Information about the book
One
AB De Villiers
I met AB de Villiers at Newlands cricket ground on a suffocating, scorching day in February 2013. Our conversation roamed across a wide range of subjects, but we did pause for a few minutes to discuss a famous moment of candour in 2009. A journalist had asked De Villiers if he had any clearly defined goals, and he admitted that one day he hoped to be the best cricketer in the world. It wasn’t intended to be a bold throwing down of the gauntlet to the cricket world. In reality, it was more a case of him admitting aloud a thought that had lurked quietly in the back of his mind for a long time. However, a statement like that is loaded with the kind of sensational ambition that just won’t go away. Put together a run of good form, and it’s going to be paraded out again for public inspection. Have a couple of consecutive failures, and you run the risk of being beaten with the metaphorical rod of your own words.
I can’t help wondering though whether this statement wasn’t equal parts candour
and cunning. By 2009, De Villiers had already noticed that his best performances
always seemed to come in huge, high-pressure situations. In the must-perform
moments, whether they came from being thrown into the deep-end of test cricket
as an unproven youngster, or from his place in the team being threatened, he
seemed to find another gear. By thrusting his dream into the public domain, perhaps
De Villiers knew he was talking himself into a perpetual high-pressure corner –
the kind that had always brought the best out of him. Since then, he’s scored well
over 3 000 test runs at a world-class average of 60-plus. As of May 2013, he is
ranked as the world’s best one-day batsman, and the third-best test batsman on the
planet. Throw into this mix his leadership role as captain of South Africa’s One-Day
International side and his recent excellence as a test wicketkeeper, and you could
make a strong argument that his dream has become a reality.
It’s an argument that at least one South African would reject, however, as AB
de Villiers has no intention of taking any pressure off himself and has no time for
false finish lines.
The Baby Brother
Abraham Benjamin de Villiers was born with a vast armoury of sporting
gifts, including coordination, speed and lightning reflexes. These are no doubt
all helpful attributes for an international cricketer, but perhaps the greatest
sporting blessings young De Villiers received were his two older brothers – Jan
and Wessels. Nine and six years older than him, respectively, they became his
first ever opponents, and regardless of whether the sport was rugby, tennis,
cricket or running, each of the De Villiers brothers loved to compete and
competed to win.
Their family home was built on four adjoining plots of land, so the De
Villiers boys had a virtually full-size cricket oval to play on. AB remembers
being woken up by his brothers at midnight, and sneaking out to roll the pitch
before the weekend, when all their friends would descend en masse to play. Jan
and Wessels were both talented sportsmen in their own right, and one of their
best friends growing up was a young lad called Martin van Jaarsveld, so garden
matches in the De Villiers home were hardly the gentle ‘French cricket’ that
many youngsters play growing up.
De Villiers would spend most of the day tearing around in the field, while
the bigger boys did all the batting and bowling. Eventually, towards the end of
the day, he’d be given a chance to bat for a few minutes. Theirs was not one of
those families where the baby brother got a few looping underarm-lobbed balls
to hit easily. Nor could he expect his older brothers to put in any pantomime
dives in the field, or deliberately let his shot trickle past them for easy runs.
Their play was friendly and fun, but always fierce. It was an unspoken thing, but
there was an understanding that talent ran in their blood, and that victory must
be hewn out of the hard rock of challenge – not soft, indulgent ease.
Wimbledon or Lords?
De Villiers’s earliest memories are a gallery of diverse sporting moments, and
surprisingly, cricket wasn’t really at the top of the list in his early years.
I grew up in a family that was totally sports-crazy. From my very earliest
preschool memories, I remember loving any kind of physical game, and
it was always a competition. If we didn’t have a ball to play with, we’d
find a hill and run down it to see who was the fastest. The very first
present I ever remember getting was a golf club, and it was like that
every Christmas and every birthday. I remember going to school and
seeing my mates playing with their latest remote-controlled car or
having water gun fights, and I’d be jealous of all these toys that we never
got. But in reality, I would never have had time for them anyway, and
wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
The first sport De Villiers really excelled in was tennis. At just six years old,
he was travelling all over the Highveld, playing in under-nine tournaments
and more than holding his own against players two years older than him. He
remembers his first competitive tennis match, against a tall blond boy called
Izak van der Merwe, who would later go on to be South Africa’s second-ranked
tennis professional and a national Davis Cup player.
