“Before I was dropped I was arrogant in the way I went about things.” – Quinton de Kock
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
ONE dark and smokey night deep in the velvet of the 1950s the genius who was Miles Davis slung a sideways eye at Wayne Shorter, his saxophonist, and rasped: “Do you ever get tired of playing music that sounds like music? Do you want to play like you don’t know how to play?” Miles Davis knew nothing about cricket. But he would have understood what Quinton de Kock reaches for at the crease.
The music isn’t in the gunshot crack of De Kock’s bat on ball, arresting as that is. Nor in the at once strange and natural shapes he shifts into, apparently effortlessly, to play the way he does. It’s in De Kock’s outrageous intent; his audacity. How dare the man think he can do that? He dares. He thinks. He does. “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.” Another Davis line, another De Kock descriptor. Not that De Kock should be described in technical terms, in the same way that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. No-one knows who said that. It’s been attributed to everyone from Thelonious Monk to Frank Zappa to Elvis Costello, who says it came, in the 1970s, from Martin Mull, who dabbled in comedy and music, often simultaneously.
Writing about De Kock is the most professionally hazardous job in reporting cricket. Those who try are likely to make fools of themselves. See above. But it has to be done. Because you cannot report on cricket without writing about De Kock. That’s as true in the South African context as it is in international terms, as well as in the bombast of bumptious baubles like the IPL.
There is unimpeachable truth in the way De Kock hits a cricket ball that defies analysis as much as it demands the same. To begin appreciating it you need to go where cricket’s conservatives won’t want to: to squash and, worse yet, to baseball. De Kock grew up playing both sports, and to a decent level. Squash teaches you more about footwork, body positioning and spacial awareness than any cricket coach could, and it does so while you’re on the move and the ball is live. There are no long moments of respite to gather your wits while the bowler walks back to their mark. Cricket coaches go on at length about the importance of hitting the ball into the V. They should try teaching their charges to do so using a rounded bat and facing thrown full tosses that might sink, rise, veer left or right — or left or right and downward, or even left and right and downward — wobble like drunk butterflies, blaze past the bat at warp speed, or never seem to arrive. Whenever proper contact is made, no matter how minimal, and the ball is put into play, a run must be attempted. That, in a crude nutshell, is the challenge of batting in baseball. In that explosive instant it’s an exponentially more difficult art than anything cricket asks of its players.
De Kock was 16 when he played senior provincial baseball for Gauteng. He was part of a Johannesburg club, the Randburg Mets, alongside Gift Ngoepe, to date the only African to have reached the US Major Leagues. De Kock might have been another, as he told Cricbuzz: “There were one or two contracts offered to me from overseas; American clubs. It was quite a while ago — I can’t really remember who they were. My dad was dealing with that. Unfortunately I chose cricket. I had to choose because I had started really getting into cricket. I went with cricket because you could go further [in South Africa].” Not that he has stopped playing baseball, or parts thereof: “It’s helped me with quite a few things: my hand-eye coordination, and I back myself to have a pretty good arm. But it doesn’t get used ’cause I’m a ’keeper. Mostly it’s helped with my strength — the shape of a stroke when I try and go after the ball. It has the same feel as in baseball. My dad was a big believer that baseball helped my cricket, even though I didn’t know whether it was helping me or not. I was just having fun playing it. Looking at it now, I can see ways in which it has helped me.”
Terroir is another major factor in the player De Kock has become. The most difficult places to bat in South Africa, which is itself among the more difficult places to bat in the world, are the Wanderers and Centurion. Their pitches snipe and swing and seam and sneer at batters who take guard loaded with ambition and attitude. Only 29 of the 121 grounds where Test cricket has been played offer fewer than the Wanderers’ 29.63 runs per wicket. Centurion is six places up the ladder with 30.42. Kingsmead is more miserly than Centurion and St George’s Park begrudges fewer runs than the Wanderers. But that’s because of the slowness of the Durban and Port Elizabeth surfaces, not the danger and difficulty they harbour for batters. Born and raised on the Highveld, where he still lives, De Kock has played at the Wanderers and Centurion more often than anywhere else: in 88 of his 457 first-class, list A and senior T20 innings.
