ICONS:
- Sir Garfield St. Auburn Sobers
He was the greatest all round cricketer the world has ever seen. 8032 runs in 93 tests @57.78 in the period of mid 1950s to mid 1970s. If this doesn’t sound awesome enough to you all, add 235 wickets @ 34.03, and 110 catches to the CV. Convinced of his greatness? Well, hold your breath. He could bowl some good, guileful left arm orthodox and wrist spin in addition to genuine quick bowling, bat in any position from 1 to 11 with equal aplomb, and field anywhere in the field like a panther right from when he made his debut as a 17 year old till he retired from the game at 37 years of age! This is about Sir Garfield St. Auburn Sobers. Statistics are a fraction of a sportsman, and Gary had those too, in abundance. I do not intend to write about his cricketing exploits here, nor about his famous drinking binges or his escapades with beautiful women in all the countries he visited/ visits. Enough and more has been written about that, and there’s no point in boiling the old porridge all over again.
For twenty years, perhaps even still around the cricket world Gary (sometimes Garry) Sobers encapsulated the popular image of West Indian cricketers and West Indians generally: gifted, happy-go-lucky, a fondness for drinking, gambling and partying, flashy if unreliable and unpredictable. Gary was the calypso cricketer. It was all an image, of course, a myth in which there was some fact but much fantasy, Nevertheless, for many West Indians themselves Sobers represented a self-image which is why in the turbulent political years of his cricket triumphs the world’s greatest player unwittingly carried many of the symbols of an emergent regional identity, and which is also why many of his cricketing transgressions rebounded on him so viciously. And this is what makes the man a great man, not just a great cricketer. This is what I would like my tolerant readers’ notice.
Garfield St Auburn Sobers was born on 28 July 1936 into what was at best a skilled working class family, his father being a merchant seaman. Two aspects of this circumstance immediately placed Sobers in the mainstream of the search for a new Caribbean culture. His small family home was located in what was known as the Bay Land on the edge of the Barbadian city and port. The Bay Land was a constant reminder of the colonial past, because it was a tenantry created originally for workers on the Bay Plantation after the ultimate freeing of the slaves in 1838, There were numerous such tenantries all across the island and, revealed by a number of social surveys during the late 1930s and early 1940s, living conditions within them were extremely basic and extremely crowded — Barbados has long possessed one of the highest population densities in the world.
For the first ten years of Sobers’ life the Bay was also the home of the island’s most elite cricket club, Wanderers. Founded in 1877 its membership was restricted to the white planting, government and social elite, and its presence amidst the black tenantry symbolised the sociology of Barbadian cricket which was riven by intersecting considerations such education, occupation and heritage as class and colour. Gary could never have joined Wanderers even though he lived on its boundaries, practised his skills on its outfield and found his first influential encouragement from one of its members, In fact, such was his social position that Sobers could not have played for any team in the Barbados Cricket association’s competition. His first organised cricket was to be played in an association set up during the year of his birth, the Barbados Cricket League established to cater for cricketers of the working class who would otherwise have had no playing future. The first star from the League was to be the legendary Everton Weekes — Sobers was to play alongside him in West Indian teams and much in common because Weekes grew up in a socially the two had tenantry alongside Kensington oval, the Barbadian test ground and the home of Pickwick, the island’s second senior white club.
The other important aspect of Sobers’ birth is that it coincided with a fast rising political consciousness on the part of the dispossessed in the Caribbean, When he was just one year old a dock strike very close to his home prompted widespread labour agitations and police action which spread all over the island leaving several people dead, The origins of the trouble were clear: very poor wages, low employment conditions, low employment rates, restricted opportunities for a steadily increasing black middle class, and no political voice for well over 95 per cent of the Bajan (The Barbadian people locally call themselves Bajans) population. And the social bases for all that was perfectly demonstrated in the very need for the creation of a Barbados Cricket League, The patterns of social exclusion were so complex that even such a tiny island needed to establish two separate cricket competitions, one for the elite and one for the populace. Barbadian cricket was intricately bound up with these social patterns as Sobers was to discover, just as he was to encounter the politics of cultural identity at every important point of his career.
