AB de Villiers: Man and Superman

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

IN a former life, I worked for a 24-hour television news channel. My job was to threaten writers with violence until they delivered enough scripts and video clips to feed the monster that was the sport bulletin broadcast every half-hour. It is, and will remain, the undisputed lowlight of what I presume to call my career.

But it had its moments. Like the day one of the writers was suspiciously desperate to take a lunch hour.

“Lunch?” I rasped under a spiked eyebrow.

In that godawful place, lunch was foraged out of greasy packaging held in one hand while the other hand continued to bang out scripts and cut video.

So, I was not best pleased at this outrageousness: “Lunch? What?”

“Yes, lunch,” she said with an incongruously sweet smile.

Months later I discovered that she did not lunch alone that day. Her date was AB de Villiers.

He has that effect on people does Abraham Benjamin de Villiers - makes them want to do what they should not want to do. Countless bowlers will attest to that, as countless more will before he hangs up his audacity.

His most recent lunch dates, West Indies, know this only too well. The innings De Villiers unleashed on them on what might have been a lazy Sunday in Johannesburg in January had a one-day international at the Wanderers not been plonked into the middle of it proved that even the most innovative batsman in the game is not done innovating.

That De Villiers scored the fastest ODI hundred that day was peripheral, the halo on the angel. How he scored it mattered far more. There was no way to bowl to him and escape a hiding; no chance of holing up somewhere until the hurricane blew itself out. The Windies needed all hands on deck, and that was not nearly enough to stop De Villiers until the 49th over.

It is not that De Villiers has somehow become a better or a more assertive player. Instead, it is that a light that has for years been hidden under the bushels of players like Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith has emerged into all its incandescent glory. He has always been this good. Thing is, others have been more trusted in a culture that remains uneasy with the stupendous. With De Villiers, stupendous comes standard.

“My thinking was to be aggressive,” he said of that innings. “You don’t often come in and get momentum behind you right away. More often than not, you’ve got to work for it. Today was an exception. Sometimes you’ve got to work harder to get that sniff, or get that click. Today it just happened from the word go.”

“You have to read the game to see what the bowler is trying to do. You can’t just let him bowl at you; you have to try and take the initiative and put him under pressure. I don’t know how many balls I faced, and I premeditated shots. But you’ve got to take the initiative and take it to the bowler.

“I’ve hit the ball better before, believe it or not. But on this kind of wicket and on this field, if you’re in decent form and you swing hard and get a bit of luck behind you, you can do amazing things.”

Amazing things are what De Villiers has done all his life, whether he has been on the cricket ground, the rugby field, the tennis court, the swimming pool or the golf course. Why did he choose cricket? Rugby careers are shorter and ask a higher physical price, and none of those other sports can be turned into a career in South Africa.

Unlike Hashim Amla, who seems to barely move a muscle - and never changes his gloves - to pile up his mountains of runs, or Faf du Plessis, who will bat all day and more and to hell with how many runs he does not score, or Quinton de Kock, whose batting is orthodoxy on steroids, De Villiers is cricket’s mad inventor. But, unlike Dr Frankenstein’s, his creations are seamless and scar-free and as elegant as the artisanal monster is a lumbering oaf. And De Villiers does not need to wait for lightning to spark it all to life: he packs his own.

From the time the ball leaves the bowler’s hand to the moment it needs to be dealt with, De Villiers is capable of mentally flipping through even the most modern coaching manual, choosing two or three options, deciding against any or all of them, and fashioning something bespoke instead; something that looks like it has been part of cricket for much longer than the nanosecond he has taken to devise it.

More often than not, De Villiers’ choice seems obvious and proves perfect - as if he has for years now been cartwheeling down the pitch at diabolical diagonals to connect the ball on the up and propel it way out of reach of where any fielder could expect it to go.

De Villiers bats like a tightrope walker who could not be bothered to check whether his rope is tight. If it is not, he will die a messy death many metres below. If it is, life goes on. Somehow, De Villiers is still flying high in rude health.

And he does it all without arrogance, without showing off. A small example, extreme in its own way: after lunch on day three of the third Test against West Indies at Newlands in January, De Villiers - having already grabbed his headline by reverse sweeping Marlon Samuels for four to reach his century - whipped Sulieman Benn behind square leg and deep into the outfield.

