multi-storied #33: On (cricketing) beauty

A good long while ago, I was a guest on a very fine cricket podcast called 81 All Out, and in the fullness of the conversation, I articulated something that I hadn’t myself fully registered as an idea to explore until that moment. Speaking about my teenaged introduction to cricket, I referred to a particular friend who drew me into its nuances, and who introduced me to the notion of beautiful batting. On the podcast, I remembered my marvel that so many people in cricket seemed to share a common idea of batting beauty. Where had that consensus even come from, and why?

A pandemic-and-a-bit later, after the idea had marinated, I ended up writing about this for the Financial Times Magazine last month, just as the English season got under way. Here it is. An introductory excerpt is below. (The whole piece is free to read online…I think. If not, you know whom to ask.)

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UNTIL 1995, the year my family moved back to India and I joined a new school there, I’d watched very little cricket. So a classroom full of teenage boys felt to me like an abbey to a novitiate. Everyone knew all the scripture; everyone already existed in a higher plane of bliss and enlightenment. Fortunately, a new friend saved my soul. Under Ravi’s wing, I soaked up the basics — once he drew an oval on a piece of paper and quizzed me on fielding positions — but also his particular predilections. Which was how I learnt that he maintained, in his head, two lists of batsmen to love: the empirically best ones, of course, the ones who made heaps of runs or who made their runs fast, but also, less obviously, those who made their runs most beautifully.

In the latter camp were several inconsistent players who wilted under pressure or produced mostly modest scores. The Sri Lankan Marvan Atapattu managed five 0s and a 1 in his first six innings, as if he was batting in binary code. He got better, but it almost didn’t matter. Ravi loved him all the same.

As I grew consumed by cricket, I found that Ravi wasn’t alone. Anyone who talked about the game, or wrote about it, treasured some batsmen for their beauty. On broadcasts, a commentator would often let out a soft “Oh!”, or fall momentarily silent, when one such batsman coaxed the ball to the straight boundary. I felt the urge too, as if I’d mislaid my breath. Even a defensive shot, drawing the sting out of the ball and dropping it dead on the ground, was described as beautiful. There were plenty of euphemistic adjectives for these batsmen: “elegant” was one, “effortless” another. Here’s the crux, though: it was almost always the same batsmen, as if selected through some unspoken consensus. And even without explanation, I found that I intuitively discerned this beauty. I understood in my gut why one made the cut and the other didn’t.

The Australian twins Mark and Steve Waugh were the canonical example of my boyhood, separated by four minutes at birth but by an aesthetic gulf otherwise, because Mark was universally held to be the stylish one. Not once did anyone argue the opposite. When I first watched them, during the 1996 World Cup, I seemed to see it right away. They batted together for a while in the quarter-final, and where Steve trod heavily, nudging or flaying the ball, Mark was feline, his paws landing surely, his weight balanced, his strokes easy but true. Once, after he reached his century, he refined the position of his feet by the merest inch and sent a ball to the boundary; it took more energy for me to gasp than it did for him to play that shot.

Other beautiful batsmen were unexpected. Inzamam-ul-Haq, from Pakistan, wobbled and shambled as he walked, but at the crease he transformed into a light, nimble man. Sometimes beauty went against the run of play: beauty in a despairing cause, beauty cut short swiftly, beauty as an alternate reality to the business of winning and losing.

I cannot think of another sport that prizes beauty so highly. In cricket, everything is aesthetics, down to the white uniforms and the red ball on a field of utmost green. CLR James, the archdruid of cricket writers, wanted to include images of Greek statues in his book Beyond a Boundary, to draw comparisons with the harmony and balance of the cricketers he admired. There is beauty in how a spinner drifts a ball through the air, and in how the cordon of fielders advances and retreats together after every delivery, in a rhythm that is almost respiratory.

Batting, though, is singular in its evocation of beauty, and even the unbeautiful players know it. Mike Brearley, the former England captain, told me about a batting partner of his at Middlesex named Mike Smith, a very good county player but one with “an off-putting technique”, in which he shifted clumsily into his position to play the ball. Once, when Brearley commiserated with him about not being picked for a team, Smith shrugged. If you’re a selector and you aren’t sure which of two equally good batsmen to pick, he told Brearley, you should pick the more beautiful player. Beauty, he implied, is cricket at its best.

Through decades of following the game, I never came across any codifications of this beauty, any convincing scheme to define it in real terms. Perhaps dissecting beauty is like pulling apart a butterfly’s wings to see how they function — an exercise that kills the thing it loves. Too often, elucidations of the abstract notion of beauty end up demystifying it. We’re told beauty is subjective, that it boils down to the neurons, chemicals and proclivities behind the beholder’s eye. Or that it is a social construct, varying between societies or over time.

But all this just makes beautiful batting too delicious to ignore. Here we have a constant, rare, cross-cultural unanimity, which at least raises the old-fashioned thought that beauty is an inherent quality, existing in the world just waiting to be recognised. Somewhere in this investigation, I figure, there must be a greater truth about cricket, or about how the human body moves, or about how we see the world outside our heads.

IN cricket, you encounter beauty early. “I think when you first start playing cricket with the under-10s, you’re aware of the people who look good,” Steve Waugh told me. “They’re the ones you want to watch in the nets. They’re relaxed and loose, and it all seems to come easy to them.” Steve is an all-time great, the player you’d choose to bat for your life or to come good on any kind of wicket, thanks to his technique and his bloody-mindedness. “It was funny, later on, when Mark would be described as the really talented one, when it was the opposite,” he said. “When we were young, I probably had more natural talent.”

There was something about Mark Waugh, though...