Oscar invited Sammy to go to the Seychelles with him on a trip that would be filmed by the glamorous South African travel show,
Top Billing
. Sammy was very excited. I think she was still really hoping that this time round things would be different. Before they left, Oscar emailed Peet, his manager, from my computer. He obviously forgot about it and didn’t delete the correspondence from the system. I only saw the email after they had gone. It had a copy of Sam’s
passport for purposes of booking the ticket and along with that, it said something like: “It looks like the shit is sorted out.” That’s how he referred to all the trauma and heartache that had happened between him and my daughter. I wanted to hurl; after all he had put my beautiful little girl through and after all he had put my family through, how could he minimise everything into those few heartless words? Did he have no feelings, no humanity, no conscience whatsoever?

Were all those tears of remorse for real, I wondered, or had he just been switching it on? Were we all just pawns being manipulated in the game of keeping Oscar happy so that the money-making machine remained well oiled? I then knew in my bones that nothing was actually going to change, that none of what he had promised, none of his new resolutions were real… I knew it was just a matter of time before there would be the next blow-up.

I think Sammy sensed it too. Although she had a wonderful time in the Seychelles – the hotels, the beaches, the gorgeous sunsets – the realities of the betrayals in the relationship hung heavy, leaving a mark over everything. Oscar could not get his head around the fact that Sammy had dated another man, let alone gone on a trip to Dubai with him while he was struggling in London. And Sammy was haunted by the Russian, as well as Oscar’s string of other women. In retrospect I suppose we were all naive to have hoped that they would both be able to just move on into a rosy future and forgive and forget.

When they returned to South Africa it was now blatantly obvious that he was not going to keep any of his great promises to change. I think she began to regret deeply that she had given him another chance, and I was getting more and more angry that he hadn’t complied with my demand that he should engage in therapy.

But of course it wasn’t all bad. There were moments of camaraderie and shared laughter along the way. We still enjoyed our early-morning chats and cups of teas when he stayed over at the house. We had a few good early-morning laughs about one of the commentators during the Olympics who loved Oscar – he used to rave about South Africa and he always told his viewers to
get a cup of “rooibosch” tea before Oscar ran – so we drank our “rooibosch” and laughed and joked about it. Oz and I shared the same silly sense of humour, and above and beyond the dramas, we did have many good laughs together.

Now that he was back, aware of the huge amounts of money the Olympics had generated for Brand Oscar, he was aching to get himself a new set of wheels. Every year he bought himself a new car for his birthday in November and with all that had happened in London, he decided to really spoil himself after the Olympics.

So he bought himself a new motorbike and a Jeep, customised to his specifications, which he had bought for himself prior to the Olympics. Then of course he was waiting for the McLaren that he had ordered. He was beyond excited about the super car.

Sam didn’t like bikes so when he travelled on the bike, she rode in the Jeep to meet him – besides he always drove too fast for her. He loved going between Johannesburg and Pretoria on the bike. This was one of the things that didn’t make sense to me – if he was so scared of being attacked and was always carrying a gun with him because he felt so threatened, surely he would feel much more vulnerable on a bike?

I saw the old Oscar back in full force when sometime towards the end of September our whole family was up in Johannesburg to attend a 21st birthday of a family friend in Blair Athol. Sammy invited Oscar to come along but he told her he was out with the boys riding cars, so we went ahead without him. The party was in full swing – we had been there for hours already – when he finally pitched up with a group of uninvited friends in tow. I immediately felt uncomfortable; it was a closed party, these were good friends of ours and suddenly there was a bunch of uninvited guests in their house.

Oscar was very edgy that night; it was clear he was hyped up and stressed about something and it made me feel uncomfortable just looking at him. As hard as I tried to relax, I developed a knot in my stomach that just wouldn’t go away. I could sense he was up to no good again.

Being a well-known face, especially with the Olympics so fresh
in people’s minds still, a lot of people at the party were clearly impressed he was there and began asking him for autographs. I wondered if that was what was making him so tense and upsetting him. When Oscar decided to leave, he told Sam he was going home to sleep and Sam left soon thereafter to sleep at a girlfriend’s house.

When we left, I had a weird feeling that something just didn’t feel right. He had made all these promises to be the best boyfriend ever, had sworn he would turn over a new leaf, he was now supposedly trying to be committed and transparent; if they were truly a couple and they had made all these resolutions, why wasn’t he taking Sam home with him? I found the whole situation very odd. It looked like all his old behaviour was back.