His first class debut came as a 16 year old who was scoring centuries, taking wickets and catches in bucketfuls in the Barbadian Cricket League. High expectations, and a hint of cocky sarcasm was what he was observed with and examined in his initial stages. “Let’s see what this wiry black kid does when he is projected into the higher level of a game which is so English“ was the general attitude of the administrators of the game in Barbados, who were at that point of time, nearly entirely white. Sobers took to the first class cricket like a duck takes to water, and claimed 7 wickets in his debut game against the touring Indian side. Nearly immediately, he was inducted in the West Indian Test side, against the touring Englishmen. In his debut test at Kingston Jamaica, Garry took 4 wickets for 75, and batting as low as number 10, scored 40 solid runs (Out once in 2 innings) showing maturity beyond his age.
The significance of the last point is that the tour was a most unfortunate one politically with the M.C.C. tourists drawn unwittingly into what some local whites saw as a test of racial strength in the midst of political change. Something of the edge crept into the West Indies team where part of the white domination was caught up in the position of captain. A good many observers felt that one of the black stars in Frank Worrell, Clyde Walcott or Everton Weekes (the “Three Ws”) had all the qualities of a captain but instead were subjected to whites, In one sense, then, it was important for yet another star such as Sobers to emerge so far as the black population was concerned because that served simply to reinforce the idea that substantial social change was occurring within the region, If the “Three Ws” constituted the first major breakthrough (Frank Worrell becoming the first black captain of the West Indies), then Sobers spearheaded the substantial second wave.
And how well did he do it! Scoring heavily in a brutally attacking fashion against all oppositions, taking wickets with pace and spin bowling, and taking blinding catches, Sobers took the small cricketing world by storm. He became the icon of Barbadian cricket and subsequently the heartthrob of the entire Caribbean Islands, and was to remain so for nearly a decade and a half. But it may be argued that it was the great cricketers who created the most enthusiasm because it was they who, in the bulk of the English-speaking world, brought the greatest international attention to the Caribbean, It is still arguable that ‘but for cricket a good many people around the world would know little if anything of the West Indies, And by being recognised very quickly as one of the greatest players, Sobers became an influential and crucial social figure, especially after he set his individual test record against the Pakistanis in 1957–58. Sent in at #3 at the fall of Rohan Kanhai’s wicket, Sobers scored his mammoth hundred, and converted it to a mammoth 365 not out. This was a world record beating Len Hutton’s 364, which had stood for 20 years, Sobers was the first West Indian to top any record table in international cricket, and thus elevated to the greatest personality of the Caribbean. He was signed almost immediately by Nottinghamshire as their overseas cricketer, and in the process Gary Sobers became the highest paid cricketer of the world. He kept inspiring the Caribbean multitudes with his unparalleled feats in cricket, achieved nonchalantly and with great style. Barbados suddenly became known to the world, as something more than a mere tourist destination.
In 1965 Sobers took on an even more onerous cultural role when he inherited the West Indian captaincy from the equally legendary Frank Worrell. The importance of the job can be understood only through an appreciation of just how much success in cricket meant to the Caribbean population. Cricket not only saw West Indies match strengths with the colonial master (while some Caribbean countries were independent by 1965 others were not, including Sobers’ birthplace Barbados) but also with Australia, New Zealand, India and Pakistan — it was socially vital that success be forthcoming in order to gain self-respect in the Commonwealth and world environment, the pressures were clearly enormous. Gary was looked up to by all the blacks of the Cricket playing nations, in a way as their leader. This is what the Caribbeans thought of their dear Gary in those days…
And the expectations were exaggerated by one condition in particular. While Frank Worrell had been the first regular black captain appointed to lead West Indies, he was in many ways an atypical Caribbean cricketer. He had spent much time playing league cricket in England, but he also took an economics degree from Manchester University. While he was no token black, he was certainly more acceptable than most fellow black players to the white-dominated hierarchy of West Indian cricket because his English sojourn was thought to have socialised him (even civilised, in some reactionary circles). And Worrell had always been touchy about the nuances of class and colour which he had learned ‘during his Barbadian upbringing. He had much to say about issues wider than cricket as a result of his travel, education and awareness. He was a charming but sober man, strong but reflective and a thinker, In the cricketing sense he was the perfect transition from the colonial to the postcolonial order. Sobers was vastly different, His education was basic at best, his interest in outside issues extended mostly to other games and gambling, he cared little for politics and social issues, he was impulsive, gregarious, exciting, a leader by example rather than a motivator. While others may have invested cultural importance on him, that is, he himself saw everything simply in cricket terms and that made him a very different captain from Worrell. In many ways he was the first truly black West Indian captain, and for a while it worked, and then, not being a man manager as good as Worrell, Sobers’ West Indies team again fell into the rut of Calypso Cricketers’ with flash in the pan performances and meteorically brilliant individual performances. Sobers’ could not forge the team in an outfit which could win in all conditions. The downfall began.
