Intellectual Original

Jul 20, 2026 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Garfield St. Aubrun Sobers, “the incomparable”, the last of a quintet at the top of the West Indies Test Match batting averages, was an intellectual original of the highest order.

When I refer to the Sobers intellectual position within the Caribbean, I have to ponder the presence of notables such as Fidel Castro Ruz, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Ernesto Guevara, Ibrahim/Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney. If the firmament of their calling was made up of “little people”, they acquitted themselves rather well. His passing came at a time when the SPIRIT of cricket he so dearly loved and hoped would endure was – according to his great admirer, the inimitable E.W. Swanton – in mortal danger chiefly because commercialism was running rampantly. July, 2026 is a time when West Indies Test Match cricket to which he dedicated himself so unselfishly was firmly in the grip of such commercialism.

It is a time, also, when this very commercialism – in its most robust forms – saturated “the beautiful game” on far more than fields of play. None of these developments would have found favour with the notables I name. Nor would they with the great Charles Wright Mills, that American scholar with his “sociological imagination” he used so brilliantly in his ground-breaking publication, “Listen Yankee” as a celebration of the Cuban revolution.

Charles Wright Mills was the organic intellectual possessed of a burning desire to use his creative imagination, for “taking it big.” He left a massive legacy constitutive of major challenges to his successors. Of them nothing less than “taking it big” was demanded. Do not take my word here. For Dr. Dan Wakefield, former student at Columbia and, later intellectual colleague, who wrote the introduction to the (2000) book publication, “C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings,” his friend and teacher is not a figure who spoke to, and for his own era, but someone whose message and work resonate, also, in future times. Possessed of a vibrancy and lasting value, the sociology of creative imagination, adds Wakefield, emerged from the reality that in the role of inveterate teacher Mills told students, not merely how things were but, also, how they might be and the manner in which all students could improve those things.

Like Mills who cared very deeply about what he termed “little circles of people”, Sobers extolled the virtues of little people. Like Mills, who railed against those he deemed technological idiots, crackpot realists, and cheerful robots beholden to rampant commercialism in transnational capitalism, Garfield St. Aubrun Sobers had no time for them in Test Match cricket. Like Sobers who dedicated himself to the craft of cricket and spurned pedagogy with that coaching drayage straight out of the ‘recipe” manuals, Mills dedicated himself to the craft of sociology. Like Sobers who had no time for grand theorising from those manuals, Mills rejected what he assessed as abstracted empiricism and grand theory in sociology. Here, it is not out of place for me to note the Sobers wisdom at the time when there were more than whispers across the Caribbean Sea about his leadership acumen.

I’ll talk and debate cricket with anyone whose knowledge I respect or who has an inquiring interest, but I’ve no time for ‘camp followers’ and people who are destructive without any real understanding of the game.

In my very last conversation with him at a time when West Indies cricket had sunk to some of its lowest depths, I asked him for his thoughts about Test Match captaincy within the stagnating region. He rendered a reply about which C. Wright Mills would have been enormously proud.

I see persons getting together and making suggestions or looking at cricket in a broader sense, so that when the idea of captaincy comes up you should look at the way the man is conducting himself… You’re not looking for the old school tie. You’re not looking for the university boy. You’re trying to gain from a broad cross section of people who follow the game – to get their ideas – form some kind of organisation or committee in which you can get together and look at your future captains and sit down and discuss it. These are the people who are knowledgeable, people who have studied the game, people who are well educated… and some ordinary people, too, because some of them have some very, very, good points. Some of the suggestions you get from little people off the street are so factual that you can use them. I think that’s the only way and I don’t know if that’s the right answer. That is my suggestion in my own little way – how I see it can work – that a West Indies captain should not only just be selected by a Board but other people from outside should be allowed to give their views.

This is taking it as big as it can be within and outside Test Match cricket – no cheerful robots in camp followers. No crackpot realists in technologically idiotic old school ties and university boyishness. Just the little people, the Gary Sobers people. Is such not quite the refreshing respite!

If the appropriate reply here is an affirmative one, is another important aspect of taking it big to be found through accepting a challenge which can be identified in words from C.L.R. James:

Garfield Sobers…   is a West Indian cricketer, not merely a cricketer from the West Indies. He is the most typical West Indies cricketer that it is possible to imagine…   the fine fruit of a great tradition.

To James, Sobers is the result of a consummation that embodies the whole history of the West Indies.

Regards,

William Walcott,

Ontario, Canada

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