Playing In The Present
Theunis de Bruyn is not trapped in the past or lost in the future, he is in the present.
The first time Theunis de Bruyn was called up to the Proteas, he forgot to live in the moment. His focus was on the next innings, the next opportunity, the next game. Not the present. After he was dropped, again he forgot to live in the moment. His focus was on what had gone wrong.
His priorities have changed. His focus is now on the present. If he gets to play, he plans to enjoy every second of the game. If he does not play, he plans to enjoy every second of offering support to his teammates. He plans to be present.
“While you've got these opportunities, you must enjoy it as if you're playing backyard cricket back in the days when you were young. You need to just stick to reality and understand that the journey that you're on, you're very privileged, and it goes by so quickly,” says de Bruyn.
If you are not yet a subscriber of Stumped!, join more than a thousand other professional athletes & ex-pros, coaches, commentators & analysts and casual sports fans that receive the newsletter in their inbox each week — it’s free:
A week before the Proteas left for Australia for a Test series, two weeks after he received his second-chance summons from the Proteas, Theunis de Bruyn scored a 90-ball century. As one does to show selectors that they picked the right man. A strike rate of 107.44 in Division 1 4-day cricket in South Africa is Bazball-level of batting intent.
What the scorecard doesn’t tell you, though, is that during the first 10 balls he looked lost at sea, it was as if he had wandered out to bat half-asleep. De Bruyn was scratchy and barely scored a run. He was all nervous energy. It is a feeling he had grown familiar with, a feeling that could hinder his game, and also a feeling that he had learned to handle.
He wasn’t counting, but after the 10th delivery, de Bruyn walked away from the crease to gather his thoughts. Took a deep breath. “In the week coming into the match, I had told myself that I wanted to play on my terms. I wasn’t doing that in the first 10 balls,” says de Bruyn.
The worry of dismissal can handicap a batter. De Bruyn knew that. “I told myself that if I go out the next ten balls then it’s no problem. I was going to play to my character and not to my technique. Without worrying about the consequence of getting out. Eventually, you get out. Whether you make a hundred or not, you are going to get out. It’s better to get out after enjoying the innings,” says de Bruyn.
The mental note gave him a sense of ease that released his natural game. A lot of de Bruyn’s cricket is played in his head. He opened up and started to play more aggressively. He was dismissed after scoring 101 runs from 15.67 overs worth of deliveries.
De Bruyn’s approach to the first 10 balls he faced was day and night with the next 84 deliveries. The ball pinged off the bat and he found the gaps he sought with ease. De Bruyn was in the zone and felt invincible.
When he was 17, de Bruyn scored 269 runs for Northerns in a provincial match against Free State. The knock came barely a week after he had been left out of the Coke Week team. Everyone else from his Menlo Park High School team had made the Coke Week team and he had not. The double century was a statement.
“I don't know how many cricket matches I have played in my lifetime. But I can't even make one hand full of other instances where I had a similar feeling, where I was just basically untouchable,” says de Bruyn. “When you play like that, whatever you try to do just happens, which is so awesome.”
The zone is the nirvana of sports. The holy grail of batters. Bowlers are helpless against a batter in the zone, so they wait for the batter to make a mistake. But zoning players don't make mistakes, they are on rarefied air where everything is clinical and instinctive, unaffected by thought processes and uncluttered by expectations.
During his playing years, Adam Gilchrist tried to will himself into the zone by going in to bat thinking he was 20 or 30 not out already. This way, he bypassed the nervous energy one has at the start of the innings and was more relaxed and calm. That did not always work. The zone comes on its own accord.
“It feels like an out-of-body experience,” says de Bruyn. “I wish it can happen every time I walk out to bat.”
When he debuted for the Proteas, de Bruyn had hopes that he would be able to have a few more moments like that. Recapturing that brilliance would help him solidify his place in the team. Throughout his career, de Bruyn had always walked into the first XI of a team and knew what role he was expected to play. That was not the case with the Proteas.
De Bruyn got in as the 12th man. The Proteas had a settled team and he would only get a chance if one of the top six suffered an injury or totally lost form. His wait for something to happen was 13 months long. When the opportunity finally came, de Bruyn knicked off the third ball and was dismissed for a duck. In the second innings, de Bruyn and Hashim Amla ran into each other in the middle of the pitch and de Bruyn was run out.