Aftermaths of backfiring of his brave declarations against England and Australia resulted in burning his effigies by the emotional West Indian crowds, and the final fall from grace came in 1970. The most bitter and by far the most serious incident in this connection came late in 1970 when Sobers played in a double wicket competition staged in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his partner was none other than the South African captain Ali Bacher. Sobers accepted the invitation to play on purely cricketing grounds but in the social and political circumstances of the Caribbean at the time his actions, at best, were naive. The issue of the rights of the black majority in both Rhodesia and South Africa had become one not just for politicians but for sportspeople with South Africa, in particular, being ostracised by all major sports bodies in the world on the grounds of discriminatory selection policies. It was an especially sensitive matter in the Caribbean on two counts: the black populations had all descended from slaves taken from Africa to be ruled by whites, and the island states had only just won black majority rule themselves, Add to that the strong pan-African strain which ran through such Caribbean social institutions as reggae music and the Rastafarian cult, along with the wave of Black Power sentiment which swept through the Caribbean during 1970 as an offshoot of what was happening in black America, and it is clear that Sobers placed himself in a most vulnerable position. He returned to the Caribbean after the competition to a serious political row joined by most prominent West Indian figures who, given the dimensions of the case, really had little other choice. Prime Minister of Guyana demanded Sobers’ publicly apology, Jamaica’s two major political parties revealed rare unanimity in seeking Sobers’ resignation as captain and similar sentiments came from other quarters, In the end Sobers issued a public statement concerning his actions and although it did not remove the sour taste, it did defuse the situation, Even so, the affair almost meant the cancellation of the forthcoming Indian tour of 1971 and helped hasten the retirement of Sobers both as captain and player. Sobers would continue to play till 1974, but didn’t enjoy the same iconic status again in his playing days, at least in the Caribbean.
Again, the dimensions of the crisis can be understood fully only by locating Sobers in his cultural role, even if it was one which he fulfilled unwittingly because to his followers, unlike him, cricket was far more than just a mere game. A little over ten years earlier Frank Worrell had finally won the long battle to have a black man replace a white as captain of West Indies, now Gary was seen to have acquiesced, at least, in a situation where whites in southern Africa maintained social, political and cultural domination over black majority populations. The strength of the connection was best demonstrated a few years later when Jamaican reggae superstar Bob Marley was invited to Zimbabwe to perform during the Independence Day celebrations there, the perfect symbol of the underlying strength of Afro- Caribbean cultural dimensions which so many thought had been affronted by Sobers.
He was forgiven and reinstated, and purely on his cricketing accomplishments went on to be a respected cricketing figure in the Caribbean. In his own Kensington Oval at Bridgetown, Barbados, his statue was erected on November 19, 2006, and it was largely seen as the greatest sign of forgiveness and accommodation of the Bajans to their greatest sons. Sobers was never a great speaker and a refined man of manners. He never made any great speeches, leave the crowds, but in even the small cricketing world. Still, Sir Gary lives on, continues to inspire and influence, but the greatness of Gary Sobers lies in his ability to unite the multitudes through sheer sport, and keep that unity alive for nearly 3 decades even after he retired.
Sir Garfield St. Auburn Sobers, was truly the first cricketing ICON.