Their encounter came soon after De Villiers had spent hours and hours
watching the French Open. He had been particularly taken with the French
umpires, sitting on their high perches, and shouting out strange terms like
‘quinze partout!’ and ‘egalite!’ De Villiers was 5–3 up in their match, and won
the next three consecutive points to be 40–0 up in the final game, but play had
to be suspended for a few minutes, so the umpire could stop laughing at the
little lad shouting across to the sidelines, ‘Mom, Mom! I’ve got three balle de
matches!’ He won that match and continued to excel as a young tennis player,
but at primary school, he began to play more and more team sports, and found
the perfect outlet for his urge to compete and his gregarious personality.
I loved my tennis, and the whole thing about one day being the world’s
best really started on the tennis court. I’d watch all the major tournaments
and dream of winning Wimbledon and being the world number one. I
was doing really well as a junior, so I had this goal forming in my mind
to be the best in the world, and as a child I always felt like I could do it.
Then I started playing rugby and cricket with my mates at school, and to
be honest, I just enjoyed those sports so much more. I loved being with
my mates and competing as a team. My focus shifted quite gradually
and naturally from tennis to cricket and rugby. I had believed that I
could be as good as any other tennis player, and that confidence just sort
of carried over to all the other sports.
Children have a wonderful gift for living in the moment, and that’s how De
Villiers approached his whirlwind of sporting commitments through primary
school. He dreamed of winning Wimbledon, but didn’t really give much
thought to actually being a professional sportsman. It was all about the game
and his love of competition. His rugby and cricket were the same, and whatever
the sport he was currently immersed in, competing, winning and being the very
best were all he thought about.
Early Defining Moments
De Villiers’s most defining childhood memories all involve his furiously
competitive efforts just to hold his own with his older brothers, but two other
moments stand out. The first was at the age of 11, when his Warmbaths team
went to play cricket in Nylstroom. At the time, he knew almost none of the
finer points of the game, and just went out to watch every ball until it exploded
off his bat towards the boundary. That’s exactly what happened, ball after ball,
and his score grew at a rapid rate. He reached his first ever 100, and had a
vague idea that this was a pretty important moment and he had seen guys on
TV raising their bat or something, so that’s exactly what he did. He went on
to score 150 runs off less than a 100 balls – quite extraordinary at that age,
and enough to get all the adults present imagining what this little guy might
achieve one day – but for De Villiers, it was just a particularly fun day of sport.
The other very early event that shaped De Villiers’s early life, was going to
watch a rugby match at brother Wessels’s high school – the famous Afrikaanse
Hoer Seunskool, or ‘Affies’. Affies is one of the finest sporting institutions in
South Africa, and every brick, every blade of grass, is steeped in its glorious
tradition. Every boy walking down its corridors is acutely aware of the countless
sporting greats whose path to greatness led them across those same paving
stones. Watching some of South Africa’s finest young rugby players hurling
themselves into battle, while 1 000 of their brothers-in-arms sang themselves
hoarse from the stands, was by far the most exciting thing eight-year-old De
Villiers had ever seen. At the end of the match, heart still racing from the
excitement of what he’d just seen – far better than any Wimbledon final – he
turned to his mother and said, ‘Mom, I’m going to go to Affies when I get to
high school’.
Off to Affies
Sure enough, at the age of 13, De Villiers made the 100km journey down
the N1 to move into his new home at the Affies boarding establishment.
Throughout junior school, De Villiers had taken it for granted that he would
be the best player in whatever team he played in, and Affies provided exactly
the kind of challenge and discipline he needed. With 250 other boys in his
year, many of whom had chosen Affies precisely because they were talented,
driven young sportsmen, De Villiers found himself in a far more competitive
environment than ever before.
Every place in every team pitted three or four really good young athletes
against each other, each competing fiercely for his place. De Villiers made
the Under-14A cricket side and, at the time, couldn’t believe how many great
cricketers were crammed into one age group. Of course, he couldn’t know at
the time that some of those big batting partnerships with guys like Faf du
Plessis and Jacques Rudolph would be repeated on the international stage a
few years later.
The whole environment at Affies seemed tailored specifically to bring the
best out of De Villiers. The incredible competition for places meant that no
player, no matter how gifted, could afford to coast on his talents alone. This
competition for places created an in-built discipline. If you missed a practice
or had an off day, there were a handful of hungry young competitors doing all
they could to take your place in the weekend’s starting line-up.
