da wazamba： Gideon Haigh reviews Out of My Comfort Zone by Steve Waugh

da dobrowin： Gideon Haigh23-Jan-2006

Michael Joseph, hb, 801pp, £20

Eight hundred and one pages; 300,000 words; 1.9 kg. In this statistically-minded age, it is the dimensions of Steve Waugh’s autobiography that first command attention. He has, again, swept the field. Bradman disposed of his life in 316 pages, Hobbs in 320, Allan Border in 270. And this after 10 tour diaries, an album of photographs, and three biographies. The man’s a machine.The hackneyed sportspeak of the title isn’t insignificant either. This is not a comfortable book to hold, let alone read. Most sport memoirs are slight, perfunctory and produced with little care. Waugh has the opposite problem. His stupendous effort in producing this book oozes from every page, almost every passage. He writes like he batted, seemingly in thrall to the idea that the man with the most pages wins. Unable to determine what is important, he has convinced himself that everything is.That’s a shame. There are hints here of genuine self-disclosure, of the drive that made him the cricketer he was, and of the frailties contained by his tight-wound personality. “For me,” he explains, “the hardest part about not doing well was that I began to think I was a failure not just as a player but as a person too.” He was, he admits, a bottler up of his emotions, even with brother Mark. At the peak of his twin’s travails in the match-fixing mess, Waugh recalls, they had a heart-to-heart that, in the great tradition of Aussie stoicism, wasn’t: “Before we parted, we had one of those moments where you know you should let your guard down and just do something. I’m sure we both sensed it – the notion that we should embrace and reassure each other it was going to be okay. But we didn’t.”Waugh is the voice of pragmatism when he wonders if he came back a better player after omission from the Australian side: “Sounds fantastic in theory, but most players who get dropped either don’t make it back or are no better prepared when they get their next chance.” But he is the voice of suggestibility when he enumerates his host of superstitions above and beyond the famous red rag – the alighting on him of a ladybird, for example, he took as a good omen.Captaincy was even lonelier than playing: “A captain can tell he’s skipper the moment he sits down to a team dinner at a restaurant and the chairs on either side are vacant for longer than they have been in the past.” He admits to the occasional “mild anxiety attack” at the coin toss. By the end of his career, his only confidante was his wife, to whom he “let all my pent-up emotions gush out and bawled like a baby” when he was retrenched as one-day skipper.Just when Waugh seems about to open up, however, he seeks the comfort of cliche (“An overwhelming sense of anticipation on top of the comforting knowledge that this was an Australian cricketer’s ultimate sporting adventure stirred me as we gathered at Sydney airport in readiness for my second Ashes tour”) and the safety of statistics (“I performed okay in our other matches, playing in all eight games and finishing fourth in the Australian batting aggregates”). His comfort zone is not merely small but well-fortified.Waugh is also prone to descriptions that are like literary slog-sweeps: batting on an awkward pitch is like “being a wildebeest crossing a swollen African creek bed, knowing that eventually a submerged crocodile will eventually sink its fangs into your flesh”; Michael Bevan was “a `pyjama Picasso’, creating masterpiece after masterpiece to the point that his genius became mundane when people were spoiled by his continued brilliance”; Gavin Robertson “once had the classic textbook technique but it somehow metamorphosed into a batting stance that resembled a badly constipated individual with a `headless chook’ approach”. The writer might have left his comfort zone, but did he have to try taking the reader with him?