Garry Sobers, who died on Friday, 11 days short of his 90th birthday, never quite grasped his greatness. Charlie Davis, who batted with him for the West Indies, once explained the problem. “He was too modest. He didn’t know how special he was. He expected us to bat like him. And catch like him. He thought all of us were like him,” he once recalled for this newspaper.
“He would come in and say, ‘I will get a 150, Kanhai, you give me a 100, Charlie, you give me a 75’. That was it. That was the plan. No self-doubt,”
The plan usually worked, though only one man could ever keep his end of it.
Salim Durani, the flamboyant Indian all-rounder who shared a field with him through the 1960s and 70s, told this newspaper a few years before his own death in 2023: “What a player he was. And itna simple aadmi. Such a simple man.”
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Sobers was born in July 1936 in a small wooden house on Walcott Avenue in Bridgetown, with an extra finger on each hand. His father, a merchant seaman, went down with his torpedoed ship in January 1942. Garry was five then.
At 14, he was running errands in a furniture factory. Nobody ever coached him; he learned everything in the street games of St Michael.
At 21, his maiden Test hundred against Pakistan did not end until 365, past Len Hutton’s world record; it stood for 36 years until Brian Lara passed it.
Sobers bowled fast-medium, orthodox spin, wrist-spin, whatever the moment needed. At Swansea in 1968, he hit Malcolm Nash for six sixes in an over, the first man to do it in first-class cricket. In 93 Tests, he made 8,032 runs at 57.78 and took 235 wickets.
But the numbers hardly tell the full story.
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There was a phase in his career when he made three centuries in a home series against England. The motivation was a friend and teammate whose death he felt responsible for.
In September 1959, at quarter to five in the morning, driving through the night to a London charity match, Sobers came around a bend into the headlights of a 10-ton cattle truck. Fast bowler Tom Dewdney was in the passenger seat and Collie Smith, his closest friend, lay asleep across the back seat.
Smith’s spine was broken. “Don’t worry about me,” he told Sobers. “Look after the big fellow;” he meant the burly Dewdney.
Smith died three days later. He was 26.
Sobers was fined 10 pounds for careless driving and began drinking, before deciding that disappearing into the bottle would be a second betrayal. He resolved to bat for two men from then on, Garfield Sobers and Collie Smith.
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Charlie Davis, who played under Sobers and watched him from 22 yards for years, once said:”He is not normal. He is definitely not normal.”
He never stopped being astonished by him. “Garry could catch a blur, you know. He used to be close at leg slip, at the back pocket of the batsman, and catch blurs.”
At Melbourne in 1971-72, when he was playing for the World XI, Sobers was bounced out by a young Dennis Lillee for a duck. That evening, Sobers found Ian Chappell in the Australian dressing room. “You’ve got a boy here called Lillee. Tell him I can bowl quick too.”
He bounced Lillee back, and Chappell later told him Lillee had smashed his bat against the wall, swearing he hadn’t really bowled quick at him yet.
“He’s got the ball, I’ve got the bat,” Sobers said. “I’ve never met the one who can scare me, and I don’t think that I will.”
He made 254, a straight drive reaching the sightscreen almost before Lillee had finished his follow-through. Bradman called it the greatest innings he had seen on Australian soil.
At Lord’s in 1973, after a party that wound up at half past nine in the morning, Sobers showered, padded up and made an unbeaten 150. His 26th Test century, and his last.
“Life is for living,” was his philosophy. He walked when he nicked one, without troubling the umpire. He would not abide sledging.
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In the early 1980s, Sobers coached Sri Lanka, when a young Arjuna Ranatunga was starting out.
Ranatunga told this newspaper of a day in England when the ball was seaming and the batsmen kept finding nicks.
“He stormed across. ‘What are you lot doing? Hey, fat boy! Give me your gloves.’ I offered the bat as well. He brushed me aside and took out a stump. Just a stump, you know. And he played six balls and connected perfectly.”
Ranatunga never once called him Sobers. It was Sir Garry every time.
In February 1975, he was knighted at the Garrison Racecourse, a mile or so from the wooden house on Walcott Avenue. In 2000, Wisden named him one of its five Cricketers of the Century.
