IT IS easy to feel jealous in the company of Kevin Pietersen. Not only because he combines immense sporting talent with pretty-boy good looks, or even because he is gleefully dating one of Britain’s sexiest women (of which more later). No, the thing that really piques one’s envy is the England batsman’s implacable belief in his indestructibility. Pietersen is cocksure to the point of caricature.
For nearly an hour I probed his defences, seeking out the insecurities that I had suspected lay beneath the swaggering façade, but on each occasion he swatted me away as if I were a mediocre county bowler. Even his description of his difficult early months in England after leaving his native South Africa in protest at the racial quota system were infused with the rhetoric of someone unacquainted with doubt.
“I came into this country with no family, no friends, no nothing,” he said in a hotel room a mile or so from Lord’s, the venue of his audacious Test debut against Australia last summer. “I came here without a mobile phone, so I couldn’t even communicate with my family. I had to do everything on my own. I had to back myself 100 per cent. If I hadn’t backed myself as much as I have done I would have capitulated under the pressure.”
Was there any moment when you feared you had made a mistake in leaving your homeland? “Absolutely not,” he said with the conviction of an evangelist. “Sure, I had to bang my head a couple of times in order to achieve what I have achieved, but I always knew I would succeed. I believe that I am in control of my own destiny. If I train and prepare properly, things will happen. That is why I never fear failure.”
Not even when you stepped out at the Brit Oval for the innings that would determine the outcome of the Ashes? Was there not a quickening of the pulse, a trembling of the hands; a moment of fear as you walked out to the crease? “No, because I believe that what will be will be,” he said. “Things happen for a reason. I can’t control what will happen in ten minutes’ time or in ten days’ time, so there is no point stressing and straining. I believe that God has planned my life for me.”
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This Calvinistic response was as unexpected as a Shane Warne bouncer. I pointed out that such fatalism contradicted his earlier declaration that he is the master of his destiny, but Pietersen barely registered the paradox. “These are two viewpoints that I have always accepted as true,” he said, as if beliefs are things that just happen to people. “I think the harder you work the more successful you will be, but I also believe God controls everything.”
Pietersen, it seems, is living refutation of Augustine’s conjecture that it is psychologically impossible to hold contradictory beliefs simultaneously. He uses his “I am in control” mantra to motivate himself while preparing for matches, but then flicks a mental switch as he walks to the crease, shifting to the belief that “what will be will be”, freeing him to bat without inhibition. Sports psychologists like to call it pragmatism. Orwell called it doublethink.
The remarkable thing is that Pietersen wields this mental trick so effortlessly that he is blissfully unaware of its existence. It is a part of a wider world view in which the Hampshire batsman, who will face Sri Lanka in England’s Twenty20 international at his home ground this evening, regards the world as mouldable to his will. It is not that he thinks he can break the rules, he just does not perceive the rules as being applicable to him. When, for example, we discussed his Christian upbringing, he seemed oblivious to the fact that his well-known promiscuity contravened his family’s moral code.
Not that Pietersen is painting the town red any longer. He started dating Jessica Taylor, the Liberty X vocalist, six months ago and is smitten, with the couple announcing their engagement last weekend. “I am the happiest bloke in the best relationship that I have ever been in,” he gushed. “It has changed my life. I got to know her before we started dating and we are now inseparable. In previous relationships I was always the centre of attention, but Jess has a life of her own, which means that we can really talk to each other.”
There is little, it seems, in Pietersen’s life that is anything but incredible. Indeed, I teased him, repeating some of his many buoyant assertions during the interview: that he is “incredibly happy” with his girlfriend, “thrilled” with his career, “really good friends” with his team-mates, “absolutely certain” that he will become one of the world’s greatest batsmen. Are you, I wondered, the first person to have cracked life in its entirety?
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Pietersen smiled winningly. “It probably sounds like that, but to me this is normal,” he said. “I just believe that things will turn out well if I do the necessary preparation. A can of Red Bull before I go out to bat, for example, and I am away. What can I say? Life could not be better.”
Pietersen is like a kid in a sweet shop in a world without tooth decay. Either that or he is an even finer actor than he is a batsman.