When the needle hit Mach 0,96, Glamorous Glennis started throwing itself around the sky like a fat orange bronco with four rockets in its tail. It was to be expected, really. The squat Bell X-1 was called an aircraft, but in an era of eternally beautiful machines like the Spitfire, aesthetes struggled to get worked up over a cigar-shaped ramjet sporting stubby wings and a crazy man strapped into its nose.
That crazy man was Chuck Yeager, the slow-talking West Virginian with the slitty eyes and the Right Stuff, made famous by the Tom Wolfe novel and the subsequent film; and when his ride started trying to shake itself to pieces in October 1947, a small part of his famously laconic and dry wit must have been explaining to the rest of him that he was about to make a very large crater in the desert below.
In The Right Stuff, Wolfe does a splendid job of glamorising trans-sonic death. He describes demons that lurk in the stratosphere, waiting to rip the wings off planes as the reach Mach 0,99. He rejoices in the macho bravado of the jocks who rode those primitive surface-to-air missiles into the wild blue yonder.
Without putting thoughts in his characters heads, he alludes to the controlled panic of those microseconds when the rivets appeared to be popping out of the wing roots and a final black mushroom cloud seemed moments away.
But read Yeager’s account of any of the near-misses he survived, and a different picture emerges. Duty is mentioned a lot. You go up to do a job, you do it, and if you do everything right and the scientists haven’t cocked up, you come back. No drama, no romance. Not even very many adjectives.
So when they put a stabiliser on Glamorous Glennis (named, extremely unflatteringly, after Yeager’s wife) and the needle jerked and rattled its way to Mach 0,99 and then hit 1,0, there wouldn’t have been a lot of adjectives flying around in the cockpit with Yeager. When an almighty bang echoed out of the blue sky, and the controls stopped fighting him, and they hissed silently beyond the speed of sound into a new era, he might have said: ”Well, I’ll be damned.” Maybe he said: ”Son of a bitch! That weren’t so tough now, wuz it?” Maybe he said nothing, because it didn’t seem to need a statement.
On Sunday afternoon, cricket went supersonic for the first time. For 10 years the needle had wobbled around the high 300s, sometimes getting up into the thin air of the high 380s and 390s as Sri Lankan and Pakistani maestros bludgeoned B-grade debutants on grassless pitches. But when Saeed Anwar retired and Shahid Afridi was permanently dropped down the Pakistani order, it seemed that the quest for one-day cricket’s final frontier had come to an end. Sanity prevailed, and sights were lowered. After all, a gripping defence of 220 was worth any dull one-sided tonk where 330 played 280. And for the thrill-crazed groundlings there was always 20-overs cricket with its meaningless pyrotechnics …
Until Sunday, cricket’s distinctions were clear. Tests were beautiful, subtle and — to the layman — excruciatingly dull. Fifty-overs games produced the odd thriller, but by and large were rendered plodding by those damned middle overs of nudge and trot. Twenty-overs stuff was good for a laugh, if you were into that sort of thing: the cricketing equivalent of flowers squirting water and revolvers belching out little flags labelled ”BANG!”.
Today those boundaries are meaningless. In 100 overs we saw the greatest resolve and nuance any Test aficionado could wish for. We saw every neat, compact one-day skill known to the game. We saw ridiculous shots, not so much cricket as exercise-yard baseball, and yet nonetheless the work of men whose lineage starts with Grace and Bradman and travels through Sobers, Pollock, Gower and Lara. And, most wonderful of all, we saw it twice.
Perhaps that’s the wonderful, stupefying hurdle that keeps us from getting our head around what happened. Pioneering moments happen; but they don’t happen again three hours later. What we saw was just stupid: Yeager going through Mach 1,0, landing, sucking down a Powerade and then strapping himself into a Mercury rocket to become the first man in space, later in the afternoon.
When booms resound out of the blue heavens, we left behind on the ground want to start slinging adjectives. The South African team have exhausted the local media’s prose. Poetry would have been next, no doubt, if news wasn’t always in such a hurry: in slower times the next fortnight would have seen scribes quoting Homer.
But listen to the beaming batsmen who provided the ramjets for that throat-clutching launch into the unknown, and one is reminded immediately of Yeager. Modest, limited statements of satisfaction abound. It’s the sort of thing that comes along once in a lifetime; it was amazing; the mood is fantastic; we just kept hitting the ball and luckily the ball just kept finding the gaps. Nobody is playing air guitar with their bat, going down on one knee and expounding on the metaphysical importance of Herschelle Gibbs’s innings. Like the fighter jocks of the high desert, they are smiling and joking, but hoarding much more than they are sharing.
South Africa were always ahead of the required rate, but were they in control? That depends on what you mean by ”control”. Yeager’s closest brush with the crater was a flat spin that lasted 51 seconds and took him just 25 000 feet off the very hard ground. He recalls fighting with the aircraft, and, well, you know, getting it to straighten out and pull up eventually. Just like that. That’s what you do when you’re in a flat spin. You do, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you don’t know about it or the crater.
The South Africans were extraordinarily brave to bat as they did; but, on the other hand, when you’re facing 435, and you’re eight for one, that just what you do. You do, or you don’t. There is no need to worry about doing it right, or having a plan, or even knowing what you’re doing.
Had the Australians posted 340, Graeme Smith and Gibbs would almost certainly have been crushed by expectation. Goaded by the asking rate while choked by the need to be cautious, they would have failed and dragged the rest of the team with them to be dismissed for 240-odd. But stupid totals allow for stupid batting.
Those who have watched Gibbs stifle his genius under suffocating layers of Bishops coaching and a blanket of self-doubt were not very surprised that it took an insane situation to unleash insane batting from him. The pressure entirely removed by the ludicrous Australian total, a packed Wanderers stadium wanting to see only a fight and not a victory, and the series melodramatically poised at two games apiece, Gibbs was always going to let loose his inner show-off. It is a wonderful thing for South Africa and cricket watchers that his inner show-off bats like an angel when the mood takes it. Herschelle, all is forgiven. Really.
But rockets need fuel, and right from the outset Smith was the juice behind the launch. Gibbs always looks elegant, and his pinging, whip-crack boundary strokes often seem to be the work of someone on the verge of becoming bored. There was nothing elegant or bored in Smith’s stroke play. If he could have flogged Australia’s bowlers with a cat-o’-nine-tails, he would have.
That extraordinary hostility may have been the catalyst, but of course there were many moments when things changed utterly: Nathan Bracken dropping a dolly off Gibbs at mid-on; Johan van der Wath clubbing his team out of an impending slump and reinvigorating a dimming crowd; Makhaya Ntini playing a gloriously sensible dab to third man to give Mark Boucher the all-important strike.
Sunday’s game has been called ”the ultimate one-day match”. This is not true. Yeager’s flight wasn’t the last. It was the first. No one is quite sure where cricket goes from here, but we do know that it’s going somewhere new and wonderful. And it’s going there fast.