De Villiers had previously played his cricket instinctively, with very
little technical coaching. It had been purely about the joy of the game, and
backing his eye and reflexes to get the better of the bowler. He was now being
challenged daily by coaches who pushed him to work on the minor details of
his technique. His batting mentor was the late Colin Dettmer, who was also
the Tukkies 1st XI coach at the time, and later became part of the coaching
team of the great Australian side of the 90s. Today’s fans watching De Villiers
and Faf du Plessis sending opposition bowlers to every corner of the park on a
regular basis are enjoying the fruit of the countless hours Dettmer spent finetuning
their natural talents.
When De Villiers wasn’t in the batting nets under Dettmer’s critical eye,
he had wicketkeeping gloves on, with former SA test keeper Denis Lindsay
putting him through his paces. As you’d expect of a man who had shone
against the Australian test side, Lindsay had a thing or two to teach a young
wicketkeeper, but the strict discipline he brought to his training sessions was
every bit as important in De Villiers’s personal growth as the skills he was
learning.
Lindsay expected nothing less than the very best from his young proteges,
and a boy arriving a few minutes late for training would find himself walking
away without having touched a cricket ball. As a cricketer who’d played
alongside the very best, Lindsay had seen far too many young careers wrecked
by the laziness and entitlement that sometimes accompany exceptional talent,
and there was no way these weeds would take root in players under his wing.
In this intense environment of cricketing excellence, De Villiers absolutely
flourished. Faf du Plessis and De Villiers had already played against each other
throughout primary school, so playing together throughout high school, they
built a strong friendship and friendly rivalry. When either of them excelled,
the other would be sporting enough to be genuinely happy for his mate.
However, they would also recognise that the bar had been raised, and both
were competitive enough not to let the other stay ahead for long. Neither of
them realised that he was comparing himself to a guy who would one day
be a top international batsman, so the drive for excellence was non-stop and
intense. De Villiers’s years at Affies were an incredible cricketing education,
playing with the best, against the best, and being coached by the best.
And now a brief rant from the author ...
In recent years, I’ve noticed a growing phenomenon that I like to call the
Celebration of Mediocrity. This is a wonderful game in which one pretends to
one’s children that everyone is equally gifted at everything. Whatever the
activity, everybody must get equal turns. It’s vital that we all pretend that the
little guy who can’t chew gum and walk in a straight line at the same time is just
as coordinated as the kid who ‘luckily’ scored 100 today, and who will be rewarded
for his efforts by batting at number ten next week. I would like to humbly ask what
world these people think they’re preparing little Johnny and Susie for? And, what
transformation can we expect to magically create out of this world, which, let’s be
honest, tends to deal rather harshly with the soft and entitled?
I absolutely understand and agree that, at an early age, every child needs
to be given the opportunity to participate in all kinds of activities – sport,
music, art, the lot. In taking pot-shots at the celebrators of mediocrity, I do
also recognise that there’s a fine balance between encouraging excellence and
allowing people of all ages to enjoy all kinds of beneficial activities without
having to be the very best at all of them. For the vast majority of humanity
(perhaps all of us), our main motivations for playing sport should be pleasure,
friendship and a healthy lifestyle.
However, one of the common threads I’ve come across in virtually every
top athlete I’ve met is a culture of excellence that has become the norm for
them. It seems that most people from all walks of life seldom, if ever, visit the
outer limits of their potential. South African sport has been well served for
generations by schools such as Affies, Grey College, and countless others that
create phenomenal production lines for exceptional sporting talent. They provide
an incredibly competitive environment in which young athletes are surrounded
by other extremely gifted youngsters. This makes every single training session
highly competitive, and young players learn to train at maximum intensity at
every single session. This high level of performance, which they see every day,
becomes their norm, despite the fact that what they are seeing is actually quite
exceptional. A tremendously high standard is set, but it never occurs to a kid
that he can’t achieve it, because it’s all he’s ever known. Interestingly, these
schools tend to be places that don’t spend a lot of time celebrating mediocrity,
but rather emphasise competition and working extremely hard for recognition
and success.
There are plenty of highly qualified people who have done far more scientific
studies into the breeding grounds of excellence, but their books tend to be far
more boring than this one, so I’ll give you my opinion for what it’s worth. I’d
say that elite performance (in sport and in other fields) is the product of mixing
together in equal parts talent, competition, a genuine love for what you do, and
some great coaching. Many of us need to be a lot more daring (or unrealistic
even) in our expectations of ourselves, and to deliberately seek out uncomfortably
challenging environments that will bring out the best in us. For parents, coaches
and other adults out there who are investing in children, I’d say that this holds true
for your kids too, but first and foremost, find a way to make the process fun, and
be wise about how hard you push kids at any given age. Children who genuinely
love what they are doing will work far harder and for far longer than children in
an environment that’s so regimented that they stop enjoying what they’re doing.
