Ian McDonald (Poet, novelist and columnist in Georgetown, Guyana) on the great ROHAN KANHAI (1957-1975,
6227 runs at 47.53 in 79 Tests,
164 runs at 54.66 in seven ODIs) ⬇️
✍🏿: 🟦The first time I saw Rohan Kanhai bat was in 1956, when he was playing for Guyana against a touring side and he wasn't yet a Test player. I had recently come to Guyana to live and work and that night I wrote to my father in Trinidad that I had just seen the best batsman in the world. That marvellous first impression has never left me.
Over the years I tried to separate the ingredients that went into Kanhai making this impression on me. One, he had a natural genius for the art, ingrained like the feel for poetry in a poet. Two, he had the physical make-up - that combination of strength, quickness, reach and perfect coordination of eye and muscle that gives rise to reflex action quick as light. Three, before he aged he was splendidly fit, simply the body tuned to its highest possibilities.
Well, four, concentration - full attention to the task in hand, whatever the circumstances - eluded him at times. When winning easily, Kanhai could get bored and not bother very much. Perhaps that is why his Test average is fairly ordinary and did not end up in the high 50s. But it did not matter because, five, he had the willpower to perform at his best when it really mattered.
In the batting I have seen, as in all the great arts of sport, there are many supreme proficiencies. There is statistical greatness - Bradman. There is the greatness of the man who carries a team on his shoulders almost alone - Headley. There is the greatness of athletic genius - Sobers. There is the greatness of tenacity, persistence - Gavaskar, Boycott, Chanderpaul. Is there not greatness in elegance too - Worrell? There is the greatness of the hammer-stroke batsman - Walcott, Richards. There is greatness in a crisis - Lloyd.
Greatness lies in all these names and in a hundred more you or I could go on naming. But for me the best I have watched remains Rohan Kanhai of Guyana and West Indies, the batsman who had a good part of all the greatnesses but, in the indefinable totalling, surpassed them all.
Because in the end I am not even talking about the attributes and the proficiencies, 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 men - the most inspired poets, composers, artists, scientists, saints, as well as the greatest sportsmen - are much more open than ordinary men to the mysterious current that powers the human imagination. In other words, their psyches are extraordinarily exposed to that tremendous, elemental force that nobody has yet properly defined. This gives them access to a wholly different dimension of performance. It also makes them much more vulnerable than other men 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 John Donne or Derek Walcott or listening to Mozart or contemplating a painting by Turner or Van Gogh or trying to follow Einstein's theory of relativity - 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 a chosen few in all creation.🟦
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