When I was asked by Cricinfo to join the panel choosing an all-time West Indies Cricket XI my first inclination was to decline. I realised, in the case of batsmen alone, that it would be impossible to name all of Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Roy Fredericks, George Headley, Frank Worrell, Clyde Walcott, Everton Weekes, Rohan Kanhai, Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards, Richie Richardson, Alvin Kallicharran, Brian Lara, and Shiv Chanderpaul – each of whom completely deserves to be included in any West Indies All-Time Test team.
I was therefore reluctant to participate in what was bound to be a frustrating exercise. But then I decided it would be discourteous to refuse. And in any case I would reveal myself as too solemn a killjoy not to join in what, after all, has simply been an entertaining excursion into nostalgia.
One thing I decided was that pure statistics could not possibly be the sole, or perhaps even the main, criterion. I felt free to form a subjective impression of who our greatest champions have been through the years – partly by reading the vivid descriptions by the great writers of players before one’s time and partly by experiencing oneself the art and craft and mastery of players seen live at the wicket in more recent eras.
Such an impression is a matter of intuition, emotion, a seventh sense we all have that responds immediately in the presence of once-in-a-lifetime, inspired genius. We know when we have seen a really great champion even though we may be tongue-tied in describing why we know it.
I will not reveal the list of eleven names I submitted. I wait to see the combined verdict of all ten of us on the panel. But I cannot resist revealing one name on my list simply because I fear he may not be in the final XI given that his cold statistics may not quite convince enough of the others on the jury to put him on the list. I cannot bear to endure the sacrilege of him not being chosen in any list of the greatest West Indian batsmen.
I speak of Rohan Kanhai, of course, whom of all the sportsmen in all the many sports I have watched in my life I judge to have possessed the most compelling genius of them all.
When Kanhai came out to bat there was that sudden, expectant, almost fearful, silence that tells you that you are in the presence of some extraordinary phenomenon. Of course you could look forward to his technical brilliance. Was there ever a more perfect square cover drive? And has anyone in the history of the game made a thing of such great technical beauty out of a simple forward defensive stroke?
And, more than just technical accomplishment, there was the craft and art of Kanhai’s batting – no mighty hammer blows or crude destruction of a bowler, simply the sweetest exercise of the art of batting in the world.
But in the end I am not even talking of these things, important though they are. There was something much more about Kanhai’s batting. It was, quite simply, a special gift from the Gods. You could feel it charge the air around him as he walked to the wicket. I do not know quite how to describe it. It was something that kept the heart beating hard with a special sort of excited fear all through a Kanhai innings as if something marvellous or terrible or even sacred was about to happen. I have thought a lot about it. I think it is something to do with the vulnerability, the near madness, there is in all real genius. It comes from the fact that such people – the most inspired poets, composers, artists, scientists, saints, as well as the greatest sportsmen – are much more open than ordinary men and women to the mysterious current that powers the human imagination. In other words, their psyches are extraordinarily exposed to that tremendous, elemental force which nobody has yet properly defined. This gives them access to a wholly different dimension of performance. It also makes them much more vulnerable than ordinary people to extravagant temptations. The Gods challenge them to try the impossible and they cannot resist. This explains the waywardness and strange unorthodoxies that always accompany great genius.
When Kanhai was batting, every stroke he played one felt as one feels reading the best poetry of Derek Walcott or WB Yeats or listening to Mozart or contemplating a painting by Turner or Van Gogh or trying to follow Paul Dirac’s concept of quantum mechanics – one felt that somehow what you were experiencing was coming from “out there”: a gift, infinitely valuable and infinitely dangerous, a gift given to only the chosen few in all creation.
