UNCAPPED PICKS: The Kid From 10 de Laan
Baartman has made it his purpose in life to beat the odds.
Today I’m launching the much-anticipated SA20's UNCAPPED PICKS series (highly anticipated by myself), which will feature essays on the six uncapped players who were picked by the SA20 franchises before the auction. In the coming weeks, we’ll have a new UNCAPPED PICKS essay that will shine a light on these select few. It should be really fun, and a perfect companion to everything else happening with SA20. And thanks, as always, for your support!
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Playing street cricket was an expensive hobby for Ottniel Baartman and his friends. That did not deter them. Street cricket was the only kind of cricket that Baartman and his friends could play. Baartman dropped out of his primary school team because his mother could not afford the kit required.
Primary schoolers did not need much in terms of kit, but even that little that was needed was beyond the reach of the Baartmans. Ottniel’s mother earned money by doing laundry for families that could afford to pay her for the service. It is not a service that was in great demand in Bridgton, Oudtshoorn. So, sometimes the Baartman family went to bed on empty stomachs.
“On some days, the sandwich and milkshake we were given at school was the only meal I would have,” says Ottniel Baartman. “That kept me going. I would go to sleep hungry, but knowing that the next day I would wake up in the morning, go to school and have a bread, have a meal.”
Whenever she had money, Baartman's mother made sure she gave him a little bit. A five rand here, a 10 rands there. He needed it. A lot of it went towards street cricket. Street cricket was not an expensive hobby because there were admission fees or because Baartman and his friends needed a decent kit. It was free and for bats, they used discarded planks. Bins took the place of wickets. They used tennis balls for balls.
One of the rules Baartman and his friends had was that a ball that flew over the fence into someone’s yard was a six and out. Most of the time a six and out also signalled the end of the game because the aunties that lived along 10 de laan, 10th Avenue in English, confiscated balls that flew into their yards.
Baartman and his friends bought new balls almost every day. The aunties did not like giving the balls back to the boys. “Sometimes we would see their children playing with our balls the next day and there was nothing we could do about it. We could not go up to them and grab them back, it would cause trouble for us,” says Baartman.
A new tennis ball went for five rands at the local shop. Almost every day, Baartman and his friends contributed one rand each towards the purchase of a new ball. Not everyone could contribute all the time. When the boys were flush with money, they started the day with two new balls. The local vendor enjoyed the repeat business the boys brought. A conspiracy theorist is within their rights to suggest a relationship between the aunties and the vendor.
Sometimes the boys would buy back their balls from the aunties for five rands.
When Baartman was on song, there were few incidences of someone hitting a long one into someone's yard. He would bowl out his friends in a procession of wickets. If Ottniel bowled well, no balls were lost or confiscated, and they would not need to buy new balls.
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Bridgton has no claim to fame. It is your average kasi, location (also loxion) or township in the heart of Oudtshoorn. All are words to describe high-density residential areas. Within Bridgton's 2.31 square kilometres is a mass of brick houses, wooden shacks, and corrugated iron shacks that house Bridgton's population of close to 20 000 people.
This is where Ottniel Baartman comes from.
The first pair of spikes that Ottniel Baartman wore were a little big for his feet. They belonged to his uncle, Douglas Baartman. Douglas is six years older than Ottniel and was a club cricketer. Douglas wore the spikes when he had matches and lent them to Ottniel when he had to play for SWD, school or club cricket. Mercifully, their matchdays rarely coincided.
It only happened twice that they played on the same day for the same team. Even then, they took turns with the spikes. When they got torn, Ottniel and Douglas repaired the spikes as best they could.
Youngsters from Bridgton are not meant to succeed as professional cricketers. The system is not designed for them to do so. South African cricketers are developed by one of the best talent-improving systems in cricket history, the South African elite school system. That is where one goes if they have dreams of becoming a professional cricketer.
Bridgton Secondary School is not in this bracket. Bridgton Secondary School does not even compete with the middling schools. To make it into these elite cricketing schools, children from areas such as Bridgton need scholarships.
Cricket South Africa has several scouts scattered across all provinces. Their job is to identify talented youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds for scholarships to these elite cricketing schools. Only a limited number can qualify. Some of these elite schools also have bursaries for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who show aptitude in academic and non-academic pursuits. These are also limited.
Ottniel Baartman did not receive either a scholarship or bursary to a top school. To make a career out of cricket, Baartman had one job, he had to beat the odds. The odds that Baartman was up against were stacked so high one could not see the sun.
Baartman made it because he walked the four or five kilometres to the South Western Districts headquarters for trials when he was 15. A walk he would make twice or three times a week after school over the next few years. After completing his high school education, Baartman walked to SWD more often. Despite the distance, Andre du Plessis has no recollection of a moment when Baartman arrived late for training.