De Villiers’s cricketing success was consistent and impressive throughout high
school, but the thought of one day making a full-time living as a cricketer
hadn’t yet occurred to him. He was still dabbling in a bit of tennis and really
loved his golf (in fact, he still does to this day – somehow managing a scratch
handicap on an astonishingly low investment of hours). However, if sport is
a religion at Affies, then rugby is its holiest order. As an exciting flyhalf at
primary school and the star of his team, De Villiers had dreamed of playing for
the famous Wit Bulle ever since that deeply impressionable moment at the age
of eight when he first watched the Affies 1st XV in action.
So, it was a bitterly unpleasant surprise when rugby handed De Villiers
the first serious setback of his sporting life, shortly after his very first Affies
trials in Standard 6. Apparently, he was too small to play in any of the top
five sides, and so he found himself on one of the distant side fields, playing
for the Under-14Fs every Saturday. He soldiered on, and his exploits for the
Under-14Fs secured his spot in the Under-15Fs the following year. It was
baffling – there he was playing provincial cricket at every age group and a
natural with any ball thrown to him, but he couldn’t even crack one of the
top five age group rugby sides. In Standard 8, De Villiers decided to hang up
his F-team rugby jersey and try his luck with a hockey stick instead. None
of the hockey coaches told him he was too small, and he found himself back
in a hugely successful Affies Under-16A hockey team that went on to beat
Pretoria Boys High – arch rivals and usually the top hockey school in the
province.
However, he missed the sheer joy of playing rugby so much that the
following year in Standard 9, De Villiers dusted off his boots and went down
to training. His expectations had been beaten down to a fairly low level, and he
was just looking forward to getting back into the game. He soon found himself
in familiar territory – playing for the fifth side – but nonetheless, having a
fantastic time.
Sometimes success is just about hanging in there long enough for an
opportunity to come around, and towards the end of Standard 9, De Villiers’s
chance came. Two flyhalves above him in the pecking order were out injured,
so in the space of a week, he found himself propelled into the lofty heights
of third team. He had waited four years for an opportunity to show his rugby
mettle, and so he seized his chance with both hands and played an absolute
blinder. Immediately after the game, the 2nd XV coach called him into his
squad to play against Pretoria Boys the next weekend.
It was a dramatic turnaround. In the space of 12 days, he had gone from
5th XV rugby on the distant side fields to playing in the curtain-raiser to one
of the biggest 1st XV games of the season, and in front of nearly 10 000 fans.
On the rugby field that Saturday, De Villiers discovered something that would
become an important part of his cricketing toolkit later in life – the fact that
he thrived on the big stage.
He played the best rugby of his life so far, wreaking havoc in the Pretoria
Boys defence with fantastic stepping and creative distribution. He created
several tries, and converted seven out of seven kicks at goal. It was the second
last game of the season, but the 1st XV had an extended run of matches in the
Beeld Trophy after the regular season ended, and De Villiers found himself
playing off the bench for the mighty Wit Bulle just three weeks after his last
5th XV game.
De Villiers’s matric year was about as good as it gets for a sports-mad
schoolboy. After a dramatic rise to the rugby 1st XV the year before, he started
the season as first-choice flyhalf in a powerful Affies side, which included an
extraordinarily large and lightning-quick youngster called Pierre Spies. His
rugby season got better still when he was selected as the Craven Week flyhalf
for a Blue Bulls Under-18 side that included Spies, Chilliboy Rallapelle and
Derick Kuun. Playing for Affies in front of thousands of spectators against
South Africa’s very best schoolboys is intoxicating stuff for any 18-year-old.
He’s since played cricket in front of nearly a 100 000 fans at the Melbourne
Cricket Ground, and taken on India surrounded by seething masses of diehard
cricket fans, but to this day, De Villiers rates those Saturday afternoons
playing rugby in Pretoria as unique and among the most incredible sporting
moments of his life.
As a sensational final season of schoolboy rugby came to an end, cricket was
once again on top of the pile, and it was at the interprovincial cricket week,
representing Northerns, that De Villiers first realised he might have a future as
a professional cricketer. He batted and kept wicket brilliantly – well enough to
make the South Africa Under-19 team, and to attract the attention of Titan’s
coach Dave Nosworthy, who had a chat with him about a contract to join the
Titans the following year.
