Captain Unflappable plays straight
By Michele Hewitson
From the New Zealand Herald, 23 November 2002
Stephen Fleming asks the photographer
what look he should assume for his picture. Should he
go for moody? Perhaps dour? Or should he put on his
best control-freak face?
This is a little good-natured jibe.
It is also a very clever rounding-off of today's presentation
of who Fleming is when he's not being the cricket captain.
I have asked him, earlier, whether
he is - as he has been described - moody, or dour or
a control freak.
He sighed at the first two descriptions:
"I'm very passionate about what I'm doing. I'm very
emotional about what I'm doing. But does it help anybody
if I'm flapping my arms around and looking all emotional."
He has fine-tuned an economy of
communication.
"The guys know when I'm not happy.
It can be that I cross my arms in a different way, but
they know it."
If things are going well then,
he says, "you'll get a happy me. A reasonably happy
and open me".
Retain that "reasonably," which
is about as much as you might expect from a captain
who - wrote Herald cricket writer Richard Boock - "celebrates
his many wins and achievements with the countenance
of someone who has just swallowed a bee".
He could have been an actor. He
offers that he has a number of faces - "several" - but
says, "Hopefully you've got me today".
He does unreadable effortlessly.
You will watch his face for a sign of any flickers of
anything other than a semblance of polite, charming
interest.
He's talked things up before. Once.
As in, against England earlier this year, how the Black
Caps were going to field superbly. It was Fleming who
dropped the catch that let English captain Nasser Hussein
go on to score a century.
He has learned to put on his masks.
He'll give me an example of why such props are necessary
when you happen to be the captain of a team who carry
with them the echo of angry shouts from the couches
of the nation when the boys are playing badly.
During a series against Sri Lanka
a few years ago, when the team really were playing badly,
the boys had a week off.
Fleming and fellow player Roger
Twose went for a day out at the New Zealand Open.
"You could hear people saying,
'Those guys should be in the bloody nets', and, 'They
shouldn't be out watching golf'."
The expectation is that if you
are the captain of the national side and the national
side are a losing side then "you should be training.
You shouldn't have a private life or a social life".
You most certainly should not be
seen to be having a good time while the nation weeps.
"You just draw back."
He chooses a quiet cafe in Oriental
Parade to do the interview. He doesn't want to be gawped
at. He'd probably be gawped at even if he wasn't Stephen
Fleming, captain of the Black Caps.
On a galeforce day in Wellington
where everyone else is having a bad-hair day, his is
perfect. He cuts a striking figure, his long legs loping
through the grey day, his untucked stripy shirt billowing
behind him.
He is trying, really hard, to be
untucked, to be open. He is friendly and only slightly
wary.
He picks me up in his pristine
white Mitsubishi Diamante with cricket bats jumbled
on the back seat. He's already said, on the phone: "Now,
you're not going to gazump me, are you?"
Our cricket players are a bit sensitive
just now. There has been the little matter of the six
week players' strike.
The cost, says Fleming, who admits
to almost pulling his hair out in frustration, has been
to "public respect and understanding".
He did not step into negotiations
earlier because he was playing this game not as captain
but as "one of 128 players. I had to respect the process".
When he and Chris Cairns did step
in it was not "to come riding in as the saviour of the
day".
The reason Fleming did not turn
up at the media conference to announce the resolution
- subsequently described as a PR gaffe - was that "it
wasn't my deal. I'd created an option; the players'
association and NZ Cricket did the deal".
Fair enough, although it's likely
it won't aid the understanding of the skipper.
What would he think if I told him
that the overwhelming response to him was: "The guy's
a total enigma?"
Fleming's response is a long pause.
"I don't know how to answer it, really." Perhaps, he
hazards, it's because he won't do the women's magazine
round.
Outside of cricket mates, "with
all due respect" he doesn't talk about his friends,
family or partner. He keeps what he calls "the inner
sanctum" closed.
He is also an enigma because he
is a batsman who gets to 50 and ... well, what exactly?
"If there was one answer I'd nail
it." L AST year he had a season in Middlesex and "learned
how to bat again". He is hopeful. "I search deep and
am still searching deep".
Partly, I suspect, it is the lifestyle
of somebody who became a professional sportsman at a
young age that has given him at least the appearance
of aloofness.
Professional sports people lead
a peculiar existence. They are protected and cosseted
with their nice hotels and dietitians and sports psychologists
and their media managers.
They are lauded in headlines. From
1998: "Prince Stephen Supreme. They are hung out to
dry". From 2001: "Time for Fleming to Quit. We love
him. We hate him".
"You've got to ride it," he says.
It's like a business, like the CEO of a business: if
your company's not performing that well, you're under
pressure."
We regard the Black Caps as a public
company and Fleming has done his growing up in public.
He was paid a good wage and never had to spend much
of it.
He has lived in hotels and tour
buses and planes. He bought a place with Nathan Astle
(Fleming bought Astle out and says they both maintain
the other got done) and now shares a house in Wadestown
with his partner of three years, Kelly, a "sponsorship
executive".
He has been a sponsored product
for all of his adult life.
Except for that little dope-smoking
incident in 1994 which he owned up to, he has had to
be seen to be good.
He is perhaps too well aware of
having to be good. When I ask him if drinks he says,
"Yeah, I drink well".
Then: "You can't put that." I have,
because it makes him sound less like a (self) control
freak.
Anyway, batsmen are - and here
it is from the batsman's mouth - very odd indeed. "Batters,"
says Fleming, are "weird. They're strange individuals".
Batters are inward-looking, intense
bundles of nerves who don armour to face balls coming
at them at 150km/h.
Fleming, who has battled his nerves
for years, is learning to love his. Not that you will
often see them.
His nickname is, predictably, Flem.
It is tempting to suppose that it springs from that
phlegmatic mask he will go on putting on - no matter
who calls for the captain to produce somersaults of
emotion on the pitch.
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