The Hindu : Sport : To Sir, with love

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 28, 2006

Sport

Sport

To Sir, with love

Sir Garry Sobers, who turns 70 today, played his cricket with the inner harmony and electrifying intensity of a Vaslav Nijinsky on a dance floor, writes Nirmal Shekar

These days, when sports fans — their passions fuelled by adjectives flying about in TV commentators' booths like Monarch butterflies in Mexico's Model Forest in the winter — let out their familiar Oohs and Aahs and go through their swooning routines during noteworthy athletic performances, this writer rather indulgently allows himself a sardonic smile.

Often, as the debate predictably moves from the day's highlights to whether the hero of the afternoon at Lord's or Wimbledon or Chepauk has indeed enacted one of the greatest-ever performances — and therefore deserves to rank right up there with the immortals of his sport — it is time to stifle a yawn or two and turn off the television.

Celebrity cult

Given TV's omnipresence and the vulnerability of our species to visual stimuli, it may be hardly surprising that `greatness' should come cheap in an era that unabashedly glories in the celebrity cult of the times.

If you aren't old enough, or wise enough, you might even wonder if such an array of sporting greats and geniuses ever walked the face of the earth in any other era. For, the G-words are used as liberally as four-letter words in a seedy underworld gambling joint.

But, believe me, there were times when greater men played in greater games in many sports — not the least in the one which has become this country's sporting religion.

Incidentally, one of them will blow 70 candles on his birthday cake today, and this is as good a time as any to toast the cricketer who is an unrepeatable evolutionary freak — Sir Garry Sobers.

Bewitching creativity

If it seems unlikely that another batsman would play over 50 Tests and end up with an average a fraction short of 100 as did Sir Don Bradman, then it is equally debatable if another cricketer would score over 8,000 Test runs at almost 58, bag 235 wickets and take over 100 catches — and do all that with the bewitching creativity of a Mozart composing his music.

Oh, Sobers...what could he not do on a cricket field, what could he not do with grace and style, power and passion, even as the coruscating brilliance of his cricket left us in a state of jaw-dropping awe.

To many of us, in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was only one great sports hero — Sobers. One stealthily made it back to the drawing room, and to an old Murphy radio, in the wee hours of the morning, to check on the great man's fortunes in a Test match played a few time zones away in the Caribbean.

So, what if you tended to doze off during geography class at school later that day? After all, you knew better than most people where Barbados was and the exact location of the greatest cricketer's house on that little island. It was simple. Sobers was god. But, what a god!

Great satisfaction

Looking back now, what a pleasure it is to realise, several decades on, that we weren't worshipping a false god; what great satisfaction it gives you when you carefully scour Wisden and find out that there is not an all-round cricketer within sight of Mount Sobers even today.

And Sobers did what he did in a rather more romantic era, a time when sport was sport and was played for pleasure — mostly — and not for megabucks. Those were days, too, when talent was mostly natural, especially talent coming out of those little islands in the Caribbean.

No SWOT analysis, no computer simulation, no fitness trainer, no batting coach, no gym routines, no long net sessions. For Sobers, it was just cricket, lovely cricket. He was a sheer force of nature.

As a West Indian cricketer, Sobers was in many ways a one-off. From Frank Worrell down to Vivian Richards, great players from those scattered islands have had a point or two to prove to their former colonial masters. Cricket was a medium; and the messages were loaded with meaning in the cultural context.

Perfect bliss

But Sobers was different. He had no agenda. He kept away from politics. He carried no cultural baggage. He had no cause. He was a free bird, soaring and soaring and soaring like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The perfect flight was perfect bliss.

Imagine the great man playing at his peak in the high noon of one-day cricket, although it is tough to think of Sobers playing the game past 9 p.m. For, he always seemed to have better things to do at that part of the evening, well past sundown.

Then again, who knows? The man who once drove into a cricket stadium from a golf course after playing nine holes to blast a 90-odd before lunch may well have dropped in, briefly, from a disco or a pub to hit the fastest ever one-day century post-dinner!

That was the man's style. He once closed the West Indian second innings at 92 for two, setting Colin Cowdrey's England a target of 215 in 165 minutes to win the Port-of-Spain Test. England got there. Mud on the great man's face? You must be kidding. To Sobers, it was a game, not war; and he played it with all the inner harmony and electrifying intensity of a Vaslav Nijinsky on a dance floor.

Rare occasion

One of few times Sobers performed with warlike intent was in a match between a Rest of the World XI and Australia in Melbourne in January 1972. Dennis Lillee had his number, for a while, and it was time to set the record straight.

Great sporting moments seldom announce themselves. But they are moments when the performer and the performance become one — as it happens in the best of classical music and art — and the act of genius elevates everybody who's witness to it.

So it was at the MCG as Sobers took Lillee and Co. apart over two days in a matchless innings (254) which Bradman described as "the greatest exhibition of batting seen in Australia." The Mozart of cricket had come up with his own Don Giovanni.

"Poetry,'' wrote William Wordsworth, "is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.''

So was Garry Sobers's cricket. Blessed are the ones who could partake in those feelings.

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