Brian Lara is the cricket equivalent of Manhattan, Manchester United or marzipan: it just isn't possible to be indifferent about him. Nor does he let you ignore him for long. Barely one calendar month after Matthew Hayden took his place as the scorer of the highest innings in Test cricket, Lara ensured his number of entries in the record books would remain the same by eclipsing Sir Viv Richards as West Indies' leading overall scorer, almost incidentally racking up 1,000 runs in a calendar year for the third time.
And, once more, as we did in 1999 when he bounced back from 'The 51', West Indies' lowest Test score, to beat Australia virtually by himself in the next two Tests, or as we did originally back in 1994 when he scored the 375 and the 501 (the highest first-class score), those of us who don't hate him are ready to love him all over. What will Lara do next? In our hearts we all know the answer: anything he wants.
You get the feeling that, if circumstances allow it before Lara's career ends in the next four or five or (surely!) six years, not just Hayden's record but the 501 might be in jeopardy.
Lara, at 34, cannot have the physical ability he had at 25. Though his eyesight is a long way from gone, it may be equidistant from its peak, when he entertained himself between deliveries by looking for pretty girls in the crowd. His body takes longer to recover from injury and the likelihood of it increases year on year. It would now fatigue him far more to bat for three days than would have been the case in 1994.
Yet he seems to have gained mentally much more than he has lost physically in the past nine years. The cream of West Indian sportswriters in the press box watching him make his maiden century at Trinidad's Queen's Park Oval, his home ground, against Australia in April shook their heads in disbelief and nodded them in unanimous agreement, with even his detractors admitting grudgingly that he is batting as well as ever. The ones who liked him told the truth: he's batting better.
There's something about Lara. Few of us are good enough at anything to be given a second chance by virtue of sheer talent after having screwed up monumentally. The ones who capitalise on second chances, though, do it by assertion of will and self. Muhammad Ali comes out of an exile imposed by the authorities to regain the world championship; Mike Tyson does it to bite off Evander Holyfield's ear. The old Brian Lara would have become this year's Diego Maradona.
The old Brian Lara would have squandered any amount of chances he was given because he would not have recognised them as such; he would have seen them as entitlements, his in perpetu ity. The new Brian knows the end will come and wants to carry his bat. (To be fair to him, the 'old' Lara we speak of was not the actual old Lara, who was the young Lara, the boy from rural Trinidad. Indeed, that personality is probably the same as the 'new' Lara of today, just younger. The 'old' Lara was an interim personality, his best attempt to go with the flow of the whitewater of celebrity into which he was tossed.)
Even in Guyana, where Carl Hooper still remains unofficially West Indies captain, no one needs to be persuaded that Lara has the will to do anything he wishes with his talent. As long as West Indies are not a great team, there will be West Indians who will make Lara a scapegoat, precisely because of his will and talent. As soon as the team is strong again, however, resentment of Lara will retreat to the same little pockets the mediocre always occupy to glower at excellence. And Lara is likely to succeed.
The problems West Indies cricket face are still as daunting as Jamaica's Blue Mountains; but they are capable of being surmounted. There are seven million people in the cricket-playing Caribbean; the chances of finding four who can send down 10 overs of genuine pace are good, even with basketball now the ghetto game of choice.
The team is young and almost embarrassingly green, but when you score 417 runs in the last innings to beat Australia and your last pair bat out a dozen overs to force a draw against Zimbabwe in your next series, you gain experience fairly quickly. Lara and the West Indies Cricket Board are no longer modelling with concrete, but clay. And Lara sees his job now as moulding that clay, not standing on a pedestal, scowling at the rabble below.
For all the disdainful looks he gave us at the nadir of his career, when he declared cricket was ruining his life, very many of us still find Lara charming. It is amazing how quickly we rush to think well of him once more, amazing, too, how anything he does is somehow richer than if repeated or even bettered by someone else. Compare the international fanfare when he set his world record to the stark absence of headlines when Hayden broke it. Lara was the subject of two leader articles in The Guardian ; Hayden's word count in the British press is dwarfed by Lara's 8,626 runs.
The reason the world made a fuss over Lara, and is still willing to, it seems to me, is because we know in our hearts how good he is. He is in touch with something purely good. The religious call it God; the secular know it as Art; but it resides in all of us and we see it plainly in our best. Even if he were not batting so well, we would want him to; because Brian Lara's redemption saves the best in all of us and we all glory in it; except, perhaps, England for a couple of months next year.
Lara by numbers
Tests 98 Runs 8,626 Highest score 375 Average 51.65 100s 22
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