The Barefoot Coach

  Published by Westland Publications Private Limited 1st Floor – A Block, East Wing, Plot No. 40, SP Info City, Dr. MGR Salai, Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai – 600096

  Westland Sport, the Westland Sport logo, Westland and the Westland logo are trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

  Copyright © 2019 Paddy Upton Paddy Upton asserts his moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 9789387894983

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Part 1 IN THE BEGINNING

  1 SEARCHING FOR THE AUTHENTIC GARY KIRSTEN

  2 COACHING. NO, NOT COACHING. COACHING.

  3 THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF LEADERSHIP

  Part 2 THE INDIA JOURNEY

  4 ARRIVING IN INDIA

  5 PLAYING TO STRENGTHS

  6 INDIA AT WAR

  7 SHED THE BLAZER AND TIE

  8 THINKING DIFFERENTLY

  9 CHARACTER AND VALUES

  10 EGO: THE BATTLE WITHIN

  11 EGO AND MY GREATEST PROFESSIONAL ERROR

  12 GETTING THERE: BIRTHING THE WORLD CUP STRATEGY

  13 GETTING THERE: THE SIX INCHES BETWEEN THE EARS

  14 THE MYTH OF MENTAL TOUGHNESS

  15 INTUITIVE LEADERSHIP

  16 FAILURE: PART ONE

  17 FAILURE: PART TWO

  18 RIDING THE WAVES OF FEAR

  19 THE ZONE OF DEATH, THE NORTH POLE AND THE WORLD CUP

  20 THE WORLD CUP: COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE TEAM

  INTERLUDE

  Part 3 LIFE IS BUT A JOURNEY

  21 HARNESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

  22 PERSONAL MASTERY

  23 SELF-AWARENESS: A JOURNEY OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

  24 THE PROTEAS IN SWITZERLAND

  25 ALPHA LEADERS

  26 THE PAINFUL LOSSES

  27 NO ‘ZEN SHIT’

  28 OUT OF THE BOX

  POSTSCRIPT Madiba’s sleeve

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  REFERENCES

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  www.thebarefootcoach.net

  INTRODUCTION

  In the mid-1990s, I was living the dream life. I was travelling the world with the South African cricket team as cricket’s first ever full-time fitness trainer, and working with the late South African captain Hansie Cronjé and the late and highly respected coach Bob Woolmer.

  It was my first real job, which I had been offered while studying for a PhD in Sport Science at the University of Cape Town, in my home city. Accepting it at the age of twenty-five meant having to retire from my cricket and rugby-playing career and to take my studies onto the road with me as I joined my new travel partners: Hansie, Allan Donald, Gary Kirsten, Jacques Kallis, Brian McMillan, Dave Richardson, Mark Boucher, Lance Klusener and Jonty Rhodes, to name a few.

  Over the next few years I became friends with most of the players, many of whom I already knew from having played with or against them. Travelling and working together brought us even closer. I was very well paid to watch international cricket at the world’s best stadiums and from the best seats in the house. I met and sometimes had a drink with greats like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh and Brian Lara. I met the Queen of England in person and twice met President Nelson Mandela. We got free tickets to whichever music concert was on in the city we were in. We stayed at the best hotels and, several nights a week, ate at the best restaurants in Mumbai, Sydney, London, Barbados, Auckland, Colombo, Cape Town, Karachi, Dubai and others. Most times, the restaurant manager would come over, meet the famous cricketers I was dining with, and announce that the meal was on him, as his way of honouring us.

  We would often frequent the city’s popular night spots after a day’s play. In those days, we played less cricket. The players didn’t all conduct themselves as professionally as they do today. Most significantly, there were no cell phone cameras and, of course, social media was non-existent.

  This meant there were more opportunities for night-time fun than are available to sportspeople today. The group I was with always attracted the lion’s share of female attention in the pub or nightclub. Oakley, the sports equipment company, gave me free sunglasses—more pairs than I could wear. The guys from Nike would invite me to load up a trolley of free clothes and shoes a few times a year, and the South African telecom company MTN gave me free cell phones and airtime. What’s more, although employed full-time between 1994 and 1998, I enjoyed about four months of paid leave every year. I was, indeed, living the dream.

  It was during the Australian tour of 1997 that I became vaguely aware that something was missing. At the time, I didn’t understand, nor could I explain, what that ‘something missing’ was.

  Looking back, it was the beginning of an emptiness somewhere in the pit of my stomach. As I touched this void within myself, I recall thinking that I could sense it in some of the players too. More tangibly, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that the individual cricketers—and the team as a whole—were performing below their potential. I could not say how or why, but the sense that things could be a whole lot better was strong.

  We were the fittest team in the world—the only team with a full-time fitness trainer, after all. Under the visionary Bob Woolmer, we were a very innovative team. With seven players who were university graduates, we were also a highly educated team, and we had great talent. Everything we could do to be the best in the world at the time was being done; there were neither obvious flaws nor problems in the system.

  In fact, other than occasional personality clashes and power games, relations within the team were particularly healthy and professional. Despite all this, I felt we were not where we could be—that there was something missing.