He received another opportunity to make an impression when Faf du Plessis flew home to be present for his daughter’s birth. De Bruyn fell two runs short of a half-century in the first innings and was dismissed for one run in the second innings. In both Tests, de Bruyn was so wrapped up in the future that he forgot about the present.
De Bruyn’s Test career lasted 23 innings. In that period, he scored a single Test hundred and threatened to score half-centuries twice, 48 against England at Lord's and 49 against Pakistan at the Wanderers. Thereafter, he was dropped from the Proteas. His international career was gone. De Bruyn’s dream of a gilded international career crumbled and he was shattered.
This newsletter also reaches more people because you share it with others:
The fielders were dispersing one by one. Theunis de Bruyn did not really notice that they were leaving. It made little difference to him because he had spent the last 45 minutes finding gaps so much that it seemed there were no fielders around him, only a few kids who ran to fetch the ball. De Bruyn’s father had to intervene, the only way young Theunis was getting off strike was if he retired.
“I have not been dismissed yet,” De Bruyn complained when his father asked him to give other kids a chance at batting. De Bruyn felt that he had paid his dues when he had fielded as other kids batted and now they had to dismiss him to earn the right to bat too.
The De Bruyn family was on holiday, enjoying time at the beach. As was his custom, Theunis had wandered off in search of some cricket. He had joined a group of kids playing not far from where his parents were relaxing. Theunis De Bruyn loved batting. Back home in Pretoria, De Bruyn and his sister traded favours. He would take part in her games that involved dolls and all that for a certain period in exchange for an hour or two of her throwing balls for him to practice his batting.
Their father relieved her of the duties when he came home from work in the late afternoon. Few people know Theunis’ technique as well as his father - and Pierre de Bruyn, whom Theunis worked with at Tuks.
Whenever possible, mid-week or weekend, father and son drove over to the nets and spent hours at work. The older De Bruyn’s throwing was not as tame as Theunis’ sister’s. He mixed things up. Every now and then the older man would send through a short delivery that would hit Theunis on the body. That is how he learned to take body blows.
“An Australian bowler just hit you with that one. Are you soft?” De Bruyn’s father would respond to Theunis’ tear-filled and accusing look towards him. Theunis’ response to the question was always a shot back over his head that went as far as their yard would allow. The young boy would watch with satisfaction as his father went to look for the ball.
This Substack column exists thanks to patrons and readers that leave tips. Stumped! is wholly supported by Readers Like You. To keep the weekly posts coming and to keep the lights on here, consider leaving a tip or supporting monthly on Patreon. You won’t regret it!
When Theunis de Bruyn was in Grade 7 he went for the most prolonged period he had ever gone without handling a bat. De Bruyn was ill for months. What has stuck with him to adulthood are the worried faces of his family and the shocked looks of anyone who came to visit. His young mind could not compute how bad it was, but it was bad. De Bruyn spent about four months unable to do much and didn’t leave the house.
Following his illness, de Bruyn had a two-week convalescence period. Almost immediately after that period, de Bruyn showed up to his first cricket match of the year. He scored a century. That was his first century for Menlo Park. In his next match, de Bruyn doubled his century tally.
The sound of the ball pinging off the bat, feeling bat on ball and being part of the team gave de Bruyn a feeling that is hard to put into words. He felt as if this was where he was supposed to be. For the first time in his life, the thought of a cricketing career crossed his mind. Cricket was his calling. For what purpose? He had no idea. What he did know, at that moment, was that he wanted to play cricket professionally.
From then onwards, the building blocks to a cricket career fell into place. At Menlo Park High School, de Bruyn was part of an all-conquering team that was almost unbeaten in every match that de Bruyn played. De Bruyn was on the losing side only once. He balanced his commitments to his school with commitments to the Northerns provincial sides. He also found time for other sports in between, but nothing on a serious level.
After high school, de Bruyn joined Tuks. That did not start very well. Pierre de Bruyn ejected him from the first net session he attended because Theunis was not following the game plan. That was the first and last clash between coach and player.
“Pierre is a hard man with exacting standards,” says Theunis de Bruyn.
“Theunis was a very intense hard worker, almost the perfectionist that wanted every training session to be perfect,” says Pierre de Bruyn.