On his way back to the crease to complete a second run, he stopped some three metres short of his ground. A spot of disturbed pitch on an off-stump line had caught his eye. So he paused to prod it down. Thing is, the throw was already arching from the outfield towards the wicketkeeper when De Villiers interrupted his return to safety. He knew this, and still he stood there as if he was tending his front lawn on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But he also knew, by some vectorial instinct, exactly how long he needed to make it back without causing undue alarm. And he did.

Few in the crowd reacted to this blatant violation of the received wisdom of Cricket, How To Play. Perhaps they did not see it. Perhaps they had seen it - or something like it - too many times before to pay it much heed. We are dealing with AB de Villiers, after all.

This is too easy. Anyone who cannot gush with hyperbole about the magnificent mayhem that is De Villiers at the crease should have their pulse checked.

But it is away from the crease that De Villiers is most interesting. When he has a bat in his hands, he always knows how to go from A to B in record time. When he is off the field, he walks a crooked line to get from one to the other.

However, De Villiers is canny enough not to be drawn into discussions about South Africa’s attempts to undo the damage caused to cricket and wider society by the rampant racism that preceded the country’s democratic era. Quota selection does not, officially, exist. Which only gives rise to unfair whispering when black players are picked - white players never have their credentials questioned in the same way.

A player of De Villiers’ abundant gifts is unlikely to be pushed out by politics, but even so his silence on the issue would be pertinent if it was not also the default position of all his teammates. South Africa’s perceived quotas seem to be of much greater interest abroad than they are in South Africa. The players are neither scared nor calculating by not speaking out: they simply do not care. As the No. 1 Test team in the world, why would they? They are also silent about a far more important goal: putting a more representative team on the field.

But De Villiers has vacillated with something close to impunity between saying he will do anything his team needs him to and voicing his reluctance about keeping wicket because of a chronic back problem.

He was not behind the stumps in either of South Africa’s Tests in Sri Lanka in July. “In the last game I had that ‘hammy’ issue,” he said between the matches. “That’s sort of recovered, but my back has always been an issue.

“It’s difficult to take on the gloves, especially keeping in mind that I haven’t kept for - what is it - six or seven months now. So, with that injury and a two-day turnaround after the day off yesterday, for me to get into shape with my gloves on, and considering my back, would be a little bit unfair.

“I’m still willing to take the gloves for the boys. I just have to come in into a series prepared without any niggles.

“I’d still like to think that I’m a wicketkeeping batsman and whatever the team wants me to do, I’ll do that. If they want me to take the gloves, I’d like to do that.”

When Quinton de Kock tore ankle ligaments warming up for the third day of the first Test against West Indies at Centurion in December, De Villiers was the logical emergency replacement behind the stumps.

But, going on what he said in June, surely he would not do the job in the second match of the series. Yes, he would. And in the third Test.

So, which is it? Does De Villiers want to keep wicket or not? Or does he want to do what the team prefer? Or to tell us - and the public - what he thinks we want to hear?

Part of this problem is that modern cricketers are conditioned to be positive in the press, no matter what. So even someone as sensible as Amla sprouts silliness, like he did after the last day of the second Test against West Indies was washed out: “If we had bowled the whole day today we might have had some tired bodies with just the two-day turnaround (before the third Test).”

Does that mean Amla is unhappy with Cricket South Africa over the playing schedule? No. It means he is desperately looking for sunshine in the gloom.

But De Villiers is nowhere near as sensible as Amla. He tends to say what he thinks is the safest thing, as per the suits’ wont. But sometimes he forgets who and what he is, and silliness like “We were the better team in Australia” tumbles forth - so how come the Aussies won that November one-day series 4-1? - and “jet lag comes into play (flying from Perth to Canberra)”. Umm, that’s a three-hour time difference.

In moments like these it is difficult for those who see and hear De Villiers often enough to curb the cruel thought that he could be brainlessly brilliant.

On the field, he is a certified genius. Off it, he has the manners of an impeccably raised young man and the manner of the ambassador to Lichtenstein trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East; not a little out of his depth. It is the difference between a penguin in water and on ice.

This is not meant as spiteful. In fact, De Villiers will not take umbrage at anything above, mostly because he will not have read it - he does not take notice of what is said and written about him in the media - but also because he knows better.

