Adieu, Martin Crowe

The New Zealand batting great Martin Crowe has been taken from our midst by a recurrence of double follicular lymphoma. Besides being an orthodox batsman of the highest calibre who was exceedingly easy on the eye of the purist when at the crease, he was also a fine thinker on the game. Martin, a cousin of the Oscar-winning Russell Crowe and brother of New Zealand cricket captain Jeff Crowe, was an exemplar in handling the last years of his life after being diagnosed with cancer.

He did not dissolve in self-pity; on the contrary, he bore his grave illness with great courage. “It’s a fine line mentally, do I judge my life as a joy or as sitting in death row?” he wrote to an Indian cricket scribe even as he organised his own palliative care after realising chemotherapy was not going to help him survive. Some of his writing on the game was sharpest after he fell ill, as if to prove the dictum that nothing focuses the mind more than impending death.

On the field, Martin proved an astute tactician, thinking ahead of his time in limited-overs cricket in which he visualised in the ’90s a format called Max Cricket which had shades of T20. And yet Martin was much misunderstood in his homeland, which saw selfishness and a streak of individuality in his pursuit of sporting excellence. While his colleagues had been accused of racism, Martin proved a liberal, his international experiences lending him a larger perspective. In a short life he achieved prominence while hailing from a land far from everywhere.