“He looked at me with those steely eyes of his and he said, ‘I want to play cricket for South Africa and I want to get good marks.’” – Devon Conway’s high school coach, Adrian Norris.
Telford Vice | Cape Town
A superbly fit, overtly competitive, ultimately ordinary off-spinner leaves Pietermaritzburg for Nottingham and becomes Kevin Pietersen. An unflashy allrounder goes from Johannesburg to Wellington and turns into Grant Elliott. They are among a slew of examples where those came from: South Africa. Devon Conway added his name to the list this week.
Conway’s 200 at Lord’s made him the 111th man to reach a century on Test debut and the 12th from South Africa. Sort of. Andrew Hudson, Jacques Rudolph, Alviro Petersen, Faf du Plessis, Stiaan van Zyl and Stephen Cook know the feeling of making a hundred in their first Test. So do Kepler Wessels and Keaton Jennings.
But Wessels’ 162 at the Gabba in November 1982 was scored from under a not exactly baggy green helmet, while Jennings made his 112 at Wankhede in December 2016 wearing three lions rampant. As did Andrew Strauss for his 112 against New Zealand in May 2004 at Lord’s, Matt Prior for his unbeaten 126 against West Indies in May 2007 also at Lord’s, and Jonathan Trott for his 119 against Australia at the Oval in August 2009.
Conway’s headgear is black and emblazoned with a silver fern. At his high school, St John’s College in Johannesburg, it didn’t matter much on Wednesday that he does not don the protea badge. “We watched bits and pieces [on television] between classes,” Adrian Norris, the master in charge of cricket and a major influence on the player Conway has become, told Cricbuzz on Thursday. “He got to 30, and then we had load-shedding for three hours. So we kept track online from 30 until he was about 105, when we were able to watch again.”
Norris’ words help explain why Conway moved from Joburg to Wellington in August 2017. South Africa’s poorly maintained infrastructure means there isn’t enough electricity to keep all of the country’s lights on all of the time. So, sporadically since January 2008 and sometimes for days and weeks on end, scheduled rolling blackouts share the darkness. Sometimes your lights are off while your friends’ kilometres away are on. Sometimes it’s the other way around. You know when you will be able to cook dinner by consulting an app — several are readily available — on your smartphone.
Load-shedding has become emblematic of a South Africa that is failing to meet the expectations of a nation that, by defeating apartheid at the ballot box in April 1994, thought its worst days were behind it. Twenty-seven years on, we know our trust was misplaced.
“Devon was always the type of person who wanted trust,” Norris said. “We made sure we looked after him — we would get him something to eat, because sometimes he would skip the boarding school breakfast — and then he produced the goods and scored hundreds. He’s a very loyal person. It’s difficult to get into his trust, but once you’re in there you will be for life. He’ll do anything for you.”
Maybe Conway couldn’t trust South Africa enough to want to continue to make a life and a career there. Aged 26, he sold his home, his car and much of the rest of his material possessions and, with his partner, headed for New Zealand.
He had had a solid junior career — he made two half-centuries for Gauteng’s under-13 side, a hundred for the under-15s, and two centuries and a double ton for the under-19s. He scored 13 centuries in provincial first-class cricket. But at the higher franchise level, where he played only 21 matches in more than six years, Conway never reached three figures in 36 innings. So how big a role did cricket play in his decision?
It’s a worn trope that South Africa chases away some of its best and brightest in the cause of trying to make its national teams look more like the nation they represent. Did Conway feel hard done by because he is white? “Absolutely not,” Norris said. “In all our conversations we’ve had, he has never brought that up. He and his partner just wanted a different life experience, and that’s what they’ve got.”
Norris spoke of an apartment near the Wanderers, paid for by Gauteng cricket, that housed some of the province’s most promising players. Conway was among them. “In that flat lived five or six black African guys who were his mates. At times he would get picked ahead of them, and at times one of them would get picked ahead of him. I think he would have said, ‘These are my mates. How can I say I’m not getting picked because of the colour of my skin? They’re getting picked because they’re good enough.’”
A less often acknowledged aspect of the race dynamic is that, were it not for South Africa’s efforts to equalise opportunities across the game, world cricket would likely never have heard of Makhaya Ntini, Hashim Amla, Vernon Philander or Kagiso Rabada. Their talent and skill was undoubted and they worked hard for the success they earned. But talent, skill and hard work aren’t enough in a society more cruelly skewed in favour of the affluent than any other. The affluent are disproportionately white.
All but one of the South Africans who have won Test caps playing for other countries have come from relatively affluent whiteness. They, or their families, have had access to means to change their realities. Those means have been purposefully denied others. At 26, Conway owned property and a car and other stuff worth buying. Millions of his comparatively less well-off compatriots, almost all of them black and brown, their prospects for a decent life stolen from them by substandard education, low level jobs — if they have work at all — and life in a tin shack — if they are not surviving on the street — have nothing to sell and no hope of starting over somewhere else. That is by design, not accident. The single exception proves the rule: Basil D’Oliveira had to rescue himself, with John Arlott’s assistance, from just such an existence to show the world how well he could play cricket. The world outside South Africa, that is.
Even so, Conway is not a cookie-cutter example of privilege — he needed a bursary to gain entry to one of the country’s most elite schools. “I remember that interview,” Norris said. “I asked him why he wanted to come to St John’s, and he looked at me with those steely eyes of his and he said, ‘I want to play cricket for South Africa and I want to get good marks.’”
Did it sadden Norris that New Zealand, not South Africa, is reaping the benefits of the first half of that ambition? “Kids who come through our hands, we obviously want them to represent their country of birth. But the reality of the situation is that he is representing himself and challenging himself at the highest possible level. The world has become so small. Sportsmen will go overseas because that’s where the money is.”
Umpteen cricketminded reactionaries have been spewing ill-considered race politics on social media since about the time the power went out at St John’s on Wednesday. That professional sport in South Africa is too small and impoverished to contain all the talent the country produces is not a truth often aired there. Conway himself was in the same dormitory at St John’s boarding facility as Scott Spedding, who captained the first XV and went on to play 23 Tests for France, and Kenyan-born Brit Chris Froome, the four-time Tour de France champion.
“We’ve got a kid at St John’s now who’s just been signed by [top French rugby club] La Rochelle,” Norris said. “And he’s black African. The professional systems overseas are just so much more established. There’s money there. You can go and play [rugby] in the third league in France and you can do very well [financially]. You can play [cricket] for a second-tier county in England and do pretty well for six or seven months of the year.”
Conway has raised himself above and beyond that level, but Norris said he hadn’t forgotten what mattered: “He’s very humble and calm. He never got too hard on himself at school, or too excited. He’s very balanced. Sometimes I’ll send him a message, and it comes back with, ‘Thank you, Sir.’ The ups and downs of cricket over the years have been his classroom. He’s taken all those lessons on board and he’s now producing the goods.”
Not that Norris was trying to hog Conway’s limelight: “It’s madness to claim an individual.” He listed Jimmy Cook, Graham Ford, Grant Morgan as instrumental in moulding the new toast of New Zealand — the seventh man to score a double century on Test debut and the first debutant foreign opener to get to three figures on England’s seaming pitches.
Norris also made a case for schools like St John’s no longer existing chiefly to prop up privilege, even if from outside their tall walls it can look like that is still their mission: “We’re here to expose kids to different aspects of life and to turn them into good human beings.”
By the look and sound of him these past two days, and quite apart from his brilliant batting, Conway would seem to have added his name to that list, too.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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