A Meteoric Start to Senior Cricket
The Titans had to wait though, as De Villiers decided to enrol at the
University of Pretoria instead, with the noble, but short-lived intention of
pursuing a sport science degree while building his cricket career. Perhaps
it was the absence of big-moment pressure to bring out the best in him, or
maybe De Villiers was having a bit too much fun enjoying the freedom of
student life after the rigid discipline of Affies. Whatever the reason, early
11
AB De Villiers
in his varsity career De Villiers found himself playing for the Tukkies 2nd
team and far below his potential, while his mate Faf du Plessis was scoring
runs regularly for the 1st team. However, across at the Titans, coach Dave
Nosworthy had seen enough in De Villiers the year before with the SA
U19s to take a punt on his ability. With the Canadian national team touring
South Africa, Nosworthy had decided to field a young development team
and created a local controversy by plucking a 19-year-old out of the relative
obscurity of 2nd team university cricket to play for the Titans.
Once again, De Villiers’s affinity for the big occasion was evident, as he
scored a century, and in the process, convinced Nosworthy that his future lay
in first-class cricket. After the Canada game, Nosworthy pulled De Villiers
aside for a blunt heart-to-heart, essentially telling him to stop messing around
at university, sign a contract, get into the gym, and start giving his cricketing
talents the attention they deserved. Faced with the choice between provincial
cricket the next weekend, or going back to the lofty heights of Tukkies 2nds,
De Villiers signed up and decided to focus all his sporting gifts into being the
best cricketer he could be.
His step up from Varsity 2nds to professional cricket for the Titans had a
distinct similarity to his progress from Affies 5ths to their 1st team, and De
Villiers became aware of this ‘other’ gear that he seemed to be able to find when
the competition demanded it. His first full provincial game for the Titans was a
four-day match, and De Villiers took the step up effortlessly, scoring fifties in both
innings. The next match came round, and De Villiers made it four consecutive
fifties in his first four innings. Hardly the worst start to his professional career,
and first-class cricket was beginning to seem like the easiest and most pleasant
way imaginable for a 19-year-old bloke to make a living.
His dream debut season continued with a brief post-season stint in Ireland,
where he immediately notched up a few big hundreds. With three months
still to go on his Irish contract, he scored two double-hundreds in consecutive
matches, prompting a call from Ray Jennings to tell De Villiers to pack his kit
bag, make some apologies to his Irish teammates and head down to Zimbabwe
to play for the South Africa A side.
De Villiers ended up liking the Zimbabwean bowlers a lot more than they
liked him. Big scores in Zimbabwe were followed by more of the same against
a touring New Zealand A side shortly afterwards. Understandably, De Villiers
went into the 2004/2005 season brimming with confidence and ready to take
on the world. This was just as well, because the season started with all the
top Proteas players back with their provinces, and the 19-year-old newcomer
found himself up against some of the best players in the world.
At the time, he was still hardly more than a kid, going with the flow and
perhaps taking for granted how easily things were happening for him at the
start of his career. Ten years on, De Villiers has a more seasoned perspective,
with a fair dose of wonder at the hand life dealt him in those early years.
You know, at the time I just didn’t think about it that much. For a
start, I had no other experience of professional cricket to compare mine
against, so I probably took some of my good fortune for granted. The
other thing I see looking back is that, as a youngster, things happen so
fast. When every experience is brand new, it’s really hard to take a step
back, slow things down and put the whole thing in perspective. Looking
back on it now, it was really pretty miraculous how circumstances
opened up for me – firstly getting a chance to play in an unusual game
for the Titans against Canada, despite being nowhere near the Titans
squad. Then being thrown into the SA A team after just a few months
of provincial cricket. I was also really fortunate that I was emerging
right as the Proteas were in a really bad run of form, and had just lost a
series in Sri Lanka. I think some of the selectors at the time were keen
to change things up a bit and were actively looking for new talent. It’s a
good thing that right at that time I was scoring runs for the Titans and
SA A rather than messing around with Tukkies seconds!
Even against the Proteas’ best bowlers, De Villiers continued to thrive. He
scored 150 against a Cobra’s attack led by the terrifying Dale Steyn, and
promptly got another century against Makhaya Ntini’s Warriors. With the
Proteas’ selectors eager to blood new talent, De Villiers was banging down
the door by scoring big runs almost at will, seemingly unaffected by who was
bowling at the other end.
Stepping onto the International Stage
At just 20 years of age, he found himself in the Proteas test side to play England,
and up against Steve Harmison, the world’s best fast bowler at the time. In his
first test series, De Villiers averaged a promising 36, including his first test
fifty, and through 2005, he built on this start, scoring his first test century and
averaging over 53 in his first full year of international cricket. However, across
all sports at the highest level, there’s this nasty little phrase – ‘second season
syndrome’ – that De Villiers was about to become very familiar with.