“I think it’s changed compared to when I first started playing there,” De Kock said of growing up on Johannesburg’s unforgiving surfaces. “I don’t think it used to be as difficult to bat on, or it didn’t feel as difficult. The last couple of years it’s been more tricky. I don’t know if it helped me develop, but you do get used to it. The Centurion wicket [since November 2015 De Kock’s home patch at franchise level] can be similar. I’ve tried to take what I’ve learnt at the Wanderers to Centurion. Playing so much between those two stadiums I’ve found a way to go about an innings there. On those sorts of wickets there’s going to be a ball that gets you anyway. If you find a way to stay out there, that’s great.”
De Kock’s way seems to be to raise the stakes at every opportunity; to tell those ugly sons of pitches to do their worst. Because he knows, as he has proved to all, not least himself, that he has what’s needed to get the better of them. It’s an approach that has served him superbly as a player, helping to build a reputation as an emphatic game-changer. But how will he turn that madness into a method fit for leadership? How would he captain himself? “Yoh [Wow]. I’m not too sure. If I had to try and captain myself, I think, the more I played the more I would need to give myself more responsibilities. It used to be all about cricket when I first came into the team. Now, as I’ve become more of a senior player, I would give myself more responsibility in the team environment. That would help with my cricket in general. Now it’s not just about batting. I’d give myself something more to focus on.”
In December, Mark Boucher cast a shadow where none had been when he said: “You can have one ‘Quinny’ in your side, you probably can’t have 11.” From a distance De Kock seems a settled soul. He is significantly less vocal off the field than on it, where he would appear to be in his element. It’s hard to imagine he changes significantly when he is in the dressingroom. Was he a tough player to captain? “I don’t think so; not that I know of. Maybe I have given Faf [du Plessis] one or two headaches. But I’m sure everybody’s been difficult somewhere in their career. I try not to be.”
De Kock might have stopped there, satisfied that he had dealt with what could have become an awkward line of answering. But, like he does when he’s pushing the limits of how to hit a cricket ball, he opted to reach further into his discomfort zone. “When I was younger I had a lot of things given to me in my career. Now, as time has gone by, I understand it’s not all about me. It’s about me trying to help others and not be so in myself. When you get given such ample opportunities and so many people back you, and something doesn’t go your way, you have a moan. You get greedy about it. But then you start understanding the dynamics of everything.”
Again he might have called a halt and waited for the next question. Instead he ventured out onto the edge again. “You try not to be …” His voice trailed off. Surely now he was done. Not. “When I got dropped a couple of years ago I was shellshocked,” De Kock said of his axing in July 2015 before the second Test in Bangladesh, a consequence of 30 innings across the formats in which he had passed 50 only twice and converted his effort into a century just once. Worse, the lean run came after six trips to the crease in which he had made five half-centuries.
“Before that happened I would say I was a little bit arrogant in the way I went about things. But that turned something in me mentally. I learnt that cricket is bigger than me. It brought me back down to earth and changed me quite a bit.”
De Kock owed nobody that answer. That he gave it, without prompting, said plenty. As did his two centuries in five ODI innings in India in October 2015, his first series back in the fold. A Test hundred and two more of the ODI variety followed at home against England in January and February 2016.
Miles Davis could talk a game as good as the one he played on a trumpet. But then, he was a genius. So is De Kock, particularly in his world — at the crease. When he’s not there, he’s one of us: trying to play music, verbally, that sounds like music, wanting to play like he knows how to play. Sometimes he hits the high notes in his own words, and they fly deep into the dark and smokey night far beyond the velvet ropes others have set to limit him. Play it first. You can tell us what it is later.
First published by Cricbuzz.
Bulletproof Truth 