In February 2011, sports writer Margot Butcher profiled a young Kane Williamson for North & South magazine. With permission, we republish an inspiring insight into the early years and career of the man who has today reached world number one status with his Test batsmanship.
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Cricket should be simple. And on those rare days when nobody gets you out, not even yourself, it is. See the ball, react to the line and length, hit the ball without getting out. Simple.
Batting is zen. It’s a mindset, Kane Williamson says. A tiny moment of indecision is crucial reaction time that’s lost, the ball travelling so quickly at you there’s no second chance to decide where to plant your feet or which stroke you’re going to play.
To succeed, skills must become second nature, secondary to that zen of playing instinctively. Watch the ball, he tells himself. Then trust that mindset. Simple.
We were talking about batting in a clattery cafe near Seddon Park, Hamilton’s Test cricket ground and home ground for the Northern Knights, Williamson’s first-class team. The espresso machine is graunching in our ears. I’m going a little spare, but the young batsman isn’t the least bit distracted.
He talks about growing up in Tauranga, talks a lot about his dad. Brett Williamson, from a big sporty family, played under-17s for Northern Districts and was a handy cricketer until his eyes packed up. Keratoconus, a degenerative condition of the cornea. He needed a cornea transplant back in the days when techniques weren’t as sophisticated as now and thereafter channelled his love of cricket into coaching youngsters.
Kane and his twin brother, Logan, are the youngest of Brett and Sandra Williamson’s children. There are three elder sisters, Kylie, Anna and Sophie, now in their 20s, who all played for national age-group teams in volleyball. Bay of Plenty is a volleyball stronghold, and they were taller for their age than Logan and Kane, a small man who looks like he could be Dominic Monaghan’s hobbit double in The Lord of the Rings. But Kane always stood out at sport, no matter his size: point guard in basketball; first five-eighths in rugby; hockey, soccer, volleyball and cricket.
His mother remembers him slotting mini-basketballs through a hoop when he was 18 months old, with the perfect action and everything. Preternatural? New Zealand has produced thousands of first-class cricketers through the decades and he’s only the second, after Martin Crowe, to have brought up 1000 first-class runs at 20.
His back story is a litany of precocious vignettes, always making cricket sides as the baby of the team by a daunting two or three years. Eight-year-olds grew up on Kiwi Cricket, a modified version played with a soft ball, and had to retire and let someone else have a bat when they reached 20 or 30 runs. Eight-year-old Williamson had all the shots, almost always retired, and the senior primary-school team wanted him even though he was only a junior.
“Dad wasn’t sure if I should; all the boys were a few years older and it was the hard ball. But I got the OK. Then we had a team meeting and had to vote for the captain, and all the senior boys voted for me to be captain, even though I was a couple of years younger than them.”
He says that without sounding full of himself – he has nice manners and deflects all praise that he is “naturally talented” or “gifted".
Cricket is his addiction. For as long as he can remember he has practised as much as he can, and found motivation in goals. He is still finding plenty to learn. “I always practised with Dad, just nagging at him, eh – inside, outside, wherever I could have a bat. I wasn’t even six. Our house backed onto the Pillans Point School field. After a few years, Dad ended up building nets there and putting in a pitch through Pub Charity, so that suited me quite nicely.”
He writes left-handed, bowls and bats right-handed, kicks left-footed (“Our whole family’s a bit like that”) and grew up listening to the BLACKCAPS on radio because the family didn’t have SKY. He’s always had the jump start on his peers. At 12, Williamson led Bay of Plenty Coastlands to the Northern Districts under-14 title in Gisborne, scoring a head-turning 420 runs from just four innings. At 14, he was up against adults as the Tauranga Boys’ College 1st XI played in the local club competition. At 15, he was picked for the New Zealand youth team (under-19s).
Glenn Turner, our luminary batsman of the 1970s, remembers Williamson stood out from his bigger, shaving peers for being able to work the ball from offside to legside, which is tricky, and for being keen to learn, one of the few to ask lots of questions, even when the older boys mocked and teased him for it.
