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When they told the writer John O’Hara that George Gershwin had died, he wrote in a memorable column: “They tell me that George Gershwin is dead. But I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
I feel the same way about the great New Zealand cricketer, Martin Crowe.
His death has been announced. But I don’t believe it. To me, if only in my mind’s eye and memory, he will always be alive as I conjure up images of his elegant and imperious batting.
I can see as if it were yesterday being at the Basin Reserve in Wellington and watching Crowe belt an attack, it could be an eager England bowling squad, to all parts of the ground.
There he is, tall and chunky, as good looking as his film star cousin Russell, Edwardian in his mannerisms and method, as he plants his front leg down the pitch and with an arcing sweep of the bat sends the ball racing to the picket fence in front of the RA Vance Stand.
The next ball is short and just outside the off stump. He is on the back foot. He waits for the ball to reach the apex of its rise and then with a short, emphatic jab of a horizontal bat, he sends the ball whizzing past cover and into the pickets.
The perspiring bowler drops the ball in short again. This time, Crowe rocks back, waits for the ball to reach his jaw line and swats it away to the far boundary on the leg side.
Neville Cardus once described how Charles Macartney, the ‘Governor General’ of Australian batsmen, “dismissed the ball from his presence”.
My memories of Martin Crowe’s batting, from watching him live at the Basin Reserve and the SCG and on TV on famous cricket grounds around the world, is that there was the same masterful “dismissing the ball from his presence” aspect to his batting.
Crowe’s batting statistics are impressive. He played in 77 Tests, averaged 45.65 with the bat, scored 17 Test centuries (a New Zealand record) and 18 half-centuries. This is a very significant conversion rate. In 1999, he shared a 467-run partnership with Andrew Jones, at the time the highest partnership in Test cricket.
In all first cricket, he averaged 56.02 with the bat. This is among the highest first-class averages in cricket (although hardly Don Bradman-like but whose average is?).
There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Statistics can tell us how many runs a batsman made. But they don’t tell how they were made. And this is the critical factor with Crowe. He never scored an inelegant run. Every stroke was a thing of beauty, even his defensive strokes.
If he had played in the days of ancient Greece, sculptors would have been attracted to the line of beauty he created when he moved into his shots.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” the poet Keats wrote in a verse that we all learnt as schoolkids in the days when poetry meant something and learning it was regarded as a crucial part of a good education. Martin Crowe’s batting was always a thing of beauty.
To my mind, he combined the textbook elegance of a Colin Cowdrey or a Tom Graveney with the ferocious appetite for scoring runs of a Steve Waugh or an Allan Border.
I will always remember his 299 for New Zealand against Sri Lanka as an example of his penchant for combining the best of the English and the Australian batting traditions.
When he needed only one more run for his magical 300, he was bowled a short ball outside his off stump. Instead of thumping it for yet another four, he carefully steered (or tried to steer) the ball to third man through a vacant slip area.
His nick was caught by the wicket-keeper. And here’s the thing. Crowe marched off the Basin Reserve in a torment of frustration and rage.
He had blown his first and last chance of reaching 300-plus runs in a single innings in a Test. He knew it. And he was furious with himself.
I think that this anger and frustration at missing out on perfection was the main fault, the only real fault, in Crowe’s batting. You sometimes got the feeling that his quest to play the perfect innings meant he lost interest in an innings if, early on, he had hit a catch and been dropped.
There was a tendency, perhaps, to theorise too much about a craft. Batting is more than just making runs: it is effectiveness, solving problems posed by bowlers and pitch and most important of all, making the most of any mistakes or let-offs from your opponents.
You sometimes felt that Crowe was only interested in perfection. He should have remembered that Japanese master potters always put a small mistake in their works. Why? Because perfection is boring.
It is the occasional imperfections in a master batsman’s play that make his mastery for hours on end so interesting and so compelling to watch.
If only Crowe had learnt this lesson early in his career, as he did later in his life after the cruel lymphoma ravaged his body and ultimately killed him. How much freer he would have been in his mind and, as a consequence, how much freer and even occasionally playful his batting might have become.
I played grade cricket in Wellington against Crowe’s dad, Dave. Dave was a tough, hard-to-dismiss, prodding nuisance of a left-handed opener. He was opiniated and knowledgeable. I remember having a long discussion with him years after our battles on the cricket field about various theories and practices of cricket.
One opinion, I remember, Dave Crowe was staunch on was his belief that lbw should be allowed to include balls snicked on to the pads.
Martin Crowe inherited his dad’s gift for forthright views about cricket, the players, his own career, his life and his struggles with his health. If he had been spared a remission from his ‘friend’ lymphoma, he would have become one of the great voices in the world of writing about cricket.
He became less opiniated, less like his dad, as he grappled with the mysteries of his illness and the meaning to his life that the cancer forced him to contemplate.
A couple of years ago Crowe attended the MCG to watch the New Zealand Black Caps play Australia in the final of the World Cup. “My precarious life ahead may not afford me the luxury of many more games to watch and enjoy,” he wrote on ESPNcricinfo. “So this is likely to be it. The last, maybe, and I can happily live with that.”
In life, it is not how you handle the good times that defines you. It is how you cope with adversity and the hard times that tells everyone what sort of a person you are.
Martin Crowe revealed that he was a person of substance in the brave way he handled his cancer by standing up to it and not yielding to it, in the same manner he did at the crease to the best bowlers from all over the world.
One of the intriguing aspects of cricket is that it is a game whose metaphors are centred around death. Batsmen hear the ‘death rattle’ when the ball hits their stumps. They ‘depart the scene’ as they walk off the ground back to the pavilion. They carry their gear in their ‘coffins’.
But because the game is ferociously documented, televised, photographed, and written about, players like Crowe remain in the records of the game with the singular blessing they are forever young, forever in their prime.
Vale Martin Crowe. The highest praise I can give you is to say, I loved to watch you bat.