He was in his natural element

Dad told us that he watched the dignitaries through binoculars as the peace treaty was signed. Sixty-five years later a sizable group of young seamen left their ship in Lake Erie to attend Dad's funeral. With all the usual pomp of flag-folding, salutes and the playing of Taps, they paid their respects to the old veteran. This quality might be experience, or knowledge, or a kind of technical expertise, but that's somehow too reductive and constraining, while also missing the mark.I was thinking about this the other day when watching the Cobras all-rounder, Justin Kemp, a key player in Friday's Momentum One-Day Cup final against the Titans at Newlands.He was playing at the Wanderers, against the Highveld Lions, and the light was fading. There was no one there, and still he went about things with the same dignity he would have done if the stadium was full.Although nobody cheered in the stands, the television cameras were there, so we can't be completely naive about things like behaviour and dignity, but there was something transcendent in the way Kemp went about his business.The game held no surprises for him. He was comfortable with cricket in the same way a fish is thoughtlessly comfortable in water. He was in his natural element, a perfect fit. It was humbling.Another element in Kemp's projection had to do with a certain quality of respect older cricketers have for their craft. We do not think of sportsmen being craftsmen in the main nowadays. Instead, we think of them as entertainers or superstars or celebrities with impressively tawdry social lives. But cricket is a game of great craft and great craftiness.Kemp banged a couple of square cuts to the sweeper boundary and lifted some of his trademark lofted drives over the inner ring, his bat scything through the air in a clear, clean arc. His technical professionalism was almost artisanal. He could have been banging a red-hot horseshoe on an anvil or perhaps binding a wine keg, a member of a great medieval craftsman's guild.I think of Kemp (and his teammate, Charl Langeveldt) in this way because older cricketers play the sport with a kind of disinterested respect. They honour their sport by playing it fairly and properly.In a way, they are the sport's guardians and younger men those more windgat, more full of piss and wind, as my parents' generation would say will never reach sporting manhood without them.You might think administrators keep the sport ticking over, which is not entirely wrong; you might think that television officials, with their wads of cash, keep the sport financially healthy.