Sobers: A Sobering Understanding
The following statement is issued by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies (The UWI), in tribute to Sir Garfield Sobers.
Sometimes words are our best emissaries. They enable us to summon and send out to the wicket a perspective on a warrior called back to the pearly pavilion. With them, we can capture a scripture that illuminates an eternal truth such as this: We are because he was!
Today we hold aloft a pantheon of cherished ideals and can make real our innermost imaginings. This warrior erupted from the most oppressed of us and led a Joshua journey to the land of possibilities for those with a passionate desire for recognition and justice.
The transition of The Right Excellent Sir Garfield St. Aubrun Sobers, therefore, represents much more than a monumental moment in the theory and practice of cricket culture and its stage performance. The facts that speak to a powerful parade of artistic genius and theatrical excellence are themselves insufficient to illuminate an icon of hitherto unknown dimensions. Everywhere within the statistics reflecting almost unimaginable performance can be seen a scenario in which enlightenment rises from the darkest dungeons of the British Empire.
Sir Gary said to his West Indian nation and the colonised beyond: look what can be achieved if our God-given talent is liberated and allowed upon the world stage. His global confidence and glorious craftsmanship inspired intellectual elites and galvanised the grassroots in every ghetto.
His consciousness was manufactured and curated in Barbados, ancestral home of the chattelised cane plantation culture that created concrete ceilings for those who did the cutting. He shattered every imposed assumption about the materially poor and melanin-rich. By the age of 25, he was canonised as the best all-round cricketer on ‘Earth and Mars’. Recognising his records became the business of the game’s accountants, who audited a productivity never thought possible in the post-industrial world.
He was quintessentially a West Indian artist whose style and elegance could not be seized only by the statistics. He was recognised and celebrated as home-grown from Kingston to Georgetown and all communities in between. The native son summoned all to rise and embrace the mantra that all things are possible from the progeny of the poor.
It was this revolutionary realisation that the father had seen in the son. Sir Frank Worrell had nurtured his talent and recommended him in 1964 as his successor. Young Sobers, he said, knows everything about the game and what was to be done and how to do it. The West Indian Test team had been dwelling in the cricket basement since inception in 1928, and the loft was now within reach of occupancy.
The world champions from ‘Down Under’ arrived in the West Indies in 1965. Worrell had wounded the dragon in 1960/61, but its roar was not silenced. Gary’s men put it to the sword and secured for the West Indies the coveted cup – World Champions of Test Cricket. It was the first time they had been officially recognised as the best in anything in the world. This success formed the foundation for future captains such as Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards to sustain this legacy of excellence.
There was no turning back for the West Indian colonial backwater of Empire. How could Barbados remain colonised when it was possessed of a brilliant mind, the best of its kind in the universe, that had taken his people to the top of the world?
Barbados grasped the Sobers’ scriptural truth, went to the heart of the Empire and demanded its immediate release from imperial bondage. It was his completeness of cricket culture and pointing to political possibilities that confirmed his incomparable genius and greatness. His freedom created new forms within the game that fashioned his art and signalled the end of his obedience to the old order. His innovations bred a new authority which he alone commanded. He invented the new order of the game and became the symbol of West Indian excellence in the age of independence.
At a time when the regional political federation faltered and failed, cricket held the centre of the nation imagined. Sobers symbolised the seriousness of a democratic option. The scripture was clearly articulated: talent must be identified, nurtured and institutionally supported lest future genius be left to survive by chance alone.
We must therefore remember him as the brightest illuminating cricket sun, and also for his universal dignity and human decency. The sky was his limit. This is why he will always be a visionary figure in the Caribbean constellation.
It is for all of these reasons and more that his University of the West Indies conferred on him the Honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree in 1992.
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