  I knew I wanted to resign, but did not know why. I also had no sense of where, or what, I would move to next. I recall the day I told Hansie of my decision. The two of us were driving from George to play a One Day International (ODI) in Port Elizabeth. The team flew, but Hansie and I drove because we wanted to bungee jump from the 216 metre-high Bloukrans Bridge. On the same day that we took the plunge and jumped off that bridge in early 1998, I took the plunge and resigned from my ‘dream job’.

  I left, not sure what I would do next, and with no clue about where to look to find the ‘something missing’, within me or within the team.

  BECOMING A NOBODY

  Over the next three years, as I worked towards submitting my PhD thesis on the prevention of schoolboy rugby injuries, trained a professional rugby team and backpacked across Southeast Asia for six months on a budget of eight US dollars a day, the search for the answer to the ‘something missing’ remained active at the back of my mind.

  Sometime in 1999, I recall sitting in a dingy Vietnamese Internet café, mulling over a recent and profound insight. I had been on the road for about four months by then, sleeping in cheap youth hostel dormitories and travelling and eating as cheaply as possible. Since nobody knew cricket or cricketers in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or Thailand, no one was impressed with my credentials. And no one ever asked me what I did. It was not relevant. Fellow travellers were interested in the kind of person I was. No one cared about the number of degrees I had—they never even asked if I had finished school. I would often sit cramped up next to someone on a third-class train trip or on the roof of an overcrowded bus. We would talk for an entire day without either of us ever asking the other’s name. It did not matter what our names were.

  Sitting in that Vietnamese café, I
typed these words: ‘Resigning from the South African cricket team and becoming a complete nobody in the subculture of the international backpackers’ world has given wind to the sails of my soul.’ I felt more alive and fulfilled in a world that made no distinction between high school dropouts and postgraduates; between so-called successful business people and barmen; between the rich and the poor. This subculture was equally unconcerned about nationality, creed, colour and religion.

  It was then that the thought occurred to me: The international cricket world had been a playground for my ego. It had been about looking good, appearing to be in control, always seeming happy, forever smiling and being the popular guy—and I had played that game well. I had been frolicking in the shallow and superficial depths of a so-called dream life. I had plastered on a permanent ‘smiley face’ mask, and many had envied me.

  Yet, somehow, it wasn’t the dream I had expected. I can’t say exactly what I had hoped to gain from being apparently ‘successful’ and almost famous by association, but I guess I had hoped it would at least feel as good as it looked. Only, it didn’t.

  Simply put, my life lacked depth and substance.

  After typing that email, I started to realise that nothing of what I was unconsciously seeking—joy, peace, freedom, contentment, love and more—derived from the name, fame, money, privileges or even the vices that I had thought might deliver them. Four months after being stripped of the identity that the cricket world and I had constructed for myself, and giving up all that I had held so dear, I finally started to feel truly alive. It was as though I had inadvertently stumbled upon what I had been seeking for so long—the ‘something missing’ that had driven me to resign from a dream job. Something clicked into place, and my own inner journey towards personal mastery gained impetus. It was time to scratch a little deeper below the surface of life—and still have loads of fun.

  THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

  Back in South Africa, I learned to wear shoes again and revelled in the simple pleasure of shaving with hot water while looking in a mirror. In six months of backpacking, I had worn shoes only twice, and very few places that I had stayed in were upmarket enough to have both warm water and a mirror in the washroom.

  The next part of my post-cricketing journey took me through two failed businesses and three years on the streets of Cape Town’s Central Business District (CBD), working intimately with the youth who lurk in the dark shadows of the city’s underbelly. I went from the global cricketing high life to the shocking reality of my city’s destitute and criminal low life.

  I found myself enmeshed in the darkest recesses of the territorial gang system with its drug-peddling, retribution stabbings, rape and tourist crime, and also came face-to-face with the city’s methods of ‘removing the problem’. My work took me into police cells, the youth courts, boys’ towns and the Western Cape prison system, with its notorious numbers gangs. It was very hard to digest the reality of extreme child abuse and dysfunctional parenting, such that an eight-year-old child would rather sleep in the open, in the cold and stormy Cape Town winters, hoping to not get beaten up, stabbed or raped too often, and constantly under the threat of contracting AIDS or tuberculosis, than be at home with his parents.

  It all started with a girl playing soccer and drawing with kids while she was working in the movie industry, filming advertisements in Green Market Square at the centre of Cape Town. Her name was Linzi. Her chance encounters with the kids progressed to weekly soccer matches on an abandoned piece of land behind the Artscape Theatre (then the Nico Malan Theatre) on the Cape Town foreshore.

  The numbers swelled each week, as more and more kids joined the Tuesday evening soccer games. I received an invitation from Donne Commins, a volunteer and a lawyer who would go on to become one of the most respected athlete representatives in professional cricket, to join them. To be honest, I started going to the games every week mainly to get in some fitness and to look good—pretending to be doing something for the less fortunate. As I got to know some of the kids, however, I started to spend more and more time chatting with them at the street corners where they hung out, as I shuttled between business meetings.

