Ja: Wayne Brown's Lara Unbound

Big ups to Nicholas, whose blog I discovered via FreeTrinidad, to which Hassan Voyeau linked. I'm running the piece uncut because of the sheer beauty of Wayne Brown's writing. Who would disturb a word of what he says? Not me.

Several years ago this column ran, in five installments, a long piece entitled 'Considering Brian Lara'. The following condensed and updated, two-part extract of that essay is published here in commemoration of its subject's second world record test innings in Antigua last week. - WB.]
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In my mind's eye I see him at the crease, with the bowler at the furnace-exit of his delivery:

The little precipitate duck-&-lunge, which can look like a feint, but which is how he 'fixes' the ball's pitch and gathers spring for that characteristic rock back and up, onto his toes and into a dancer's extension, bat pointed straight up at the sky. And in that split-second you hold your breath, because against the fastest bowling he is already there waiting, so that for a moment all is poised, impending...

Who is Brian Lara, this short, good-looking young man who but for cricket might be quite inconspicuous, with his slow, slightly slurred, drear-note'd speech, and his veiled eye? To whom among his peers shall we compare him?

Well, we might compare him to Viv Richards, the Clyde Walcott of Antigua: Viv, who like Clyde routinely paid fast bowlers the penultimate insult of hooking them forward of square, or the ultimate insult of lifting them back over their heads off a length, and whose batting was refined to genius by something more evil and aquiline than you will ever find in proper Barbados, something small-island and bitchy and renk, yet at the same time something so carelessly noble that most times all you'd register was a sort of glossiness, nobility's shucked skin. That was how the Master Blaster batted, with the glossiness of a horse, and that wall-eyed Arabian glint of contemptuous amusement in the corner of his eye (while the man chewed and chewed on his gum).

But we shall not compare Lara to Viv, because mastery and ease were the Antiguan's qualities, and those are not words that come to mind when you think of Lara. You wouldn't expect ease of a Trinidadian, anyway - and mastery without ease is something else.

Though Lara sees the ball as early as Viv did, and plays it even later, he lacks the infallible eye-&-foot co-ordination which, at the level at which Viv exhibited it, was new to the game. A Richards on-drive was a conversation-stopper: there was nothing to say, and no time to say it. Your gaze flicked at once from his bat to the boundary, to see which spectator was running to retrieve the ball. But Lara is short, and crouches further with that initial duck-&-lunge (whereas Viv at the crease stood tall), and on-driving doesn't come naturally to him. Most times he works that side backward of square, down on one knee and pulling; or in the violent way, all waist and wrists, flashes it away square of the wicket: Jackie Chan with a scimitar, Hah! It's a different elation: angrier, less imperious.

Nor should we compare Lara to Sobers, though both are left-handers and Sobers, too, was happiest on the back foot. No, we shall not compare Lara to the Incomparable, whose batting C L R James once nailed immortally as 'orthodoxy...carried to an extreme where it is indistinguishable from nature.' James meant the educated and harmonious fluency which characterised every aspect of Sobers's game.

But Lara isn't orthodox. He has, or invents on the run, more strokes than Sobers ever had (or needed). And he is faster on his feet than Sobers. But the real difference isn't that.

Lara dislikes the ball and means to drive it away from him. Sobers used to co-opt it. Lara in full cry will bloody a bowler and leave him wishing he were dead. Sobers used to make bowlers fall in love with him.

Every ball bowled to Lara is to him an adventure, a brand new problem or window of delight; and the question you see him asking in that split-second pause is: 'By what inventive chord-of-a-stroke shall this one be put away?' When he winds up dead-batting, Lara feels it as a constriction, an interruption of what he's there for. For all his elan, he is at heart a marauder, a taker-apart of a fielding side.

By contrast, every ball to Sobers was part of a preordained scheme of things. He didn't ask, 'With what chord shall I destroy this one?' He asked, 'Where in the melodic line does this ball fit?' Most times, he found the response which harmony dictated.

And Sobers never dead-batted; in his forward defensive he played through the ball. The stroke was not an interruption, not an irritant. It was merely the front-foot drive diminuendo.

