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Priestley on Sobers

From time to time, several great literary figures have turned their attention to sports, if only briefly. The celebrated English essayist, J. B. Priestley, was one of them. One of his finest essays that touched upon sport — a cricketer, to be precise — was a brilliant appreciation of Gary Sobers' virtues as a cricketer, written for the New Statesman in 1966. The Hindu which had a reprint arrangement with the New Statesman, featured the essay in its columns on October 6, 1966. Excerpts:

I SEEM to have spent a lot of time, this summer, sitting in front of the TV watching Garfield Sobers. Always I have stared at him out of a mixture of apprehension and admiration. He frightened me and enchanted me by turns. Batting, bowling, fielding, captaining his side, he seemed to be pronouncing often with a grin, the doom of the England eleven. More than once — in the bitter hours facing defeat — I wished he would sprain a wrist or turn an ankle. But even so, admiration came seeping through these mud walls of partisanship. And it was not only his feats with bat and ball that compelled my applause; it was his style and manner, the way he carried himself, the way he moved.

There is none of the chin-up-chest-out nonsense about Sobers. He isn't one of your stiff-necked athletes. He carries his head slightly forward, as if eager to swing the bat or deliver the ball and so break another record and he seems to ripple towards the wickets. All is loose, easy, instant and powerful. And if I were coaching young cricketers — though I must add here that I think some of ours have been over-coached and so torment themselves wondering what is the correct stroke to play — I would show them films of this great cricketer, asking them to note his posture and movements, his avoidance of unnecessary effort and strain, the whole cat-like style of the man.

But while we remain with the body I am like a hippopotamus trying to describe a leopard, so now I turn with relief to the mind. This doesn't mean — please, please, everybody! — that I imagine that my mind has the loping ease and then the instant power of a Sobers in the field. What it does mean is that I believe there is a mental equivalent of the Sobers style. And indeed we can choose as an example a member of his own race, for I have always liked the story of the old coloured woman who was asked how she had been able to cope with her own troubles and also help many other people. She replied: `I wear my life like a loose garment.'

Never be afraid — I am advising the young now; their elders are hopeless — of any accusations and taunts of being half-baked and woolly-minded. These come from the kind of people who would tell a Sobers to pull himself together, to keep his chin up and his chest out. They have minds that can never be loose and easy. They are stiff-necked in all their opinions and conclusions. They carry their intelligence rigidly, never allowing it to amble and lope, so that it is strained and tired before it has been asked to do anything in particular. And England — and I mean England because I can't speak for Scotland, Wales, Ulster — is crammed with such people.

So we arrive on the ground, to play the world, still marching as if on parade, not as a nation but in regimented sections, each shouting old slogans and moving to tunes that have bored the hell out of us for years. We might remember before making our final protest and then deciding to emigrate, how a man from Barbados came on to our Test match grounds, so eager and yet so easy, apparently without a stubborn bone or stiffened muscle in his body. Yes indeed, we can learn from Garfield Sobers — Arrangement with New Statesman.

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