Quotes of the Day

one of the hardest tasks faced by any off-duty sportswriter is to convince some people, usually women, that there are qualities to be admired in certain celebrated athletes. Watching, say, Lleyton Hewitt, many struggle to see past the scowling and the obnoxious self-exhortations to the traits that lifted a little trier to the peak of tennis. While most Australians preferred Steve Waugh to Hewitt, many couldn't warm to the cricketer, either. Grim and prickly, Waugh eschewed elegance for efficiency and good manners for a competitive edge. To his eternal credit, he took time out from his sport to mingle with India's poor and sick. But his defining knack was to produce big scores when he or the Australian team most needed them.

Waugh, in other words, possessed a strong will. To see that purely in cricketing terms is to sell him short. It's something he calls on still, nearly two years out of the game. "Today (in Brisbane) I signed 700 books in a sitting," he says. "People were astounded. To me, it was a job I had to do. It didn't worry me in the slightest."

Before the mass signings, there were the momentous innings. In his colossal autobiography, Out of My Comfort Zone (Viking; 801 pages), Waugh takes us back to the boyhood play that made them possible. Like the young Bradman, he devised a simple solo game that soldered into his technique the basics of watching the ball and a straight bat. Like Ian and Greg Chappell, he had a brother who loved cricket as much as he did, and together they played till dark on all manner of surfaces, ever desperate to outdo each other. Both Steve and Mark Waugh became players of distinction. But while Mark was the more stylish, it was Steve who retired with a Test batting average of over 50, and Steve who became an Australian captain, with a 71% winning record.

Waugh understood better than most that there's almost nothing between the top players in terms of talent: what separates them is the strength of their minds. Over a Test career that spanned two decades, Waugh worked at improving his concentration. That may sound dull. He concentrated well? Big deal. But his ability to shut out distractions and silence his demons was the making of him. In the mid-1990s, a bunch of admiring Sri Lankan players gathered around him after a Test. One asked Waugh whether he meditated, for he was trance-like at the crease. "It was," Waugh writes, "one of the finest compliments I could have wished for."

It shouldn't surprise that Waugh batted better than he writes. His tour diaries have been bestsellers, but Out of My Comfort Zone reads like a compilation of these - a superdiary in which almost everything is deemed worth a mention. Waugh's probably never heard of Ernest Hemingway's theory of omission, which is basically that prose reads better when the obvious is left out. Hemingway would have choked on Waugh's cavalcade of superfluous adjectives, and on sentences like, "Failure can lead you into a dark abyss of gloom and depression." But then Hemingway couldn't play the cut shot like Waugh did. The original target was 100,000 words. But after a year writing in longhand at his dining-room table, Waugh emerged with a manuscript twice that size. Some would sooner take their chances with a Brett Lee yorker than drop this hardback on their toes. "Some days it just flowed, and I'd peel off three or four hours of writing at a time," says Waugh. One reason there was so much to say, he explains, is that he wasn't properly quizzed in his playing days. "I always said to journos, 'Give me some interesting questions and I'll give you some interesting answers.' But it was the same boring ones all the time."

What do we learn about him? Waugh not only sledged but felt annoyed at times with teammates who didn't. We knew he was a hardhead; his insecurity was less apparent. Waugh scored 22 ducks in Test cricket and each was like a knife to his ego. "There's something about that figure that makes you feel worthless," he says. "It's as though you're a failure as a person and not just as a cricketer." Waugh's shyness is a revelation: a passage in which he botches a speech in front of his family is one of the book's most poignant. Another surprise is the helplessness he felt in his early days as a Test batsman, facing a quartet of West Indian fast bowlers every bit as ruthless as Waugh would become.

Australian cricket misses him. As the Ashes were surrendered this northern summer, there were many times Australians wished Waugh would bustle to the crease. Did he ever feel like that? "I let go of those feelings the second I finished," he says. "I haven't really thought about playing since I retired. I haven't thought once about my stats or what I achieved." Instead, he's thrown himself into fatherhood, property development, charity work - and writing. A children's book might be next, he says, or a novel. And no, he's not planning a move into the commentary box anytime soon. "I know I can handle cricket," he says. "I want to see what else I can do." The certainty with Waugh is that whatever he chooses, he'll do it until it hurts.

• Daniel Williams
• In a weighty memoir, the former Australian captain reflects on life before, during and after cricket fame