When I was a schoolboy, one of my first sporting heroes was Tony Greig. Blond, 2m tall, a dashing batsman and a whirlwind bowler, he was a figure to inspire awe in a 13-year-old. Then, because he was a prefect and I was a snivelling wretch in standard six, he cut my hair. It was, by some distance, the worst of my bad haircuts I have endured in my life.
Many years later, Greig is bald and while I have to wear a cap when the sun comes out, I still have some left. This seems to me to be evidence that if there is a God, He works on the philosophy that what goes around, comes around.
I don’t particularly hold this against Greigie. A few years later I, too, was being brutish and nasty to 13-year-olds. It is the way of the world. Or, at least, the way of boarding schools. Still, I was henceforth a little more sceptical about who qualified for hero status.
In more than a quarter-of-a-century watching and dealing with sportsmen and women, only two people have lived up to my particular standards (Amanda Coetzer doesn’t qualify because lust keeps on getting in the way of any objective assessment I am able to make of her either as a person or tennis player).
The first was Henry Honiball, the Natal and Springbok flyhalf/centre. Some years ago, shortly after the 1995 World Cup, I was briefed to interview Honiball ahead of a Loftus Versveld Test match. It was the devil’s business setting up the interview, but after several days of string-pulling and arm-twisting, I had Honiball sit down in front of me.
It was like pulling teeth. Not because Honiball was unpleasant, aloof or uninterested, but because he has an almost pathological aversion to talking about himself or his accomplishments.
Let me put it (hypothetically) this way: it is in the last seconds of a Test match against New Zealand, with the opposition three points ahead. Jonah Lomu is diving over the Springbok try line. Honiball flies into him with a mighty crash-tackle that knocks the giant All Black 5m backwards.
Honiball picks up the loose ball, executes a succession of dazzling loop passes with six teammates, runs through, around and past the entire All Blacks pack, chips ahead, picks up the bouncing ball with amazing sleight of hand, outwits the cover defence and sprints the length of the field to score under the posts for the greatest try in rugby history.
Honiball’s assessment of this scenario would be, I have no doubt, to note that the kicker did a really good job with the conversion. Thereafter, whenever Natal or South Africa played, I watched only Honiball.
I seem to recall him knocking on a kick-off against the Queensland Reds, but that may just have been the same higher hand who pinched Tony Greig’s hair, reminding me that: hang on, mate, Honiball’s only human, too.
And then, more recently, along came Graeme Smith. When Shaun Pollock was axed as South African captain before the World Cup tournament had run its course, I thought the episode a shameful chapter in the history of South African cricket, redeemed only by the dignity with which Pollock conducted himself.
I harboured no particular feelings against Smith. He hadn’t asked or lobbied for the job as captain, but I thought he was too young and had technical problems that might be exposed in England. Then, shortly before the South Africans left for England, I was roped in (along with Radio 702’s John Robbie) to talk to the touring party about some of the problems they might encounter when dealing with the media there.
This entailed having lunch with Smith before talking to the team en masse. By the end of the lunch, I was pretty much converted.
In his brief career, Smith has variously irritated and angered some people because he has said what he thinks. Others, better inclined to him, have worried that he might be talking himself into a cul de sac.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that Smith has very consciously sought to establish himself and, by extension, his team, as their own entities.
It struck me during the early NatWest one-day games that Smith was trying a little too hard to impose himself on the bowling, seeking the type of innings that would not only silence his critics but stamp his authority on both his team and the oppo-sition.
Over the past two or three years, there has been a tendency to hark back to Hansie Cronje’s captaincy as some kind of golden era for South African cricket. This idea has taken root among not only a sizeable section of the public, but also among some of the players who served under Cronje.
The brutal truth, though, is that Cronje’s legacy is one of shame and disgrace. The effect on the team was to invoke a sense of insularity, a side suspicious of the media and the public, withdrawn and occasionally defensively arrogant (or arrogantly defensive, if you will).
Smith has deliberately set out to change all this, and his record 277 score against England at Edgbaston speaks for itself. In the past 50 years, only Jackie McGlew, Graeme Pollock, Daryll Cullinan and Gary Kirsten had held the South African batting record. That’s some company to join.
Smith is not a left-hander who lingers in the mind’s eye like a Pollock or a David Gower. There is, though, something of an Allan Border or a Mark Taylor about him as he hulks over his bat. He shares the Australians’ sense of self-belief and the confidence and patience to know where his runs will come from.
In four years’ time Smith will be a wiser, shrewder and more exper-ienced player and captain. For the moment, though, he has given himself and his team space to grow. He has opened up possibilities for South African cricket.
And so, to adapt the standard-issue applause from ardent fans on the trail of Tiger Woods around the United States Open: you’re the man, Biff, you’re the man.