Adekeye Adebajo | Garfield Sobers: A prophet with honour

Sir Garfield (Garry) Sobers who recently died in Bridgetown at the age of 89, was one of the world’s greatest cricketers. He played first-class cricket in Barbados, Australia, and England. Sobers was a pioneer who broke records. He was the first player in Test cricket to attain 8,000 runs, scored an unbeaten 365 against Pakistan in 1958 during a 10-hour innings that included 38 boundaries, and, a decade later, famously smashed six successive sixes in one over, playing for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan. In 1962, he made 1,000 runs and took 50 wickets for South Australia in 10 Sheffield Shield games. His longevity was impressive, playing for the West Indies from the age of 17 until he was 37.

Sobers was born in the St Michael parish of Barbados on July 28, 1936. to working-class parents as the fifth of six children. His father, Shamont, was a sailor with the Canadian merchant navy, killed when his ship was sunk by a German U-boat in 1942. This left Garry’s widowed mother, Thelma, to care for the family in a one-storey wooden house on a modest pension. The young boy was just five years old.

Sobers played street cricket in Barbados using a tennis ball, and his precocious talent was spotted early. He also played on the beach with palm leaf bats and balls of rolled-up tar, sometimes getting on one knee to bat in a format dubbed “Lilliputian cricket”. The joyful exuberance he displayed throughout his career was honed in this milieu.

VERSATILITY

Sobers’ versatility stood out from the start. A left-handed batsman and medium-seam bowler, he hit the ball with merciless ferocity, displaying a variety of dazzling strokes. He was also a formidable fielder at slip, taking 109 catches: the third-highest in the world at the time. Sobers burst onto the scene as a 16-year old, taking seven wickets from 89 overs for Barbados against India’s tourists in 1953. A year later, he took 4 wickets for 75 runs on his West Indies Test debut in a loss to England.

During the long, hot summer of 1966, Sobers scored 722 runs (including 161 at Old Trafford, 163 at Lord’s, and 174 at Headingley) in the famous 3-1 Test victory against England, also taking 20 wickets at 27.25 runs each and making 10 catches. In 98 test matches over two decades, he scored 8,032 runs, including 26 centuries, averaging 57.78 (the third-highest global score at the time), and claimed 235 wickets: the sixth highest total at the time

When Trinidadian Brian Lara broke his batting world record in Antigua in 1994 with a breathtaking innings of 375 runs, Sobers was among the first to go onto the pitch to congratulate him. He had earlier gone into the dressing room and urged his young disciple: “Go out and do it, man.”

Despite his genius, Sobers, however, had his vices. He admitted to a gambling addiction, frequenting racecourses and casinos around the world. He was a heavy drinker who sometimes overindulged in rum, port, and brandy, and had a reputation for being a womaniser. He later confessed to drinking all night and not sleeping before important Test matches. The death of his best friend, West Indian batsman Collie Smith, in a car accident in 1959, with Sobers at the wheel, left a permanent scar. One of the few blots on his career was Sobers’ widely criticised decision to play cricket in the racist white-minority-ruled Rhodesia in 1970.

CAPTAINCY

Upon his retirement in 1963, Frank Worrell, the legendary batsman and first black captain of the West Indies strongly recommended his 28-year-old protégé, Sobers, for the captaincy of the team. Sobers went on to lead the Caribbean islands in 39 Tests over the next decade, gaining the West Indies’ first Test series victory in Australia in 1965, and laying the foundation for the all-conquering teams of Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards. Between February 1980 and March 1995, the West Indies went unbeaten in Test series, becoming one of the greatest teams in the history of sport. They won two World Cups in 1975 and 1979, before losing a third consecutive final in 1983. Sobers’s consummate, infectious self-confidence had helped the team to achieve a world-class status that transformed the previous “Calypso cricketers” into the global cricketing Colossus.

In 1998, Sobers was declared a National Hero of Barbados by the country’s parliament, and his statue stands immortalised at the Kensington Oval in Bridgetown where a pavilion is also named after him. In 2000, Wisden Wisden cricketing magazine named Sobers the second-best cricketer of the 20th century after Australia’s Paul Bradman, who had earlier declared the Barbadian “the greatest cricketer of all time”. Four years later, the International Cricket Council (ICC) named its world player of the year trophy after Sobers.

Former England cricketer, Mike Selvey, noted: “Never has there been an all-rounder such as Garry Sobers, and never again is it likely that one will appear;” the president of Cricket West Indies, Kishore Shallow, described Sobers as “the greatest cricketer the world has ever seen;” while Barbadian historian, Hilary Beckles, observed that Sobers “invented the new order of the game and became the symbol of West Indian excellence in the age of independence”.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com