Late one night in December, 2012, De Villiers and some of his teammates wobbled into “The Lucky Shag”, a bar perched on the banks of the Swan River. Many hours earlier, South Africa had beaten Australia by 309 runs to seal a 2-1 Test series triumph. Our conversation went like this:

“Y’know AB, sometimes we have to write not that nice things about you.”

“And? Have I ever complained? You have a job to do. I understand.”

That’s the thing with De Villiers: just when he has convinced you he is the epitome of the dumb jock he proves why he is not. Any number of apparently intelligent, thoughtful mature players have no clue why the press are not their fans. De Villiers, it seems, does.

So, as capable as he is of making himself look stupid in his dealings with journalists, De Villiers also appreciates the media’s role. This is so not because he has been trained accordingly - if he had been, he would not say the things he does - but because, stripped of all that talent, skill and stardom, De Villiers is a basic bloke imbued with intentions more good than bad. Happen upon him in public or at a restaurant and he will wave and smile. So will his wife, Danielle. The son of a doctor, noisily Christian and a wannabe pop singer, De Villiers is that corny thing: utterly middle class and happy to be accepted as such.

However, unlike Dale Steyn, who revels in being one of cricket’s rock stars, or Amla, whose unease at being a public figure thawed only after he was named South Africa’s Test captain, De Villiers is comfortable with being one of the most recognised figures in the game.

This he has in fact been trained to do. As a schoolboy prodigy in any sport he cared to attempt, De Villiers was famous in his milieu long before he became the giant we know today. And Pretoria is not any old milieu - it is a place where school sport is taken only slightly less seriously than what happens at senior level.

So De Villiers name, face and exploits have been splashed across newspapers since he was a boy. That he attended the prestigious Afrikaans Hoer Seunskool did not hurt his assimilation into the ranks of the rarefied.

But, after the 2011 World Cup, De Villiers went where even he had not gone before. Not at any level of the cricket he had played previously had he captained a team. Often, Faf du Plessis - who went to the same school as De Villiers and played for many of the same teams - took that responsibility. De Villiers was simply the star, not the leader. However, when Graeme Smith relinquished those reins job De Villiers picked them up.

Why? Call it growing up. Or answering the call that would have been buzzing inside him because of his conservative, Calvinist upbringing. Or even becoming a little bored with the diminishing challenge of flaying attacks.

Initially, he struggled to get his head around managing an attack in the accepted manner. But Gary Kirsten’s philosophy of spreading the leadership load among the senior players allowed De Villiers the time and the space he needed to grow into captaincy. He was always going to set an inspirational example, but the smaller stuff like overrates and field placings tended to trip him up - not unlike the engineers on the Brooklyn Bridge forgetting to check that all the nuts and bolts had been tightened.

The 2015 World Cup looms for De Villiers like the spire atop the Chrysler Building, a shimmering prize on a towering perch that will take some climbing. No South African captain has been up there, has not even ventured as high as the final. Will De Villiers be different? He is already in that, for all his ability to play cricket to a level rarely seen, he can be clumsy in the public glare and he has had to learn how to captain a team. But, despite his missteps, he has yet to flinch in the media spotlight and he has shown himself to be a keen student of the lessons of leadership.

De Villiers is what results when an ordinary man is given extraordinary gifts. He goes to the World Cup with a team that has, by their standards, an ordinary record in major tournaments. But Amla and Steyn - and, of course, De Villiers himself - lend this generation the gleam of the extraordinary. All three of them were there that extraordinary night in Dhaka four years ago when an ordinary New Zealand Zealand team who had posted a duly ordinary 221/8 found a way to beat South Africa’s extraordinaires in their World Cup quarter-final.

That was then. Now, De Villiers, Amla and Steyn are at or near the pinnacle of the game. They know that, just as they know they will never be better players. This may not turn out to be their World Cup, but they will never have a chance as good as this to make a World Cup theirs.

So, if South Africa do the unthinkable and win it, De Villiers would not be able to claim as much credit as, say, Imran Khan was entitled to when Pakistan triumphed in 1992. And he would not want it.

When he is at the crease, De Villiers knows no boundaries. But they are strewn elsewhere in his life - when he is captaining his team, or trying to tiptoe around a tricky issue in a press conference, or sitting in a restaurant with his wife. The difference between him and other players of similar stature is that De Villiers knows where the invisible line is drawn; where the star ends and the person begins.

As long as he does not allow that line to blur, as long as he remembers that he has weaknesses to go with his many strengths, as long as he is who he is, he will not lunch alone.