He was also a sixth-former when selected to make his first-class debut – few do so that young – and while he was head boy the following year, Northern Districts made him a contracted player (i.e. gave him a salary). A professional sportsman while still a schoolboy, one of the 80 or so top players in the country. He took his cricket so seriously that he’d already been taking yoga, martial arts and boxing classes for a couple of years to develop his dexterity, flexibility and footwork. His teammate Michael Parlane had been playing for Northern Districts since Williamson was still in Huggies.
There used to be an ad on telly in which a kid was agonising under a swirling high ball, going through a string of flashbacks of all the times he’d dropped a catch. Williamson, all of 12 at the time, was drawn to it. As you would expect in saccharine ad-land, the boy in the commercial ended up taking the catch, but it didn’t compute with the young Williamson.
Around that age, he was playing Roller Mills rugby, where he’d struck up a rapport with Jeff Robb, forwards coach for the Bay of Plenty Roller Mills side. A big influence on Williamson, he’d also begun teaching at his intermediate school.
“We started having lots of chats about the mental side of sport, about believing and being positive,” Williamson recalls, “rather than focusing on ‘don’t let this happen’ and exaggerating what could go wrong. “That was something that stuck with me, and I remember so clearly this moment playing against Westlake, one of my first games when I’d just got to college, nervous as hell, the ball swirling and me under it. I was thinking, ‘Right, I’m going to catch it, going to catch it...’ and I caught it. I popped back to the intermediate school to see Jeff and said, ‘I gotta tell you what happened!’”
Mindset. For a couple of hours, it’s almost exclusively what we talked about in that noisy cafe, and the young cricketer came across as someone who had studied himself through the mirror of cricket. Dad had taught him the skill sets, how to play off the back foot (hallmark of a complete batsman), so many throw-downs over the years that Williamson snr stuffed his shoulder. Technique was second nature; what engaged the batsman now was the ceaseless study of the human mind under pressure. And what is that pressure but your own perception?
If we’ve made Williamson sound like some golden whizz-kid, we need to point out that there’s been a quirky pattern to his cricketing upbringing in which he bombs on debut. His big step-up to representing the Bay of Plenty, precociously at 14, was abysmal.
“It was against Hamilton. Dan Vettori was playing for them and I was just staring wide-eyed at him, eh. The first ball he bowled, he dropped it short and I whacked it, still looking at him, into the bat-pad. Out for a duck. My first-class debut was the same. I was put into the side, made 2, 0, didn’t do anything, dropped a catch.
“Then in the one-dayers, I was batting at six and kept getting one not out. A lot of guys spoke to me saying, “Make sure you have that presence at the crease. Stick your chest out, that sort of thing.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s right. You’ve been selected to be there, after all. Belief is the strongest thing in your game and I just needed to reset my confidence at that level. I tell myself no matter how good the level is, everyone is human and there’s no ‘set way’. Even the best players in the world are different from each other, so if I work as hard as I can, there’s no reason I can’t be there.”
When it happened again, this time on his BLACKCAPS debut on a One-Day International tour of Sri Lanka a few months back — duck, duck — he swears he felt unfazed. We were talking upon his return, before he set off again with the BLACKCAPS to play in Bangladesh, and then to India, where he would make his Test debut.
We joked that he’d have no reason to feel nervous on Test debut, since he was bound to make a duck anyway. And then, as history had shown, he would be away soon enough.
When he was barely 18, Williamson won Northern Districts’ cricketer of the year award, noteworthy in a team of such strength — they supply more BLACKCAPS than any other first-class association and have won more trophies than any other team in the past couple of years. Then, last season, he was judged the most outstanding first-class batsman in the land, garnering special praise for an eight-hour innings in which he looked like he could keep batting all week.
He’d just got out in one of the last games against Otago when his mobile rang. Mark Greatbatch, coach of the BLACKCAPS, was calling to say he wanted him in Hamilton the next day, in the squad to play Australia. The dream had come true. Williamson rang his parents, then quietly watched his team-mates without letting on — the game came first.
