Steve Waugh

There is no glory without guts

From here

THE OTHER day, at the Madras Cricket Club, an old connoisseur of the most English of all ball-games took his eyes off the television screen bringing live action from Sharjah and remarked: "It was a miracle, wasn't it, in Wellington...the Aussies getting to 419 from four down for 51.''

A smile and an agreeing nod made the old cricket lover happy. But, deep inside, one knew that there was no miracle at Wellington. There was, on the other hand, a man called Steve Waugh.

To put the Aussie revival down to a miracle is to insult the genius of a man who is inarguably the greatest modern-day warrior on a cricket field. And the point is not weather you believe in miracles or not. It is, quite simply, a question of accounting, so to say, a question of making the credit entry in the right place, in the right column and under the right head.

For, a miracle seldom involves the human will - it is often a product of an all-too-rare combination of circumstances, something whose director is believed to be an unseen superhuman. At Wellington, the other day, the director-cum-actor was very much human, all too human.

And, to be sure, this was not the only occasion when Steve Waugh had walked in when his team was four down for next-to-nothing and produced a magnificent innings. In the event, to equate Steve Waugh's success in times of grave crises to miracles would be an insult to an extraordinary sportsman simply because it would take away from the very essence of what he is a champion - an eternal warrior with a granite will.

If nothing else, perhaps above all else, Steve Waugh is a fighter, a fighter to the point where his very identity as a sportsman is dependent on that virtue. He fights, therefore he is.

Steve Waugh is one of the most brilliant representatives of a breed of sportsmen whose chief virtue and greatest claim to fame is their ability to fight.

From time of the ancient Games to the modern professional era, from Pompeii down to Lord's and Wimbledon and Eden Gardens, one of the greatest compliments in sport is to be described as a fighter.

The most coveted of titles in sport, "fighter'' is not something that is bestowed on a sportsman lightly. A sportsman has to earn it the hard way, sweat buckets for it, spill his guts for it. It's a blood- and-guts road to the pedestal. But once the title is earned - as in the case of Steve Waugh - for its owner even a loss is never a defeat. For, fighters are the folk heroes of sport.

Man is a sporting animal simply because he is, in the first place, a fighting animal, a survivor. And all sportsmen are fighters, in varying degrees. If you can't fight, you can't play ball at the highest levels.

No matter this, there is a class of athlete whose primary asset would seem to be its nose for the battle, men like the Australian captain who appear to be more in touch with man's essential nature than most others.

"People don't seem to understand that it's a war out there. Maybe my methods aren't socially acceptable to some, but it's what I have to do to survive. I don't go out there to love my enemy. I go out there to squash him.''

Those words of Jimmy Connors, spoken in 1973, might well be the mother lode of all mystiques about fighting. Later in his career, Connors, the greatest fighter I have seen on a tennis court, would say: "I hate to lose more than I like to win. I hate to see happiness on their faces when they beat me.''

Untutored as he was by image makers, Connors's words at once hold a mirror to the deepest recesses of his psyche as a champion and as a warrior.

Steve Waugh was never quite as brash and foul-mouthed as Connors was. And, perhaps too, his motivation to fight did not come so much out of the fear of defeat as of the sweet smell (the thought of) of success. But when it comes to the motivation to fight, there are no water-tight compartments really. But, after watching and writing about sport for over two decades, this writer can assert with a touch of confidence that from experience you can learn to see through all the finery and sport a fighter when you see one.

It is almost as if, for the fighters, the result of the battle itself is secondary, success and failure almost irrelevant. Their fight is for fight's sake, pure and simple. It is not so much a means to an end as an end in itself.

How many times has Steve Waugh produced an innings such as his unbeaten 151 at Wellington after coming in when the team was four down for 275 or something? Surely, not many. When there is no need to fight, there is no need for a Steve Waugh. Lesser men can take over.

Looking back, and getting to the very foundation of sport, it may not be difficult to see that sport, at least a majority of them, involve what was once called "survival skills'' by our distant ancestors.

And in tracing the evolution of man - and sport - from survival- hunt to sports-hunt, the anthropologist, social psychologist and author, Desmond Morris writes in his foreword to the classic work The Tribes: "With the passage of years, (the) bloodthirsty form of ritual hunting has gradually been replaced by two new kinds of hunt: one physical and one mental. All forms of sport are either ritualised aiming or ritualised chasing or both. They take these elements of hunt and direct them towards a symbolic prey. And the tribesmen are still there to soak up the thrills. The sportsmen and their followers are the closest analogue we have today to the age-old human tribal hunters.''

Indeed, for many of the modern-day fighters in sport, the gladiators of the professional era, the thrill is not so much in the strike, not so much in winning the prey as in the chase, as in the process of the hunt, as in the fight itself.

"Something happens inside you when you are pushed to a corner, when your knees seem to buckle and your body tells you that you cannot take it anymore,'' Muhammad Ali said more than 25 years ago. "It is then that the real fighter in you springs up. It's a challenge. But the first battle is within you. Once you have won that, the rest is easy.''

Ali was talking about the classic rope-a-dope coup that saw him stop the seemingly unstoppable George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974. A real ``fighter'' if ever their was one, Ali was also a classic example of a great sportsman who combined extraordinary technical skills, tactical genius and fighting spirit.

This, of course, is an amalgam that is about as easy to find as the Loch Ness monster - or perhaps an Indian cricket team that actually wins a Test match abroad!

Yet, the history of sport has quite a few examples of men who have wonderfully combined the great qualities. To name only a few that come to mind, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Boris Becker, Pete Sampras, a long line of great cricketers from Sir Gary Sobers down to Steve Waugh... you could go on and on.

The legends of sport, the truly gifted ones such as Sobers and Sampras do not always appear to be the in-the-trenches warriors that some of the less talented players appear to be. But this is simply because they have so much talent, and are often so clearly superior to their rivals, that they are seldom forced to awaken the ``fighter'' in them.

In the event, it is not surprising that the moment you think of fighters the ones that come to mind are players like Jimmy Connors and Steve Waugh - blessed with natural talent considerably short of a Sampras' or a Sachin Tendulkar's, but consistently rising above themselves and performing well above the level decreed by their raw sporting talents.

This is because, in sport, mental set is as crucial a factor as talent. This is why many talented players and teams do not win often enough. The current lot of Indian cricketers is a wonderful example.

Compare this team with the ones featuring men like Sunil Gavaskar, Chetan Chauhan, Mohinder Amarnath, Ravi Shastri and Kapil Dev. And you know why that generation of cricketers was a lot more successful. The bottom line was, they fought better.

In cricket itself, no country has produced as many fighters as has Australia. On a superficial level, there may not be any ready explanation for Australia's success in producing fighting cricketers but should you care to delve deeper the influence of cultural and political factors becomes clear.

"In the manner in which soccer is the great way up for the children from the economic sumps of Brazil, so cricket was the great way out of Australian cultural ignominy. No Australian had written Paradise Lost, but Bradman had made a hundred before lunch at Lord's,'' said Thomas Kenneally, a famous British politician.

If fighters come from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, then, looking back, each of them has not only enriched sport but has become a better man for all the fighting.

"People outside sport may see only the game, just as those outside of war only see the horror. Yet, in that horror a man may be better than he will ever be the rest of his life. And in that game a man may find what life is really about,'' wrote Dr.George Sheenan, a U.S. cardiologist.

In modern cricket, no man might have found out as much about what life is all about as Mr. Steve Waugh.