De Villiers began his career with boundless talent and confidence, and had
scored a big pile of runs before opposition bowlers could take a look at his
technique, and start probing and picking at it for flaws. By the time the Proteas
faced Pakistan in 2006, bowlers such as Mohammad Asif, wily masters of their
craft, had begun to pick up a few weak spots in De Villiers’s batting, and the
previous gush of runs that seemed to erupt every time he strode out to the
crease dried up almost instantly.
I don’t think I’d ever faced bowlers who literally put every single ball
on the same tiny little patch of grass where it was almost impossible
to hit. I was doing all I could just to survive, and couldn’t seem to buy
a run at the time. I had never been the most technical batsman, but
now I was facing guys who would relentlessly go after the areas of my
technique that weren’t solid, and I was getting exposed. Being young
and successful was obviously pretty easy, but I tell you what – when the
going got tough, and there I was just 20 years old, and in this intense
spotlight the whole time ... No-one had prepared me for that, and I
honestly don’t know how I got through the next two years in one piece,
let alone kept my place in the Proteas squad.
After a disastrous series against Pakistan, De Villiers did slightly better
against Australia, but was still struggling. He would lose his wicket cheaply at
times, and even when he felt he was seeing the ball like a basketball and hitting
it sweetly, he’d get to the mid-30s and then go out without getting the big runs
he desperately needed. Strangely, years of success built on his vast talent started
to count against him, as he had never previously had to learn to squeeze runs
painstakingly slowly out of a treacherous wicket or against a flawless bowling
attack. In the past, his free, aggressive style allowed him to amass huge scores in
no time at all, but he had not yet learned to build a slow, difficult innings, and
test cricket is one helluva place to start learning new tricks.
Short of runs he may have been, but one thing De Villiers had in a
superfluous abundance was advice. He’d turn his phone on after a flight to find
30 messages stacked up, all from well-meaning friends, coaches and random
people from his past, but completely unhelpful to a young guy desperately
trying to slow things down and simplify them.
I’d have this guy telling me to change my backlift, and another guy
telling me to take guard differently or change my foot movement. All of
them genuinely believed they’d identified the secret to getting me back
on form, but it was just overwhelming.
In the end, De Villiers chose a few trusted friends to listen to, and managed
to shut out the rest of the voices screaming for his attention. His old senior at
Affies, Jacques Rudolph, encouraged him to just write down everything that
he knew worked for him. Jonty Rhodes helped him to develop the habit of
focusing completely on one ball at a time, and not letting anything else into his
headspace when he went out to bat. He found that the quietest, most reasoned
voices were the ones that helped the most, and would listen to a guy like Gary
Kirsten who had a way of bringing a calm perspective to his troubles in the
middle of a cricket oval.
His form had plunged to a low plateau, where he seemed stuck throughout
2006, and eventually Proteas coach Mickey Arthur came up to him after a nets
session, put his arm around De Villiers’s shoulders and spoke a few gentle,
frank words.
He told me that he felt he owed it to me to let me know that my next
match was probably my last shot at keeping my place in the side. I’ve
always had a lot of time for Mickey, and I think he knew that I responded
well to big moments. He also knew that some of the selectors were ready
to bring in someone else, with the 2007 World Cup just around the
corner, so he was playing it straight with me, and giving me a chance to
respond to pressure.
Arthur’s approach proved to be an inspired piece of man-management, and he
had created the kind of do-or-die environment that De Villiers had so often
thrived in. De Villiers scored 67 runs in his next one-day international (ODI),
and then scored a match-winning 80-odd at Newlands in the following game.
Although his progress through 2007 was still gradual and not without challenges,
he had turned a corner and fought his way back into the selectors’ favour.
The Proteas have built a very-unwanted tradition of performing
badly at World Cups, and the 2007 event in the West Indies was another
disappointment for South African cricket. On a personal level though, De
Villiers continued to rebuild his confidence and regain the selectors’ faith by
scoring his first ever ODI century against the tournament hosts, and averaging
45 for the tournament. Not a bad average at all, but one that could have been
much fatter if not for two ducks against global cricket minnows Ireland and
the Netherlands – further evidence to suggest that De Villiers was at his best
when he was backed into a corner against the world’s top bowlers.
