Speaking to the BBC in 2023<\/a>, Stokes\u2019 primary school teacher Mike Smellie recalls an important cup fixture where Stokes\u2019 school, Plimmerton, had made it through to play the much bigger, much more fancied Palmerston North. Stokes, however, had a broken arm.<\/p>\n\u201cI was asking if he could play and he said he had another three weeks in plaster,\u201c said Smellie, who passed away later that year. \u201dI rang his mum, pretending to talk about something else. We got on to cricket and she said no.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next day, Ben walked up the school driveway, pulling his cricket bag, with no cast on his arm. I said, \u2018What\u2019s going on?\u2019 He said, \u2018Dad got out the scissors and cut it off this morning\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Plimmerton lost. But Stokes made a hundred.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s just a natural sporting star, isn\u2019t he?\u201d says Shaw, his childhood coach in Christchurch. \u201cHe turned up and wanted to excel. Other kids were there to make up the numbers, but he came to practise, to really practise.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n The square at Merivale Papanui (Cameron Ponsonby\/The Athletic)<\/p>\n
While physically no bigger than any of his contemporaries, Stokes\u2019 power set him apart. He had the tangible qualities where adults catching a ball thrown from him, or feeding a ball for him to hit had it returned with interest. In one match as a junior, an uncut outfield meant no child on either side could manage a boundary as the ball got caught up in the long grass. Stokes was unaffected, though. He hit it over everyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember one game (for Wellington) we played in Blenheim,\u201d says Cameron. \u201cAnd Ben decided he wanted to open the batting and no-one else put their hand up. So I thought, \u2018OK, off you go Ben.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd he hit this cover drive that would have put David Gower to shame. And I thought blimey, if a kid 10 years of age can do that, and he can bowl a leg break and he can do this and he can do that and he can throw the stumps down from 50 metres, this kid is going to go a very long way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stokes\u2019 talents were not confined to one sport. His mother was the cricketer in the family, continuing to play while she was pregnant with Stokes. While, unsurprisingly, he was an equally fine rugby league player courtesy of his dad. Furthermore, his ability to kick with both feet, a skill trained on the countless evenings spent down the rugby club, saw him invited to trial for the New Zealand Under-16 Australian Rules Football team. He was 12.<\/p>\n
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\n Ben Stokes, left, as a Merivale player with coach Mark Shaw, at the back (Mark Shaw)<\/p>\n
Stokes was not alone in his youthful cricketing ability. In the two years he spent in Wellington, he was team-mates with Tom Blundell, who is now New Zealand\u2019s Test wicketkeeper, while the other standout in his age group was a child named Harry Boam. After Stokes moved to England, the next time Stokes and Boam would meet was in the Under-19 World Cup seven years later, Stokes playing for England, Boam for the Black Caps.<\/p>\n
In a quirk of fate, that World Cup was held in New Zealand, making it a homecoming for Stokes, who still had family in the country, and a proud moment for all who had been involved in the development of the \u201cfree-thinking\u201d 10-year-old who had grown to fulfil his potential.<\/p>\n
Stokes scored a century in that tournament, which came against India at Lincoln, a town that is only a half-hour drive from his childhood home in Christchurch. By coincidence, Shaw\u2019s work had taken him to the ground that day.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew the groundsman and I went down to give him a hand,\u201d Shaw says. \u201cAnd then Ben scores a hundred! So I said to the groundsman, \u2018I remember that kid from way back at Merivale.\u2019 And so he said, \u2018I\u2019ll take you to the changing rooms and you can say g\u2019day.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I went in, and he did not remember me at all,\u201d Shaw says, laughing. \u201cNo idea. He\u2019d just scored a hundred and I was the last person he wanted to talk to I imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n
A tale as old as time. The proud adult, speaking to the oblivious child.<\/p>\n
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\n Ben Stokes with his father Gerard Stokes and mother Deborah Stokes at Christchurch Airport in November 2017 (Kai Schwoerer\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
To this day, Stokes\u2019 mother still lives in Christchurch, and before the Ashes he paid a visit to New Zealand to see his family that still live on the South Island.<\/p>\n
For the rest of the world, it was an unlikely journey. \u201cYou\u2019d never have thought that the son of a rugby league player would end up playing cricket for England,\u201d Shaw says.<\/p>\n
But those closer to home saw the writing on the wall from the beginning. \u201cI always had a feeling that cricket would win out in the end,\u201d his father said in an interview back in 2015<\/a>. \u201cHe just spent so much time developing his game.<\/p>\n\u201cHe was playing senior cricket when he was 13 so he was very used to the changing-room environment with adults. He grew up with men and he used to hear all the things you shouldn\u2019t at that age.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sense for all those who were part of Stokes\u2019 upbringing is pride \u2014 but not surprise \u2014 at his success. In the years after he left, news filtered back that he had made the England Under-15 team, then been signed by Durham, before ending up as the captain of his country.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess you could say he was a bit of a tearaway,\u201d Shaw says. Twenty years on and 115 Tests later, the same remains true today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By his own admission, Ben Stokes wasn\u2019t the best behaved child in the world. \u201cI was always an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":561285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4101],"tags":[1406,6869,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-561284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-global-sports","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115525209980524580","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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