Such men as these walk onto a field of play, or enter a room, and their life-force brings everyone to silence and attention – these were two men who in their very different ways set my mind alight.
• The cover driving came from the same place as a Carter poem or an Aubrey Williams vision of an ancient land. His batting represented for me a very good reason why sport is as important as art. I remember my first sight of Rohan Kanhai batting at Bourda in 1956. I wrote that night to my father in Trinidad that I had just been witness to a wonder, the best batsman in the world. This was a big claim – after all I had seen, among others, the great Frank Worrell at his elegant best. But I was sure then and I was sure thereafter as I followed Kanhai’s career. All the times I met him I never asked his secret. In any case he would have been impatient at having to explain what came as naturally as green to leaf.
I have written about it before. The technical excellence, often embellished with the exotic, you could take for granted. I think batting came so easily to him that he courted danger, difficulty, risk and loved the do or die challenge of resisting the prospect of defeat. I remember once in Barbados in a Test against Australia one end of the pitch at Kensington was a green top with Max Walker bowling his fast medium pacers unplayably to that end – except that Kanhai made a point of staying at that end ninety per cent of the time and scored a defiant century. It made me think that on a flawless pitch he could have scored 500 any time he bothered – but then he would have become bored and tried something beautifully extravagant and got out.
Mixed into everything else in his batting there was one other absolutely rare element, a flare from the central fire, which no one can wholly grasp but which was there in him and not others and you felt it as he took the field and made his walk to the wicket, a quality that makes excitement grow in the air, a feeling that here is something to see that makes the game of cricket more than a sporting contest, makes it also an art and an encounter with the truth and the joy that lies in all supreme human achievement.
