Hash v KP: the sacred and the profane

GQ Magazine - December 2013

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Leonardo da Vinci painted his mountains blue. Glance past Mona Lisa looking languidly at you and, indeed, the peaks extending to the left and right of her, many miles from where she is smiling her forever beguiling smile, swirl with a deep, moody blue.

In the edifice of modern cricketers, who are ranged at least as far from their obsessed public as the mountains are behind Mona Lisa, Hashim Amla and Kevin Pietersen loom among the tallest summits. They are thus, in Leonardo’s logic, both blue.

Even genius makes mistakes. Amla and Pietersen glitter equally in the firmament of world stars and both their records and reputations will shine on for decades after they have vacated the limelight. But they are as contrasting a couple of characters as it is possible for a couple of characters to be contrasting.

They are polar opposites as starkly contrasting as the Mona Lisa is from Picasso’s Guernica. So much so that the thought of Amla’s ego flickering anywhere except at the centre of his being is as unimaginable as the idea of Pietersen being able to imagine a universe without him at its centre.

But connections they have a few, not least that they were born and brought to manhood in KwaZulu-Natal, that they learned to play the game of cricket there, and of course, that they wield a bat with as much panache as anyone does in this era and more than many ever have or ever will. However, the different paths they have taken to reach that shared summit define them more than anything else.

If a dressingroom is enough space to hold a host of personalities each wildly wayward from the others – and it is - how much more so a province?

Pietermaritzburg, where Pietersen was born, slumps sleepily 67 kilometres inland from the steaming sprawl of Durban, where Amla took his first yell. Maritzburg breathes the stale air of a crumbling colonial outpost where people live in distrust of anything that arrived in the world after 1952 – the year the frumpy old woman they blithely call “The Queen” ascended to a throne far, far away. All of which no doubt helped Pietersen slip into his faux-Pom accent soon after arriving in England in 2000 and eased the pain of the tattooist’s needle when he had the Three Lions Rampant inked into his skin forever.

Durban likes to think of itself as the peachy, beachy party capital of the country, a place of poison and passion and perfect weather where no-one without a tan and sand between their toes is to be trusted. It is also home to the world’s biggest diaspora of people who can trace their roots to the Indian sub-continent. Amla, whose grandparents hail from Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat, is among them.

Pietersen attended Maritzburg College, the elite school that remains the beating heart of a city where small is big and old is everything. Amla went to Durban High School, still the natural habitat of the scions of the ODF - the Old Durban Families who not many years ago would look down on those who came from the wrong side of the Berea.

Pietersen is the son of a regte egte Afrikaner railwayman father and an English-born mother. In their home religion was an expression of Calvinist resilience and faith, a reminder of how tough you had to be to survive in the world, and an opportunity to make mischief.

“When mum and dad said grace I was watching my food in case one of my elder brothers nicked it off my plate,” the England cricketer would say years later.

Amla’s father is a doctor, his mother a housewife. In their home religion meant that you prayed five times a day, understood your place in the family, the community and the world, and learned why faith and respect for others – particularly their privacy – mattered more than almost anything.

“We’ve always been a pretty private family, and maybe some people aren’t accustomed to that with sportsmen,” said Amla’s elder brother, Ahmed, himself a fine cricketer with more than 100 first-class games to his credit.

“Maybe people aren’t sure how to relate to Hashim. But something that you learn at an early age as a player is that if you take care of performance, everything else takes care of itself. Hashim’s performances have definitely done that for him, so I don’t think this is a major issue in his life.”

The younger Amla’s bemusement at why anyone should be interested in him or his cricket career is deep and sincere and, at times, maddening for those who earn their keep from bringing players and their public closer together by weaving words of what they hope is wisdom.

He could not, for instance, fathom why there should be curiosity about whether or not he was observing the fasting month of Ramadan, which coincided with South Africa’s tour to England this year. For the record, he did not fast on match days.

He was also politely bored with talking about the 311 not out he scored in the first Test against England at The Oval – the first triple Test century by a South African, the central plank of South Africa’s crushing victory in the match, and a monument to patience, calm and absorbing a level of pressure that in other environments would turn coal into diamonds.

Throughout what other players would have found a pleasant, boosting experience, Amla smiled, shrugged and averted his eyes. Or shrugged, smiled and averted his eyes. Or even averted his eyes, smiled and shrugged. To him it was no big deal. No-one was born because of his innings, and no-one died.

However, Amla’s reluctance to place himself in the eye of the media hurricane is a pleasure to put up with compared to enduring the stink of arrogance that accompanies Pietersen. And that’s before he has opened his mouth.

When Pietersen does open his mouth he is often does so with cringeworthy gaucheness. A press conference at Headingley on September 6 that was supposed to focus on the pyrotechnic century he scored to help England save the second Test against South Africa became eight minutes and three seconds of insufferable smugness.

The recorded version starts with the sound of Pietersen sucking air through his teeth and includes him saying, “The spectators just love watching me play and I love playing for England, but the politics is what I have to deal with personally and it’s tough being me, playing for England.”

Again with the politics. Pietersen blamed the quota system for his decision to leave South Africa. The truth was that the Dolphins thought Gulam Bodi was a better option. It wasn’t difficult to see why. Bodi offered attacking left-arm wrist spin while Pietersen was one of many mediocre off-spinners. Bodi was also a forceful batsman. Pietersen sometimes swung lustily down the order, but he couldn’t be relied upon.

Which is not to say South African cricket did not fail Pietersen: it failed to realise his immense potential. But there is no doubt that Pietersen’s monster ego would have led him to fail South African cricket just as surely as it has led him to fail English cricket. His sidelining for, apparently, calling his captain a doos in an SMS was a weak but handy excuse to do what England coach Andy Flower has been itching to do for a long time.

That Pietersen will be remembered as one of the most explosive players ever to step across the boundary and that Bodi, who now labours in relative obscurity with the Highveld Lions, is destined to end his career as a mediocrity who never fulfilled his potential doesn’t change that.

The fact is Amla has been blessed with the kind of class that Pietersen could not hope to buy, no matter how much money he makes in the IPL.

Ahmed Amla, who played in six first-class matches with Pietersen, offers another view. “If you speak to KP casually you get a different impression of, but maybe the pressure at the level he plays at makes people say and do funny things.

“He was intensely competitive. I wouldn’t say Hashim is any different, but they are competitive in different ways and the different personalities come through.”

In one of their games together for KwaZulu-Natal, Ahmed Amla batted at number three at Kingsmead in December, 1999. At number six, Hashim Amla made his first-class debut. Pietersen, playing in his sixth first-class game, took strike at number nine. The opponents were Nasser Hussain’s England team.

“A guy with longish hair bowled off-spin; got me out, Hussain out, Michael Atherton out,” Michael Vaughan remembers. “But it was just orthodox bowling. Then he batted, smashed a few.

“But it was more behind the scenes - he was talking to our guys about coming over to play in England.”

Mountains like Amla know they can be moved by faith. Pietersen knows what he needs to do if Mohammad won’t come to the mountain.