Growing into his Potential
One of the distinctions of consistently world-class sportsmen is that their
excellence is intrinsic, not extrinsic. Their success is consistent because it’s borne
out of their own confidence, mental toughness and preparation, rather than
the result of a complex combination of external factors all aligning perfectly
every now and then. As it turns out, 2007 was a pivotal year for De Villiers,
and he turned a corner into 2008 when the world began to see a more mature,
consistent competitor who was beginning to drive his own success from within.
Mickey Arthur’s well-timed and carefully chosen words may have been the
starting point of this maturing process, but a number of other factors also came
into play. De Villiers rates Graeme Smith as the best captain the game has ever
seen, but having had the captaincy thrust upon him at an unbelievably young
age, it had taken a few years for Smith to grow into the role. By 2008, the
leadership combination of Arthur and Smith had created a stable, confident and
happy Proteas camp, and De Villiers was in the kind of positive environment
he could thrive in.
Another defining moment in 2007 happened by chance during a flight from
Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg. After a gruelling cricket match, De Villiers
was enjoying some peace and quiet during the flight and looking forward
to getting home. So, when another passenger approached him and asked if
he could sit next to him and chat for ten minutes, De Villiers had to hide
his initial annoyance, and hoped the ten minutes wouldn’t stretch into the
entire flight. His new neighbour was sports-writer and businessman, Edward
Griffiths, best known for his work as CEO of SA Rugby Football Union in
the 90s and current CEO of Saracens Rugby Club. Griffiths started asking
De Villiers questions about how his legal, financial and sponsorship affairs
were being managed, and told De Villiers that he would like to provide a team
to manage every aspect of his business off the field. Most astonishing of all,
Griffiths said that he wanted to do all of this for no fee.
He was initially skeptical, but agreed to meet Griffiths a few weeks later and
dig a bit deeper into all the ways Griffiths claimed he could simplify his affairs.
Trust was built over time and through a series of meetings, and eventually De
Villiers agreed to let Griffiths manage his affairs, which he now considers one
of the best decisions he ever made.
Edward Griffiths has been incredible to me. He’s put people in place
to manage literally everything, from my taxes and sponsorships to my
property investments and charitable work. It’s been completely lifechanging
and meant that I could focus one hundred per cent on my day
job, which was scoring as many runs as I could. What’s most incredible
is that he’s never taken a fee, and I honestly have no idea what motivated
him to offer so much help in that first conversation.
In a harmonious Proteas setup and with his personal affairs being run for
him like a well-oiled machine, De Villiers was growing up as a cricketer and
becoming more self-critical. He knew he had all the shots he needed to score
freely, but he began to understand that his team needed him to bring a new
obdurate element to his game in the tough conditions, and start spending a lot
more time at the crease. He needed to start turning his exciting 30s and 40s
into match-winning, bowler-breaking, massive scores.
I think, as a young player, I had limited myself by what I thought I was
capable of. I couldn’t imagine myself batting on and on for hours. I
thought I was the kind of player who could score a quick hundred at a
run-a-ball, but just never saw myself spending a whole day at the crease,
and piling up the big double-hundreds. In 2008, I began to question
that mentality, and I replaced it with a different approach. Scoring runs
wasn’t my problem, so I began to focus on really protecting my wicket
and challenged myself to produce a level of concentration that I just
never expected of myself before. To be honest, it was often as simple as
reminding myself just to watch the ball – every ball, and for hours and
hours at a time.
Throughout 2008, De Villiers started putting together some seriously big
innings. Playing against India in Ahmedabad he scored 217, breaking the 200
mark for the first time himself, and becoming the first-ever South African to
do so against India. Shortly after that innings, he scored a patient 174 against
England, and the cricket world began to take note of the emergence of a
world-class batsman.
De Villiers found himself ranked among the world’s ten top test batsmen,
and yet felt that he was just at the beginning of a steep improvement curve.
Quite suddenly, it felt as though his dream of being the world’s best cricketer
was close enough to reach out and touch. Putting this goal into the public
space could have been a disastrous move for an athlete without De Villiers’s
exceptional affinity for pressure, but by 2009, De Villiers had got to know
himself pretty well. Publicly admitting just how much he expected of himself
ensured that every time he padded up and walked out to the crease, the pressure
was well and truly on.
The rest, as they say, is history. Or, in De Villiers’s case, history-making.
By the start of 2013, South Africa were dominating test cricket, with one of
the best top-order batting line-ups in recent memory. Hashim Amla, AB de
Villiers and Jacques Kallis are all ranked in the world’s top ten test batsmen
at the time of writing, and cricket grounds are finding it harder and harder to
pre-sell tickets to the fourth and fifth days of test matches in South Africa,
with the Proteas making a habit of winning well inside the distance.