They were two sides of the same coin. Both could be incredibly stubborn. They also gelled together. Pierre and Theunis developed a strong bond and worked together as recently as 2018. During his years at Tuks, Theunis went on to become one of Pierre’s most valuable players in the Tuks team that had an unprecedented run.
Pierre du Bruyn’s Tuks team, led by Theunis de Bruyn in the last year of both men at Tuks, was unbeaten in over 100 games. Those games included contests against South Africa A and professional teams. They capped off their run by leading Tuks to their first-ever Varsity World Cup title at the Oval, in London, in 2014.
This holiday season, I am accepting gifts in form of coffees:
‘He is back,’ Matthew Ruben thought as he watched Theunis de Bruyn cruise to 143 runs. The same thought crossed Richard das Neves’ mind. Das Neeves was sitting a few seats away from Ruben. De Bruyn looked assured, in control and was dominating bowlers as he led the Titans to the 2021-2022 4-day title.
De Bruyn had protested against being added to the playing 11 to play in the final. After his shoulder operation, de Bruyn had not taken part in any 4-day match for the Titans. He didn’t want to be the player who swoops in because of their reputation. The coaches assured him that he was in because he was a top player and had valuable experience that the team needed. The team-first mantra resonates with de Bruyn.
Before his shoulder injury, de Bruyn was searching for something, searching (if you will) for his groove, he was on the hunt for that single innings that would turn things around for him, but he couldn’t find it. He grew frustrated with himself and slipped into an abyss.
Somewhere along the line cricket had become a job for de Bruyn, something he had to do and not something he wanted to do. In his haste to meet KPIs that would elevate his game, he had rushed through the process. He had forgotten that he loved to bat and became obsessed with scoring runs. He turned into a bataholic who watched himself in the hotel room mirror shadow-batting and dreamt of getting the handle in his hands during sleep and naps.
Throughout his career, he had been invincible and now he had been proven to be a mere mortal. De Bruyn had never failed on the level he had failed with during his time with the Proteas before, especially not so early after joining a team. The insecurity and self-doubt he developed after that failure created a barrier in his career and his poor run persisted into his First Class career.
His mind was wrapped up in the past, grappling with his failure so much so that de Bruyn retreated into his shell and started batting within himself.
Often a player can’t identify why things are not going well. For many, the go-to solution is working on technique when the issue could be a niggling injury, mental fatigue, family issues, bad press and social media, poor workload management and complacency, among other things. It could also be a combination of two or more issues.
As de Bruyn’s confidence spiralled, Mandla Mashimbyi, Matthew Ruben and Richard das Neves formed a boy band. No, they didn’t. They did, however, become the trio that helped him rebuild his game and his confidence. Long chats were had, some that lasted well into the night. They spent hours grooving his technique and fitness. At team net sessions, de Bruyn was always the first to arrive. After his session, de Bruyn stuck around the nets.
“Theunis has a good eye for really small details,” says Richard das Neves. “He picks small technical things that a fellow batter might improve on.”
“If there is one thing he enjoys more than batting, it’s helping other batters improve,” Matthew Ruben adds. De Bruyn spent hours watching his teammates work on their batting, offering tips to anyone willing to take in his feedback.
In the run-up to the 4-day final, things came together for de Bruyn. His technique solidified and he rediscovered his love for the game, a passion he had lost beneath a mountain of lofty expectations. For the first time in years, he felt the same sense of purpose he had felt when he was in Grade 7 after his Lazurus moment. The shoulder injury, helping others improve and the conversations and work with Mashimbyi, Ruben and das Neves helped de Bruyn regain perspective.
“When Roger Federer retired, there were a lot of interviews about him and he said he loved tennis, but he never ever in his wildest dreams dreamed of achieving what he achieved. He just wanted to play at Wimbledon,” says de Bruyn. “He didn't know that he's going to be the greatest tennis player of all time and he didn’t plan for that too. And that meant that he stayed in the present all the time and just enjoyed the whole journey, the good and the bad.”
Das Neves and Ruben were right, Theunis de Bruyn was back. He is solid in technique, trusts his instincts and is high in confidence. But he was also different. He was not the 24-year-old the Proteas selectors called up in 2017. The 30-year-old version lives in the present and his focus is on his love for cricket.
