Makhaya rides on inspiration

Makhaya Ntini won't forget the past few weeks in a hurry. Nor is next month likely to leave his memory anytime soon.

"I'll be riding with Lance Armstrong, and you wouldn't believe how much I'm looking forward to it," Ntini said.

Ntini, an inveterate fitness freak, came out of the cycling closet years ago. If he can't be contacted outside of the hours of play, he's probably on his bike somewhere. So the news that Armstrong, a veritable Don Bradman on wheels, would take part in the Argus Pick 'n Pay Cycle Tour - billed as "the world's largest individually timed cycle race" - in Cape Town this year hit Ntini like a runaway bus. And not only because he would breathe the same air as another elite sportsman.

Armstrong's career seemed over when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer that spread to his brain and lungs in 1996. Three years later, he began his record run of seven victories in the Tour de France.

"I've always followed his career, especially in the Tour de France," Ntini said. "He's such an inspiration. If he can come back from cancer, who's to say what can be achieved by people in other sports?" Who says, in other words, that Ntini's international career is over?

"Why can't we let someone decide for himself what he wants to do, and not decide for him," Ntini said. "It's one of the most irritating things - that people want to make up other people's minds for them."

Ntini came like a comet in 1998. Eleven years later he has played 101 Tests, taken 390 wickets, and earned a place in history as South Africa's first - and greatest - black African player. But, at 32, his powers are waning. Ntini was a poor imitation of his former self in the first two Tests against England this southern summer, and consequently left out of the last two. He is also missing from the South African squad in India, and watched from a distance their innings victory in the first Test.

"I saw Dale Steyn take those seven wickets in the first innings, I saw Jacques Kallis and Hashim Amla batting together. And it hurts. You feel like you should have been there. You would have loved to be there to experience it and to celebrate with the guys. There's no other place where winning feels as good as it does in India, except Australia."

For a bowler who doesn't have the gift of express pace, nor the ability to move the ball off the seam consistently, and less yet to swing it through air, relentlessness and control are all-important. So it figures that there should be a note of panic in Ntini's tone now that his destiny is no longer in his hands.

"I still want to play for South Africa, and I still want to achieve so much for the country. Each and every one of the people behind me knows I can still offer a lot. But we can all say that. If the people who are running cricket don't agree, there's nothing we can do. I can't control what the selectors do and what the captain thinks."

The c-word comes up again when he is asked whether he feels it is important that a team representing South Africa should include at least one black African player: "That's none of my business. It's out of my control."

But let's not paint Ntini as a sad, spent player. He remains in love with the game, and never more so than this season, when he was part of the Warriors team that won a trophy, the MTN40, for the first time in the franchise's history.

"Immediately after we won the final, the rain came down. We were waiting to receive the trophy in the rain, and I knew then that we were really blessed."

Ntini is a man of unplumbed depth of character and a heart at least as big as the grounds he has graced. Whether or not he makes it back to the big time, blessed is how we should feel to have known him.