Cricket: A far cry from warming feet in cows' dung

By RICHARD BOOCK

PORT ELIZABETH - On cold mornings, a young Makhaya Ntini would always follow the cows.

The 10-year-old Xhosa boy was one of the first up in the township of Mdingi, not only because he had the responsibility of herding the family's cattle, but also because the novelty of sharing the floor of his bedroom with six brothers and sisters was starting to wear a little thin.

As hot as Mdigni often gets, it sometimes becomes bone-jarringly cold, and a barefooted Ntini learnt to cope with the discomfort by keeping close to the cows as he moved the animals, quickly standing in their freshly produced dung for some temporary relief from the chill.

South African cricket's most recent pace bowling star was speaking of his childhood while standing in the bedroom of his team's five-star hotel. In the morning, he was to deck himself out in adidas apparel from head to toe, wander down to the restaurant for breakfast before jumping into his $50,000 vehicle and heading off to the ground.

It goes without saying that he pinches himself regularly.

Only a decade ago, Ntini was waking up in the clothes he wore the day before, herding the cattle across the dust-blown fields, and sitting down on the ground with his six siblings to eat a meal out of one bowl.

"We had one bowl of food for seven of us," he said.

"In those days you all sat down and ate out of the one dish.

"To get full eating like that, well, you would have to eat very fast."

There was no electricity, hence no television, and the family made wick-lamps for lighting. Hardly anyone had heard of cricket, let alone seen it, they only spoke Xhosa, not Afrikaans or English, and the accent was on survival and family support, rather than sport and entertainment.

Ntini remembers shooing along some cattle one day in the summer of 1990-91 when he passed a ground where the United Cricket Board was staging a development clinic, and feeling curious, popped over to see what was going on.

After having the rudiments of a bowling action explained, he decided to have a go, and to everyone's astonishment, produced some fairly handy deliveries, which immediately raised the interest of UCB academy representative Greg Hayes.

Hayes continued to monitor Ntini's progress and helped him out by buying him a pair of shoes and some cricket gear, because even though the teenager was showing progress, he did not even have any whites, let alone a bat, ball or pads.

The following year the UCB sent Ntini, who could still only speak Xhosa, to the Australian academy for tuition, after which the young paceman started to make huge strides in his bowling development, to the extent that Border immediately offered him a scholarship at East London's Dale College.

"I had reached the stage where I knew, for my sake, I had to learn English to continue my development," he said. "I couldn't speak a word of English and found it so hard I almost quit school, but Greg persuaded me to carry on."

That was in 1994, and it was only the following year that he made his first-class debut for Border, against England, with national honours arriving in the 1997-98 summer when he was included in the squad to tour Australia.

Although things were looking bright when he later toured England and went to Sharjah, his life was turned upside down in 1999 when he was first convicted of rape and then acquitted in the Court of Appeal, a sequence of events which not only sidelined him for much of the year, but also forced him out of South Africa's World Cup squad.

Of the transformation from cattleherd to South African test representative, Ntini still shakes his head at the memory of where he came from, and what he still might be doing.

"It's a huge change," he whispered, casting his mind back to the Mdingi lifestyle. "When I think I could still be living that life, just like so many of my friends, it almost makes my head spin."

For all that, Ntini never considered himself poor. In fact, he was brought up to believe he was rich in the sense of all the things that could not be bought or sold.

"There was a great sense of camaraderie," he said.

"We had very little so we cared for one another and made sure everyone was comfortable.

"It was a struggle with hardly any money at all, but there was always great warmth, great character and great soul."