During my boyhood, TV sport wasn't on tap like water (as it is now), so you never got the chance to be blasé about drinking it in. There were only three channels; and one of those, BBC Two, didn't yet broadcast across the whole country. Any game on the box, frivolous or not, counted as a seminal event. It was a shared experience too: you and tens of millions of others were watching.
Colour TV was on the brink of arriving, a symbol of affluence and one-upmanship, like parking a Ford Zephyr on the driveway. The screen of our black-and-white set was no bigger than a square dinner plate. The picture, drifting in and out, tended to dissolve into a pale haze. On the hottest days, during July and August, the light flooding through our front window was so strong that the cricketers appeared to be almost diaphanous, moving about like ghosts in white sheets.
I had to get up close to track the ball once it was released from the bowler's hand; I had to get closer still after it left the bat. Among the stellar cast of Cavaliers were Ted Dexter, performing with the patrician nobility of a European prince, the suave Nawab of Pataudi in his white cravat, Denis Compton, Jim Laker and Fred Trueman. I was too young to identify them by sight and too ignorant to know much of anything about them beyond the basics of their background and reputation. Honestly, I didn't care. My gaze was fixed on Garry Sobers. I was drawn to him instantly.
Even I, a know-nothing novice, recognised at first sight that Sobers was cut from the rarest of cloth. There was art in his hands. There was grace in his body. Whether playing at Lord's or in humdrum Westcliff-on-Sea, Sobers was an incandescent presence, even when he did nothing more than mark out his run or crouch in the slips; he never had to resort to meretricious showboating or performative antics to seize and then hold your attention. By his high standards, he might have a relatively unproductive match, making only a handful of runs or snapping up the odd wicket. There was nonetheless always a moment - a stump sent cartwheeling, an acrobatic catch, or a ball dispatched into the confectionery stall and out again - when my eyes popped out on stalks, like a character in a cartoon.
Sobers could do everything - and, almost perpetually, he did. His talent came as naturally to him as song comes to a bird. Often the game seemed preposterously easy for him. As a batter, unconventionally relying on the minimum of foot movement, Sobers was capable of hitting a ball with such venom that I wondered how the stitching of the seam didn't unravel and burst apart. But he could also play a late cut with soft tenderness, like the brushing caress of a loved one's cheek. As a bowler, he could jag and swing a delivery at pace or switch to bamboozling variations of spin; he'd either blast someone out or subtly tease and outfox them into submission. As a fielder, even when dangerously close to the bat, he swooped to take catches with sinewy movements.
Along with all that abundant, voluptuous talent, something else - indefinable to me then but blatant later - made Sobers utterly compelling. It was his elan, the joie de vivre manifest in him. When, majestically, Sobers dismissed a ball or a batter from his presence, the TV picture would switch from a wide angle to a close-up. Since this was the era pre-dating helmets. you saw his face: the closely cropped hair, the pencil-thin moustache and the diastema between his front teeth. Sobers possessed what show business describes in convenient shorthand as "star power"; his was luminous enough to be detectable from the moon. The novelist and critic James Baldwin wrote the perfect sentence about the allure - the glow - of the icons of Hollywood's golden age, their personality always far bigger than the movies in which they were cast. "One does not go to see them act," said Baldwin. "One goes to see them be."
There were queues to watch Sobers be. Neville Cardus, the Great Romantic, said he would gladly have paid twice at the gate to catch Frank Woolley play a cameo innings of 20 runs rather than sit through "anyone else" make a hundred. Where Sobers is concerned, I can go further than that. I would have bought a ticket merely to see him stroll down the pavilion steps at Trent Bridge. His loose-limbed swagger, while walking to the crease, was beautiful to behold. The roll of the hips. The twirl of the clean bat in his hands. The brief tilt of the head, the eyes scanning the sky. The shirt collar always upturned. The sleeves always buttoned at the cuffs. There was something very regal about him; he was a king in his coming. Notts ought to have gone to the expense, since it would have been justifiable, of hiring a red carpet and a 25-piece big band to blast out the Royal Fanfare.
This is a lightly edited extract from The Man Who Walked Out of the Sun by Duncan Hamilton, Abacus, 2026