Like many of our rugby players plying their trade overseas these days, Francois Hougaard is loving life.

Some of his recent performances for Premiership club Worcester have been out of the top drawer, and against Gloucester, he racked up 11 tackles and a ridiculous seven turnovers.

Whilst outings like that will improve his rugby stock, his name will forever be linked with ex-girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. In a new interview with the Daily Mail, he was pressed on what that has done to his psyche over the years:

I ask about the impact of losing his ex-girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, who was shot dead on Valentine’s Day, 2013, by Paralympian Oscar Pistorius. Hougaard was in the middle of the media inquest, with some reports claiming he sent a text message which sparked a row on the night of the killing.

‘Reeva and I dated for quite a while,’ he says, in a rare interview. ‘One of my best mates phoned me at seven o’clock when I was playing golf to tell me what had happened. He was the first to get to the house. It’s a shock when you hear something like that, isn’t it? It’s tough.

‘Everyone was saying I sent Reeva a message and that’s why he shot her. I had nothing to do with her any more but it’s all people were asking me about. Mentally, that was a really tough thing to go through.’

The case lasted months. It shaped Hougaard’s sporting determination and his entrepreneurial drive.

‘It was tough because rugby is 80 per cent mental,’ he says. ‘If you’re not mentally where you need to be, then you’re not going to play well.

‘I went to see a psychologist to talk about it. That taught me to deal with negative situations. That taught me to turn things into positive fuel and not to sulk.

Whilst Hougaard continues his rugby career, Oscar Pistorius serves out the remainder of his sentence at Atteridgeville correctional centre in Pretoria.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything on that front, but a TimesLIVE article from late last year quotes his father, Henk Pretorius, as saying that he’s “finding new purpose by leading a Bible study and prayer group”:

They met once or twice a week, he said.

“Oscar leads the studies and is able to accommodate those who aren’t so familiar with the Bible to explain the meaning of all the verses..He (Oscar) can feel he is making a difference to others who really needed a difference to be made – to give their lives meaning, purpose and some hope. As a result, things have also improved for him.”

The prison [pictured above] has given Pistorius, who will be eligible for parole in 2023, a piece of land to develop a vegetable garden.

His father told The Times UK: “Oscar, being an artist, didn’t just do square blocks of vegetables, he has designed a face – the hair is certain type of veggies and the ears and mouths are something else. It’s quite incredible.”

Oscar will only become eligible for parole in 2023, and it sounds like he’s doing his utmost to nail down an early release.

[sources:dailymail&timeslive]