Word: waughs
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...Waugh, in other words, possessed a strong will. To see that purely in cricketing terms is to sell him short. It's something he calls on still, nearly two years out of the game. "Today (in Brisbane) I signed 700 books in a sitting," he says. "People were astounded. To me, it was a job I had to do. It didn't worry me in the slightest...
...Before the mass signings, there were the momentous innings. In his colossal autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone (Viking; 801 pages), Waugh takes us back to the boyhood play that made them possible. Like the young Bradman, he devised a simple solo game that soldered into his technique the basics of watching the ball and a straight bat. Like Ian and Greg Chappell, he had a brother who loved cricket as much as he did, and together they played till dark on all manner of surfaces, ever desperate to outdo each other. Both Steve and Mark Waugh became players...
...Waugh understood better than most that there's almost nothing between the top players in terms of talent: what separates them is the strength of their minds. Over a Test career that spanned two decades, Waugh worked at improving his concentration. That may sound dull. He concentrated well? Big deal. But his ability to shut out distractions and silence his demons was the making of him. In the mid-1990s, a bunch of admiring Sri Lankan players gathered around him after a Test. One asked Waugh whether he meditated, for he was trance-like at the crease. "It was," Waugh...
...shouldn't surprise that Waugh batted better than he writes. His tour diaries have been bestsellers, but Out of My Comfort Zone reads like a compilation of these - a superdiary in which almost everything is deemed worth a mention. Waugh's probably never heard of Ernest Hemingway's theory of omission, which is basically that prose reads better when the obvious is left out. Hemingway would have choked on Waugh's cavalcade of superfluous adjectives, and on sentences like, "Failure can lead you into a dark abyss of gloom and depression." But then Hemingway couldn't play the cut shot...
...What do we learn about him? Waugh not only sledged but felt annoyed at times with teammates who didn't. We knew he was a hardhead; his insecurity was less apparent. Waugh scored 22 ducks in Test cricket and each was like a knife to his ego. "There's something about that figure that makes you feel worthless," he says. "It's as though you're a failure as a person and not just as a cricketer." Waugh's shyness is a revelation: a passage in which he botches a speech in front of his family...