  The sports conference business I had been involved with was limping along and in the process of collapsing, leaving me with plenty of free time, which I was now spending on the streets. Soon it became something I did full-time, day and night. I did not become a street worker through a religious experience, and I am certainly not a bleeding heart who wants to save the world. I was single at the time and not sure if I even liked kids all that much. But the streets never sleep and I felt an urge to get more deeply involved.

  I became interested and then fascinated by the parallel life that went on in my city, something largely invisible to the tourists and business people who frequented it regularly. Somehow, I knew I could make a difference. One day, we invited all the leaders of the dozen or so territorial gangs to Linzi’s movie production office. These gang leaders were effectively the self-appointed parents of the kids. We wanted to learn from them how we could really help, beyond the ad hoc stuff we had been doing. It turned out that the leaders of these groups had never been in one room together, let alone an office. Most of them had only visited offices in town in the course of a ‘midnight shopping spree’ wearing balaclavas.

  By the end of that day, they had taught us a great deal about how the streets and the city actually worked. They went into detail about what kind of social help worked and what didn’t, how to operate so that we could stay safe, and so much more. They really let us into their lives that day. They also agreed to work with us to help the children. Our organisation was given a name: Street University (it would later change to Street Universe).

  Linzi’s office was transformed from a movie production office to a homeless children’s office; an office where the ‘staff’ were leaders of the street gangs and some of the toughest street criminals in Cape Town. It would be the beginning of long-standing battles with landlords, as we were (understandably) expelled from each location that we moved to.

  One of these landlords, David Barnes of Central Boating, deserves a special mention. He leased us the office next to his business, and it wasn’t long before the kids drove him nuts, turning what hair he had left grey, and many times even compromising his own business. But he had a soft spot underneath the business exterior and his support held out the longest among all our landlords. Sorry, David. And thank you.

  In 1999, Street Universe was registered as a non-profit organisation, with a mandate to rehabilitate the hardened street children of the Cape Town city centre. Linzi and I became the two founders, directors and financiers. The gang leaders arrived at the office on most days, almost always washed and cleaned. In a city that does not have washrooms for the homeless, this was something of a miracle, but they were a resourceful bunch.

  Along with this unlikely group of gang leaders, the now ex-movie industry girl and the ex-fitness trainer set out to make an impact, armed with will and commitment, only a vague idea of what they were getting themselves into, and without any real qualification to do so.

  Seasoned and qualified street workers told us that we should never get the different territorial gangs, of between five and fifteen youth, to mix. Apparently, they only mixed when they were attacking each other with fists, knives or broken bottle necks. Fortunately, we were only told this six months into running what had become twice-weekly soccer games, for which over a hundred youth from several different areas in the city would assemble, willingly handing in their weapons and drugs before playing. Soccer dominated the proceedings, mostly without incident, until darkness eventually brought the game to a close. It was perhaps just as well that we hadn’t yet been given the advice from those so-called experts about not mixing the groups—we might have paid heed to it. Unknowingly, this experience would prepare me for a conflict situation I had to deal with, a whole decade later, when an informal soccer match between Indian cricketers got heated.

  Du
ring the games, Linzi, a few volunteers and some of the street girls would light fires beneath Cape Town’s Eastern Boulevard bridge, preparing food for the hundred-plus hungry footballers. We would camp there deep into the night, cooking, eating and listening to hilarious and disturbing stories of life on the street. Often, I would head home at around midnight, leaving Linzi alone with Cape Town’s most hardened criminals. No harm ever came to her or to any one of the numerous volunteers who would later join us.

  In the early days, we spent most of our time on the streets, building relationships with homeless children and those negatively affected by them. We were constantly reacting to problems at ground level: in the courts, police cells, hospitals and prisons. In time, our efforts gradually progressed to being less reactive and more proactive, as over 400 children and youth from Cape Town and neighbouring suburbs started to participate in weekly soccer, cricket, rowing, sailing, drumming, cross-country running, music, art, weekend camping trips and various other forms of temporary employment. Admittedly, they were seldom able to hold down a job for long. I gravitated to working with youth from the age of about sixteen and older. Linzi worked more with the younger kids. Volunteers from around the world also joined the organisation during this time.

  We would take gang leaders or street youth with us to all meetings with businesses, police, government departments, potential funders and other non-profit organisations. Strangely, the street dwellers had almost always been excluded from these meetings where people were talking about them. Later, this approach of including the opinions of the people I was leading would become one of the hallmarks of my approach while working with international athletes.

  After a year of self-funding, comprehensive financial support came in from various businesses and the Laureus World Sports Foundation. The latter was thanks to the wonderful, caring support of former South African rugby captain, the 1995 World Cup Rugby winning manager and laureat, Morné du Plessis. Through this initiative, the kids were even afforded the opportunity to spend a few days with Morné himself, along with former American 400-metre hurdler Edwin Moses, ex-British decathlete Daley Thompson and erstwhile Argentinean rugby fly-half, Hugo Porta.