Playing for Fun
It seems self-explanatory that a game should be played for fun, but international
cricket is uniquely pressurised and tough – even when compared to other
sports. The number of weeks that players spend touring overseas is immense
and, for a batsman particularly, one bad moment can mean the end of your
game. Two bad moments becomes a serious form problem, and careers hang in
the balance. As De Villiers grew into one of the senior players in the Proteas
side, one of the leadership roles that came most naturally to him was keeping
the touring environment fun and light-hearted.
I remember a tour to India when we were put up in this really strange hotel
with some bizarre artwork in the rooms. My room had windows opening
onto a courtyard inside the hotel, and as luck would have it, Graeme Smith’s
room was next door to mine. One evening at dinner, he was telling us all
about his room having a ‘bad vibe’ and he had clearly got himself a little
freaked out. Well that was too good an invitation to turn down. I popped
into his room for coffee later than evening, and when he wasn’t looking, I
opened the window nearest my room just a crack, and pulled the curtain
shut over it. Later, when everyone was in bed, I climbed out of my room and
into Graeme’s suite. The window I had opened was into his lounge area, and
fortunately there was a shut door between me and his bedroom, so I could
get up to a lot of mischief. I started by turning on the TV at full volume
and then hopping out the window quickly, so Graeme came through to find
the room empty with the TV blaring. He turned it off and went to bed, so
ten minutes later, I climbed back into his room, and this time moved all the
furniture around before turning the TV on and getting out again. By round
three, he was so disturbed he wouldn’t even come out of his bedroom to
turn the TV off. He ended up calling reception to send security up and to
organise him a new room that wasn’t haunted!
Being the Best
Despite the public attention De Villiers’s personal goals have attracted, he’s
surprisingly unfazed by batting averages and personal milestones, and cannot
divorce his personal goals from the success of the Proteas in all three forms of
the game. The Proteas’ test form has been sublime recently, but in the shorter
versions of the game – ODIs and T20s – things have not gone quite so well
since the Proteas slipped from first place in the world ODI rankings in 2012.
While the watching world will keep an eye on De Villiers’s stats and his
ranking in the international batting charts, he prefers to judge his progress by
the value he adds to the team.
Since I made my comment about wanting to become the world’s best
cricketer, people have obviously become very interested in my batting
stats. It’s quite ironic though, because I don’t pay attention to that stuff at
all. I don’t check the batting rankings at all anymore, and for me success
is about adding the most value I can every time I get to play cricket for
South Africa. In fact, I think that this obsession with batting averages is
actually very one-dimensional, and you have to judge a cricketer in the
context of his contribution to the team. I’ve played in matches where a
guy like Bouch (Mark Boucher) has been a match-winner with 30 runs.
The way he’s lifted the guys around him and helped them to score more
runs and perform at their best has been the difference between winning
and losing, but if you don’t go further than scrolling down the scorecard,
you’ll never appreciate his value. When I step out into the middle,
if the way I play helps us to succeed collectively, then on that day I’ve
achieved my goal.
Author’s Reflection
Legendary South African fast-bowler Peter Pollock once said that he became
one of the world’s best bowlers primarily because of the countless hours he spent
trying not to get hit to all corners of the back garden by his brother Graeme. He
said that if he had realised that he was bowling to one of the greatest batsmen of
his generation, he’d probably have been a lot easier on himself, but fortunately, all
he knew was that he couldn’t let his brother get the better of him. AB’s childhood,
and his years at Affies tell the same story in different words. Natural talent needs
to be passed through the furnace of competition to be refined, and AB’s early
years provided the refining fire his gifts needed most. From competing against
his talented older brothers, to having to fight for his place at one of the strongest
sporting schools in South Africa, the first 18 years of his life offered virtually no
opportunities to take it easy and rest on his laurels.
There’s no such thing as a world-class athlete who hasn’t invested a tremendous
amount of work into his skills, but AB places a lot more value on quality than
quantity. I asked him if he put in more hours in the nets than the guys around
him growing up, and his response was that he possibly trained with a little more
intensity than most, rather than spending far more time in the nets.
Whether it was a fielding session, or a warm-up game of touch or soccer, I’ve
always been the guy wringing buckets of sweat out of my shirt afterwards. I
probably didn’t do a whole lot more minutes and hours than a lot of the other
guys, but I think I might have got a better return on every hour I trained
because of the focus I brought to my practices. And that probably had
something to do with having to be on top of my game every single second I
played with my older brothers growing up if I wanted to survive.