In the event, he was omitted from the Test-playing XI and released, but within months would be contracted to the BLACKCAPS, aged just 19, despite not yet having played for them. Last summer, his first-class scores for Northern Districts were 2, 18, 2, 6 not out, 16, 93, 170, 192, 33, 26 — a good season in the end, but the first half had been a failure.
“Without bragging, until then I’d always done well,” says Williamson. “It was a new experience for me and I learned so much from it. A lot of people were interviewing me when I wasn’t scoring runs and decided that it meant I wasn’t in form. Well, what’s form? Is it hitting the ball in the middle, or is it when you’re making good decisions? I just made bad decisions for the first half of last season and then made good decisions for the second half. Yet it wasn’t as if I changed my game or became a different player.
“That’s what I learnt. That instead of trying to complicate and push my game forcefully to try to improve, I succeeded by just relaxing. I started learning the guitar in the middle of it, to relax. When the pressure is on, rather than ‘handling’ the pressure, you almost ‘don’t register’ the pressure, and then you’re in the place to score runs.”
Martin Crowe, the beautiful batsman whom Williamson is too young to have ever seen play except on video, has become a willing mentor. They met last year. What I responded to well was the way he tries to get players to find what they did a few years ago when they ‘just played’, says the young pretender, “which for someone like me was at college, when you just play and don’t get caught up in the small stuff. Often coaches feel they have to change things, impose, change your grips and so on, and what I found really good was he said, ‘What you do is right.’
“You just have to trust your natural style is good enough, trust the instinctive way you play, because when the pressure is on you need to use that instinct. That’s when you make your best decisions. ‘My game is my game’, rather than, ‘I need my game to be like someone else’s game.’”
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He didn’t make a duck on his Test debut after all, of course. Instead, his seemingly nerveless 131 made him the youngest New Zealander ever to open his Test career with a century, breaking a 45-year-old record and forming part of a record fifth-wicket stand integral to saving the Test against the world’s number-one Test team.
As Williamson reached three figures, Vettori, his captain, was at the non-striker’s end. Having been a precocious teenage BLACKCAP himself, perhaps no one better understood the achievement. Williamson had recently shown him a photo — Vettori with an eight-year-old fan who’d asked him to pose for a picture during a break in a cricket match at Seddon Park in Hamilton. That was Williamson.
Now the Kodak moment is of Williamson leaning into the skipper’s shoulder in almost a father-son fashion — he barely reaches Vettori’s collarbone — quietly absorbing his first Test century, the expert Indian commentators, meanwhile, raving about his nimble footwork and composure, timing and flair.
In this age of cricket, India’s boundary-slapping rock star Virender Sehwag can insolently bat through the line of the ball without moving his feet; players like Sri Lanka’s Tillakaratne Dilshan and BLACKCAP Brendon McCullum invent impressively confident backward slogs under the high- adrenaline influence of Twenty20. Might there still be room for a modern classic like Williamson, who prefers Test cricket and plays like the textbooks say?
In his eighties, the legendary Australian Don Bradman watched a young Sachin Tendulkar and saw, for the first time, a batsman slight in stature who reminded him of himself. At Ahmedabad, it was the turn of Tendulkar, India’s greatest batsman and Williamson’s batting hero, to watch a player many years his junior and remember how he had felt as a 16-year-old playing his first game for his country. Even he hadn’t managed a Test century on debut.
These quick-footed, short men with good eyes, deft timing and low hands — how they can play. Williamson had already made his first One-Day hundred for New Zealand, on the earlier tour against Bangladesh. Barely in the team a minute and already busting mental barriers. He says he just keeps it simple by watching the ball.
“International cricket isn’t a whole new beast. It is a step up, but it’s still cricket, eh?”
He finishes his coffee and slips out into the Hamilton haze, where he might pass, even now, as a schoolboy in the street. A very normal rock star, who still lives at home in Tauranga, who turned down scholarships to play for fancy schools in Auckland because he believed in himself, who has the cricket world at his feet, who just loves to bat. Simple.
© Republished with the permission of Margot Butcher and North & South magazine / Bauer Media (NZ) Ltd
