Cricket balls are hurtling towards my head. I’m in the stands of the Kia Oval and Kevin Pietersen is smashing six after six, if not straight at me then much too close for comfort. Using his personal assistant as a shield, I’m told that my hour-long slot with the erstwhile bad boy of English cricket has been halved. Initial impressions are that KP doesn’t relish interviews.
Training over, we meet in the Oval’s dining room. “We’ve got half an hour,” he says gruffly, then fiddles on his phone. Warnings that Pietersen — once known as “the Ego” — is a jerk are threatening to ring true. Then he puts down his mobile apologetically, looks straight into my eyes and there’s a sudden, blissful gearchange.
Haters are going to hate, but Pietersen — all 6ft 4in of him — is an absolute hunk with Malteser chocolate eyes and big, all-the-better-to-bat-with arms. The sunlight streaming through the window is dousing him in a golden glow and he’s dripping with sweat. I try to focus on what on earth I’m meant to be asking him about. Ah yes, rhinos and cricket.
I bowl him an easy one and he starts talking about his “deep connection with wildlife” and uttering such fridge-magnet clichés as: “You’re not born in Africa, Africa is born in you.” As I tune in properly, he’s explaining the difficulties of playing for England (his mother is English) when your true identity is South African.
“Playing the ‘I’m England’ card was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. People said throughout my career ‘you’re South African’, and I always said ‘no, no, no’,” he says with a suitably authentic accent. “But, at the end of the day, I’m South African, I was born in South Africa, I lived in South Africa for 20 years. If you don’t like it then you’ve got no brains.”
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Some wag’s comment that the Australian-born Johanna Konta was British until the minute she crashed out of Wimbledon last month resonates with Pietersen. “Every single time I did well I was English, every time I did badly I was ‘South African-born Kevin Pietersen’.”
Speaking before the final England Test against South Africa, which began on Friday, does he feel torn between which team to support? “It doesn’t really bother me. I don’t get emotionally attached or involved at all. It does not have any bearing on my life at all,” he says firmly.
Pietersen, 37, certainly likes to hammer his point home. As well as stating four times he’s South African, he says he has “an amazing life” endlessly, and repeatedly asserts that “you mature as you age”, as if this were a shocking revelation.
In light of his extreme South Africanness, Pietersen’s latest passion is one close to home: saving rhinos. “It’s so emotional when you know there are only 20,000 of them left,” he says, “and people are killing them just for wealth and to make themselves feel like they’re the biggest person in the world.” Talks are under way about Pietersen interviewing poachers for a documentary, but he doesn’t fancy hunting them down Ross Kemp-style. Especially not when he has a young family back in leafy Surrey. “It’s a huge war. Poachers get killed now. They’ve got their AK-47s and the trackers have their guns too.”
For now, then, he is supporting a charity coffee-table book called Remembering Rhinos, and next Sunday’s T20 Blast match, with Pietersen playing for Surrey against Sussex, is also fundraising for the cause.
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He was livid about the Conservatives quietly dropping their pledge for a total ban on ivory sales. “I was on to Theresa May viciously, just giving her an almighty spray because it’s disgusting. What is the reason to legalise the ivory trade?” he almost shouts. “You tell me why,” he glares, seemingly waiting for an explanation. With his beautiful eyes boring into mine, I repress my giggles.
Luckily for May, Boris Johnson reassured Pietersen personally that the ban was still on the cards. The pair know each other from “cricketing days” and Pietersen is clearly a fan: “I love him. He’s just a cool, cool, cool dude. I don’t see him as a politician, I see him as a buddy.” Is he a good cricketer? After a long pause comes: “He tries hard.”
And, suddenly, we’re onto the sticky wicket of the time when Pietersen’s enormous talent at the crease was matched by his ego. Does he have any regrets? “I was the person I was at the time and it is what it is. Occasionally you fall out with people, that’s human nature,” he trails off.
Later on, and avoiding specifics, he confesses there are things he said and did that he would not do now. We dance around the texting furore of 2012, when Pietersen was suspended from England after messaging insults about Andrew Strauss to the South African team. He’s previously talked about a “red mist” descending. Does he still have rages? “No, that doesn’t happen any more. I think you mature through age.”
What would happen if he bumped into old teammate Matt Prior — whom Pietersen accused of being “backstabbing” and bullying? “I saw him recently at Sky, I was commentating, it was civil. Very civil.”
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As to which players he keeps up with from the England dressing room, he talks only about unnamed “youngsters”. Sensing a dead end, I move on to easier territory: his wife Jessica. Squeezed out of the reality-TV-pop-star sausage factory, his missus, says Pietersen, was “more famous than me at the start”. He talks proudly about how her band, Liberty X, “got Brit awards and everything” in the mid-Noughties and how she urged him to keep playing cricket when he was contemplating retirement. Her name and the names of their children, Dylan, 7, and Rosie, 1, are tattooed on his left arm.
“I did a nappy yesterday and I just said to myself, ‘Dude, this has to stop’
I’d read that Pietersen was beaten with a cane by his father growing up, but he dismisses my sympathy with a curt: “It is what it is. It was the Eighties.” Not a disciplinarian himself, he argues that tools such as Facebook and Snapchat demand a different parenting approach: “With all the pressures that social media brings, I think you’ve got to be really close to your kids. I am really clued up because I know that my little boy is going to be jumping onto the platforms and it’s a horrendous world out there.”
Are more children on the cards? “No, I did a nappy yesterday and I just said to myself, ‘Dude, this has to stop.’”
When not changing nappies, on the school run or batting, Pietersen plays golf with a six handicap (“I’d be a lot better but I’ve fallen out with my driver”) and focuses on the home he’s building in South Africa. He gets out his phone to show me a video of the architect’s model for the finished lodge, set over an acre near the Kruger national park. In its early stages, he won’t reveal how much it’s costing, but the plan is to let it to tourists. How much will that make him? “A lot,” he smiles. I push for a figure and he tells me that the smartest properties in the area demand up to £60,000 a week. As he quickly backtracks from the money conversation, I revert to being a stuttering, eyelash-fluttering wreck.
To donate £5 to Remembering Rhinos/Born Free text RHINO to 70755 or visit bornfree.org.uk/rhino. To order the book visit bit.ly/buyRRbook