At the trials, Baartman impressed everyone and became a part of SWD’s PG Bison team for that year. That gave him the confidence he needed to keep going. From that year onwards, Baartman went for all trials he could.
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The following year, Baartman went for the Under-16 trials. That also went well. But, the Under-17 trials did not go well. “I was overconfident going for those trials. Not being picked was hard for me to accept,” says Baartman.
Missing out on the Under-17 trials drove him to work hard at his bowling and fitness. His mother could not afford gym fees or private coaching, so Baartman took up running. He ran a lot that year. He also bowled a lot of balls at the SWD nets. When he went back for trials the following year, he did not just make the SWD team Baartman also made the Coke Week team. Baartman made Coke Week two years in a row. He now had a clear path to a professional career.
In 2015, Baartman was one of the 15 players announced for the SWD Academy intake. Baartman became the breadwinner at home. The allowances he received for every match he played for SWD fed his mother and sister. Baartman barely had enough left over for himself.
“Ottas never had a phone and it was always a struggle to get hold of him - we then agreed if he would give me R100 a month I would double that for six months and buy a phone for him,” says Andre du Plessis.
Baartman was no stranger to sacrifices. After du Plessis explained the reasons why Baartman needed to have a mobile phone of his own, Baartman made sacrifices elsewhere in his life. Through his commitment to the deal, the coach and student shrunk the timeline by three months. “He was over the moon when I handed him the brand new phone,” says du Plessis.
At 21, he could afford to travel to the Free State for trials with Free State Cricket because of the high-performance contract SWD had given him. The people at Free State liked what they saw and offered him a contract to play for the Knights after two days of trials. Baartman did not need time to think, he signed his first professional contract on the spot. When he received his first payment Baartman bought his mother a house.
The Baartmans lived in a shack for as long as Ottniel could remember. They lived in a shack when he was born. They were still living in a shack when he travelled to Free State for trials. Now, with his mother's house, he would not sleep in a shack whenever he visited home. He also no longer shared Douglas’ spikes.
In 2021 Ottniel Baartman was a recipient of the inaugural Makhaya Ntini Power of Cricket Award. The award ‘serves to demonstrate the ability of this game to change lives and communities, just as it did for Proteas bowling legend Makhaya.’
Baartman can be used as a poster boy of how one can make it through hard work and perseverance. But, Baartman is an outlier. For every Ottniel Baartman, there are tens of thousands of youngsters that do not make it beyond club cricket, like Douglas Baartman.
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Cricketers are shaped by where and how they learned to play the game. Tabraiz Shamsi bowls quick in the air because he was a medium pacer growing up, he converted to spin under duress. Keegan Petersen can play the short ball because he was always one of the smaller boys in his teams. The bowlers were always big tall guys and deliveries on a good length were short deliveries to him.
When he was a young boy, if Baartman was accurate and hit a certain line and length, his friends failed to hit sixes that landed in the yard of one of 10 de Laan's aunties. So no one would confiscate the ball. But, that's not why Baartman tried to be accurate. Baartman tried to be accurate because if he hit a certain line and length, he had a higher chance of bowling the other boys out.
That's all he wanted, to hit the wickets. Or rather, to hit the bin that represented the wickets. In his head, he saw the stumps cartwheeling and bails flying. Every moment he spent on the streets playing, Baartman relived the bowling he watched Douglas execute on Saturdays for Union Stars.
Accuracy turned Baartman into a hired gun. Affluent schools noticed him and hired him for matches. Bridgton Secondary did not play league cricket. The affluent ‘white’ schools did, and they needed good bowlers for their campaigns. So, they were happy to pay for services from a youngster like Baartman. Baartman gave all his earnings to his mother. The days of sleeping on an empty stomach became a distant memory. If he bowled well, his family ate.
On a conscious level, Baartman bowls with accuracy because of Vernon Philander. The Baartman family had their first television set when Ottniel was a teenager. Immediately he fell in love with the idea of watching sports on TV, especially cricket. The TV did not come with a DSTV decoder, so the only cricket he watched was what SABC 3 televised.
“Whenever there was cricket on SABC 3, I would spend hours in front of the TV, sometimes the whole day just watching, and my mother have to kick me out of the house, so she could watch soapies and stuff like that,” says Baartman.
When he watched Vernon Philander playing for the Proteas, Baartman decided that he wanted to bowl with the same accuracy and skill possessed by Philander. Philander tested batters’ technique, that is what Baartman strives to do. He hopes to do so for the Eastern Cape Sunrisers. He also has an accurate yorker that he hopes will help the Sunrisers in their quest during the SA20 tournament.