Vivian Richards And Owning The Moment.

Ask anyone who watched cricket in the ’70s or ’80s—anyone who remembers sun on the outfield, radios crackling through summer—who the greatest was, and they’ll probably say Vivian Richards.

Not because of averages, though those are there. Not because of records, though he has them. But because of something else. A moment, maybe. Or a posture. Or the space between deliveries when you were sure—absolutely sure—that the man on strike was not simply playing cricket, but revealing it.

Cricket is a strange game. Not strange in its rules (though those, too, have the fragrance of colonial bureaucracy), but strange in what it asks of the watcher. Time, patience, the ability to understand that silence is sometimes more charged than action. And in this slow game of deference and decorum, Richards arrived like a theorem, already proven.

He didn’t so much bat as resolve things. A messy, hostile world—crowds, bowlers, histories—reduced to angles, probabilities, and the familiar sound of leather on wood. But even that doesn’t quite capture it. What made Richards Richards wasn’t only the result of the shot—it was what the shot told you: that he had seen it. Before it happened. Before the ball had left the hand.

There’s footage, of course. There’s always footage. You can watch him stride out—bareheaded, gum rolling, bat held loosely like a brushstroke yet to be made. He doesn’t scratch his guard. He doesn’t fuss with pads or gloves. He’s already there. You know that feeling when a pianist hits the first note and you already trust them? That.

And what’s strange—what defies every learned instinct about sport—is how calm it all seems. Not slow. Just unhurried. As if the laws of physics, of motion, of reaction time, didn’t quite apply to him the same way. As if the ball slowed just enough, not for him to hit it, but for him to understand it.

How does that happen? How does a man read a short ball aimed at his ribs and turn it, in real time, into an act of grace? Not defiance. Not violence. Just certainty. Like a poem already memorised, just now recited.

Take the pull shot. The famous one. It’s not even a flourish. Just a slight rock back, a roll of the wrists, the bat coming through like it was made of wind. The ball disappears, of course. But it’s not the power that awes—it’s the inevitability. You don’t think “Wow.” You think, “Of course.”

But here’s the thing. Try it. Go outside. Find a wall. Toss yourself a tennis ball. Try hitting it on the full while it’s rising, aiming not for distance, but for elegance, precision, and the right kind of violence. Then imagine doing it with a red Kookaburra. Then imagine doing it with a man like Lillee steaming in, eyes narrowed, shoulders broad. Then imagine doing it without a helmet.

It’s not a game anymore. It’s something else. Something theological.

We talk about Richards as myth because there’s no better frame. He becomes a site of projection: the Anansi-blooded genius, the HaGolem guardian, the fire in the belly of the colonial game. And it fits, partly because he was all that. But partly because—like any true artist—he resists explanation. The more we try to measure him, the more we are measuring ourselves, and finding the instruments lacking.

He played in an era where the Caribbean team didn’t just win. They redefined. They weren’t the polite guests of empire anymore. They were the hosts now. And Richards? Richards was the one who didn’t ring the bell before entering. He didn’t need to. He already had the key.

What makes this harder to explain, even now, is that the game wasn’t built for players like him. It was designed to exclude by ritual. It rewarded circumspection, technique, proper footwork. It venerated the gentleman amateur with the right accent. And Richards arrived with forearms like old rope and an attitude that said: this is mine now.

He was not flawless. But his flaws—those moments of overreach, the refusal to dig in when all advice said “play safe”—were not failures. They were extensions of his style. He was not here to preserve. He was here to demonstrate.

What you felt watching Richards wasn’t admiration. It was recognition. That somewhere in the deep ledger of human ability, there exists this: to see clearly, act precisely, and remain oneself while doing it.

When we talk about greatness, we reach for statistics. Centuries, win ratios, partnerships. But numbers, like grammar, can’t describe music. They can tell you something happened, but not what it meant. Richards, standing unhelmeted, facing down legends, didn’t just change the score. He changed the language.

And like any great artist—Ali, Jordan, Federer—he makes you ask questions you can’t quite answer.

Was that instinct? Calculation? Magic?

And why do I feel, even now, just thinking about it, a kind of joy? samjhere@gmail.com