Beautiful mind, tortured soul

When a star dies, it hurts. When a personal hero falls from grace, it's bloody disturbing. Peter Roebuck was both.

Mohali has been my happy hunting ground. In my debut Test, as a cricket correspondent for the TOI, I had pulled off an exclusive — a Sachin Tendulkar interview. What held far greater joy was the opportunity to watch the maestro bat for over 30 minutes from a distance of barely four feet. It was a complete education on batting but that’s another story for another day.

Last year, Mohali was benign again. There I met Peter Roebuck — one of the most compelling cricket voices of our time. A pack of Aussie cricket writers had amid them a tall guy with an unusually athletic built and a fashionable straw hat — Roebuck stood out like a dove among the pigeons. If he was aware, he didn’t acknowledge it. The subtleties of the game held far greater fascination for him.

Having lived in Australia for over two decades and chronicled their domination with a rare felicity and flair, no one could have offered me a better insight on Australian cricket — a topic my editor at Sports Illustrated had asked me to explore. What followed a polite request was 40 minutes of social and historical commentary on how and why the Aussies approach the game the way they do. Though he was hurting to see the decline, he hadn’t allowed any discontent or contempt to colour his writings. “It’s a fairly old team with players’ average age of 27-28 years. The team has only one great player in Ponting, who at the moment is struggling with his form,” was how Roebuck had analyzed Ponting’s aging team. The words proved prophetic a couple of days later. Australia almost willed, rather the lack of it, an embarrassing defeat from a position of convincing victory. Their bete noir VVS Laxman produced yet another magical knock of 73 not out and Ishant Sharma showed extraordinary defiance (31) to script India’s one of the finest Test victories.

Admiring men outside sporting arena is not quite one of my pursuits. However, watching Roebuck in the Press box was almost like seeing an artist at work. He had a bubble around him, a wall of vacuum that kept him untouched by the vagaries of the Press box. Those green-gray glassy eyes were transfixed on his subject. Whatever transpired on the ground made immediate organic changes in that beautiful mind. It carefully weighed each word, savoured its gentle flow and the way it arranged itself, before those long fingers glided on the keyboard. The pace and rhythm resembled a gently flowing stream. The result was often pure magic.

For a writer of such glorious proportions, it’s tragic his innings was cut short in a manner so violent. A dove coming under a road-roller shows it had strayed. Some great innings do have ordinary ending. Some transcend its ordinariness. Roebuck’s surely will.