Growing up, Nandre Burger wanted to be Roger Federer. The best part of his childhood was spent watching countless videos of the Swiss, trying to absorb the grace and the geometry. Then a back injury ended the tennis. He flirted with squash. His father made him try cricket.
Up until that point, Burger’s association with the game was mostly his backyard wall. When he wasn’t volleying a tennis ball against it, he would draw stumps on the surface and try to copy Dale Steyn. He played cricket with his friends, but beyond that, he had no ambition to be a professional cricketer. He was fifteen when he enrolled at Wits University to study sports psychology. It was there that he met Neil Levenson.
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Unlike Rabada, Ngidi, Jansen, Nortje — South Africa’s recent production line of fast bowlers who came through the system young — Burger wasn’t a fast bowler at all until Levenson found him.
He was clocking 127, 128 kmph. Good enough for a club bowler. Levenson saw something else. “I felt that he could be much more than he presented,” he told Chadwickdrive. In their first session, Levenson said something Burger couldn’t quite believe. “Neil said to me, ‘You could play professional cricket and bowl at 140kph.’”
In the weeks that followed, Levenson spent hours reworking Burger’s action. It started with walking through it. There were sessions where Burger walked through the action blindfolded. Enoch Nkwe, now Director of Cricket at Cricket South Africa, was part of those formative years too. It took years. A first-class debut came in 2018, by which time he was clocking 135. The Test cap arrived in 2023, at twenty-seven — unusual even by the standards of a country that produces fast bowlers the way others produce spin.