Scripted endings to careers are rare in sport. Too often great players hobble into retirement on the arm of a physiotherapist, or choose euthanasia, a quick pre-emptive press-conference to avoid the indignity of being dropped.
Those who do make it on to the field that one last time are overpowered by the occasion, the first time in their lives when there will not be another chance, and invariably disappoint. Their standing ovation is a retrospective one, substituting that day’s fumblings with a decade of remembered splendour.
But Stephen Roger Waugh has always written his own script. Granted, his plots have been somewhat repetitive and decidedly too macho to garner the acclaim of aesthetes (Act 1, Waugh makes a heap of runs, Act 2, Waugh bats on through the pain barrier, Act 3, Waugh wins it for Australia and shrugs), but he has acted them out with unmatched intensity, skill and attention to detail.
How typical — and, for his legion of devotees, how satisfying — that his final curtain call should be in honour of a romantic draw at his home ground, that his final score should be 80 runs more than Don Bradman managed for his own swansong, and that the applause should be led by Sachin Tendulkar, the manchild-god of cricket.
With no precedent of emotion to work from it was difficult to be sure whether Waugh had been touched by Tendulkar’s words or was simply enduring a buttock cramp, but the crooked smile and stiffly jovial glances at his protégés around him seemed to belong to a man briefly startled by his achievements, and unstrung for a moment by the admiration of a player who is comfortably his better.
It seemed incongruous for a veteran like Tendulkar to say that he and other ‘youngsters†had looked up to Waugh since they were little, but then Jacques Kallis was nine years old when Waugh made his Test debut. Waugh, it seems, has always been there.
To many South Africans he is as immovable and immortal as the traditions of Australian cricket. He had already played more than 40 Tests by the time Kepler Wessels led his green outfit to the West Indies for South Africa’s first Test since international readmission, and through the following 11 summers South African cricketers and public watched him in admiration and frustration, counting down the months until he would take guard against them again.
Wessels, Hansie Cronje and Shaun Pollock all quested after the silver bullet that would stop him: bouncers, wide half-volleys early in his innings, prayers. All failed.
Invaluably for South Africa’s new generation of batsmen, Waugh always kept one step ahead. Oh for a batsman with his grit and determination, we wailed in the mid-1990s: as soon as the likes of Kallis and the late-blooming Gary Kirsten established themselves, Waugh simply changed gears and became a brutal free-scoring strokemaker, leading a process that has produced Matthew Hayden and Ricky Ponting. South Africa will follow, but following is not leading.
In many ways — some infamous — Waugh was the first modern cricketer. The West Indies of the 1980s batted fast as a by-product of their prodigious lineup. Waugh’s Australians batted fast in a calculated attempt to win Tests, and Tests were won for the team, for the fans, and for the sponsors, the new holy trinity of sport.
But one never felt that the corporate captain was a role that sat easily with him, as it does with Graeme Smith. Waugh was old school to his core, something that perhaps irked a South African public orphaned by cricket in 1970, and left without the tradition and nursery that nourished the Australian.
Because of that isolation, South African cricketing culture in the 1980s was easily seduced by pyrotechnics, too often overlooking the lustre of artful batting. We demanded slog-sweeps and paddles, and the cavalier exploits of Henry Fotheringham, Adrian Kuiper and Clive Rice made the straight bat into something defeatist, a failsafe option when the lofted six over cover wasn’t working.
Half a decade of international cricket did little to educate us. In 1995, while Waugh beat the West Indies with the strength of his will, we were frothing about Sanath Jayasuriya and Mike Rindel. A year earlier the ageing Peter Kirsten was dropped in favour of the more obviously aggressive Cronje, casting aside the closest thing to Waugh South Africa had produced, and a player who, if given Waugh’s opportunities, might have been greater than the Australian.
But to talk of might-have-beens is to succumb to a typically South African failing: we might have beaten Australia if Herschelle Gibbs had held that World Cup catch; we might have tipped the scales if Allan Donald had broken through on that terrific afternoon at Sydney. Speculative pyrotechnics.
Waugh, ever the realist, put the issue beyond speculation every time with a straight bat and the patience of Job. By the time the pyrotechnics did come — past 50, a utilitarian thump through the covers, then another and another, until the hundred and a Bradmanian display of late-cuts and square-drives — our players and spectators were too battered to appreciate them.
It’s a game where people hit a ball with a plank for five days, a cricketing infidel told me this week, shrugging off Waugh’s final bow. But there are planks and there are planks. And somehow those five days won’t be the same any more.