The next morning I called Sam early, expecting her to be with her friend, but I was surprised to find out she was with Oscar at his friend’s house. So it turned out no one had gone home that night after the 21st. Somehow Sammy and her friend found out that Oscar and all his friends had gone to a club. So being girls and egging each other on, they decided to go and see what he was up to. They walked in and found Oscar deep in conversation with some girl. Sammy’s friend, suspecting the worst, marched up to them, stood between Oscar and the girl and began shouting at him.

“Who do you think you are? I have your girlfriend here… Who the fuck do you think you are, lying to us, telling us you were going home to sleep and instead you came out here…? What do you think you are doing!”

I think Oscar was caught so off guard by this he didn’t know what to say. His immediate response was that he was just chatting to some girl who wanted his autograph. But Sam’s friend was having none of it. She just let rip.

“I don’t fucking care, why do you lie to us? You have a girlfriend, what’s wrong with you?” She wouldn’t listen to a word he was saying, she just kept on letting him have it. Oscar was furious. He stormed off into the VIP area and told the girls they weren’t allowed to go there as they were embarrassing him. But Sam knew the owner of the club and she easily got into the VIP area without Oscar’s permission. Sam now decided to let Oscar
have a piece of her mind. She told him she was sick of him and their whole relationship. He told her that she and her friend had ruined his reputation for life and hugely embarrassed him. The girls decided to call it a night and went home. Just as they got in, Sam got a call from Oscar who begged Sam to go over and spend the rest of the night with him at his friend’s house. They both cried, kissed and made up. He was still furious with Sam’s friend though, and vowed that she would never be allowed to set foot in his space again.

In a few weeks it would be their birthdays on 22 November, and he told Sam in no uncertain terms that they could not have a combined party as they had planned. He laid the blame squarely on Sam’s friend, saying it was all her fault as he couldn’t have her anywhere near his celebrations.

After all of this, within weeks of Oscar’s return, I just had this really bad aftertaste left in my mouth. The old Oscar was back in full force.

Sometime towards late September, Oscar had been invited to Sun City to do some work. Sam was spending time at the Silver Woods Estate and on the day they were to leave Oscar said he needed to do a few things with the boys. Little did she know he was off to Kyalami race track where he coincidentally bumped into her ex, Quinton. I don’t know whether this was planned or not. I kept calling her, asking her if they had left yet and Sammy kept saying that she was still waiting for him to pick her up. I found this very odd as the roads to Sun City get very busy the later it gets, and become pretty dangerous to drive on after dark. I also didn’t like the idea of her sitting all alone in the empty house, waiting for him. I began to worry, not able to shake off a feeling of dread.

After waiting for hours, not able to get hold of Oscar, Sammy got a call from a friend, who told her Oscar had confronted Quinton in the VIP room at the race track. Apparently things had got ugly when Oscar accused Quinton of messing around with his
girlfriend while he was away in London. Things got badly out of hand, with Oscar shouting, swearing and screaming at Quinton, saying he would break his legs and “fuck” him up, embarrassing him in front of a large group of businessmen whom Quinton was entertaining and discussing business deals with at the track. Of course the whole idea that Sam had cheated on Oscar was absolute rubbish, as Sammy had made it clear in calls to Oscar in London that things were over between them before she began dating Quinton.

The situation would escalate a few days later when soccer player and TV presenter Marc Batchelor, an acquaintance of Quinton, called a few of Oscar’s friends, telling them to tell Oscar to back off the billionaire. Things got uglier. Oscar called Marc back to find out what his “problem” was and swore and threatened him. And so it went on.

Back at Silver Woods, now having waited for hours, distraught and worried, Sammy continued trying to call and text Oscar, begging him not to do anything stupid. Oscar finally returned to the estate to pick Sammy up to go to Sun City but he was in a foul and angry mood. He re-enacted the whole showdown between himself and Quinton, screaming and shouting, describing in detail what he had said to Quinton. Sammy was terrified. When Sammy finally did manage to open up a little days later, she said to me, “Mom, I was so scared of him, he screamed so much, even the neighbours heard.”

Finally, they left for Sun City, much later than initially intended. Oscar was driving a borrowed Porsche. It was pouring with rain and he took all the fury from the fight with Quinton out on the road, speeding at over 200 kilometres an hour into the growing darkness, towards Sun City.