Great sportsmen are not like you and me. The game they play, and in playing extend, is not merely what they do but who they are. Or how they are who they are. It's the way they 'express themselves', yes; but it is also a mirror that gives them back the real-ness of their lives. And in time it becomes the language through which they apprehend the world.

Muhammed Ali thought with his body. What poets bring to words or painters to canvas issued from him in feints and jabs. Michael Jordan was most a philosopher when, sailing to the hoop, he'd pass the ball quizzically back and forth between his hands.

Brian Lara lives in and through cricket. But where Sobers was of Barbados and the colonial 50s, Lara is from Trinidad and a product of the '80s. He grew up amid the Me Generation, not the British public school and its traditions. He has no empire either to administer or to resist; he comes from a country with nine synonyms for heckling; and his immediate cricket ancestors are Pace-like-Fire and Licks-like-Peas. Moreover, he is generationally a man of the Americas, an American. And what all these mean is that, unlike Sobers, Lara is a man alone.

Among West Indians, Trinidadians are the existentialists. (Existentialism: '...A theory of man that emphasises critical borderline situations to show the need for making decisive choices in an apparently purposeless world.') Perhaps it has to do with the relative young-ness of the society. Or with its urban demographics, or its bi-ethnic composition.

But you see it in Lara, in the little lunge-and-rock-back, the early sighting but the playing late, the sense that, to him, each ball represents a discontinuous new promise and peril. His brand of mastery as I said is without ease; and in this, as in their comparable hand and foot speed, he reminds me of Rohan Kanhai.

Now, Kanhai was not a free man, and so you never quite knew where you were with him. And Lara too, it's clear, lives with an uncomfortable measure of unfreedom. When Richards was in full flight you knew you could safely go downstairs for a drink. But not with Kanhai. And not with Lara.

Explosive, stylish, ingenious, brilliant: they are the words I would use to describe the batting of either man. And yet their victory over each dispatched ball was/ is, somehow, a victory without duration. As though after each ball it was necessary to start again! As though a man were only safe in the narrowest moment of his mastery!

You never felt that fear watching Sobers or Richards. Once either was established at the crease, Time and the future became a predictably coursing river. The world was safe.
Many years ago, at an international cycling meet in Trinidad, I watched a young cyclist break down and cry.

Call him Stones. Stones was gifted but young. He had already won twice, but this now was that peculiar race, a team 'Devil'. Riding against the four Trinidadians were teams from Venezuela, Columbia and France.

Most of the spectators - as, no doubt, Stones himself - assumed the other TT cyclists were there to protect Stones. But it didn't work out that way. All three were expelled early, and Stones was left alone in enemy territory.

There was nobody now to cooperate in being drafted from, nobody to let Stones through. But he rose from the saddle and sprinted, bent his elbows, gritted his teeth and sprinted, and our admiration grew as we understood that Stones had gathered up all his anger at his teammates' 'betrayal' and put it back out - against the foreigners!

They rode him wide, they boxed him in: Stones squeezed by each time on the line. At the last bell he was still there; and in the backstretch he looked poised to pounce.

But this, alas, was not to be the fairy tale. On the final bend a wave of cyclists washed over Stones, and he threw back his shoulders and rode off the track and dismounted. And there, bent over double, hands on knees, Stones wept. Not the tears of disappointment you get from a defeated World Cup team, say. Great, wrenching sobs.

I thought I understood those sobs. They were a young man's sobs, and they were actually very private and to-himself. Stones wasn't weeping for 'Trinidad', or for having lost a race. He was weeping for the great illusion of all the gifted young: the fiction that the world is a mirror of one's soul. That a man can go it alone. That greatness and heart can triumph over - anything.

But Stones had burst his heart. And he had lost.

So now he had learned the lesson that turns young men into men: that talent and heart were not going to be enough. That the universe, imperturbable, indifferent - in the end, the universe would still be there. That for all his greatness, a man is not saved. For that most private of realizations, Stones was sobbing.

I thought: He will not cry like that again.

And watching, at the end of the 1996 Australian tour, Brian Lara weep in the dressing room - Lara alone of all the team weeping, because he, Brian Lara, had not been born to lose a Test series after 23 years - the same thought occurred to me: 'He will not cry like that again.'