Carl's mighty

promise
And the mightier disappointment
BC PIRES
NOVEMBER 2016

T he 1990s, the Queen's Park Oval, West Indies

playing - India, if memory serves, but mine is
more likely to spit in my soup - and Carl
Hooper slid down the wicket, like a cobra on cocaine, to
lift some poor sap - Anil Kumble? - back over, first his
head, then long-off's, then ours in the press box, which
fell silent, everyone listening for the ball crashing onto
the roof, except we did not hear it: either it was caught
unseen on the top tier of the then Republic Bank Youth
Stand or the ball cleared the peaked media building
roof, sailed across St Clair Avenue and landed unheard
in the grass of then King George V (now Nelson
Mandela) Park.

It might have been the stroke that inspired the young

Kieron Pollard, today's hardest hitter, whom I like to
imagine sitting that day, open-mouthed, in the
Schoolboy's Stand; but however far anyone hits the
ball, no one, then or since, could match Carl's careless,
flowing grace in that accelerated, unpredictable glide
down the wicket. Australian spin legend Shane Warne
even when he too was hit clear out of the ballpark,
publicly admired the athletic elegance of the man his
captain Steve Waugh included in his 100 Best Cricketers
list.
The Oval crowd, which back then knew a bit more about
cricket and a bit less about how to get on TV by wearing
embarrassing outfits, went crazy. Slowly the cheering
subsided and Hooper tapped his bat. The person sitting
next to me (Tony Cozier? Christopher Martin-Jenkins?
Peter Roebuck? I can't ask those three now) leaned
towards me and asked, "Do you know how you can tell
Carl Hooper is going to be out next ball? He looks to be
in astonishing form."

It wasn't the next ball, but it wasn't that much longer

before Hooper, who on that form ought to have made a
double-century, was slouching back to the pavilion -
and even then with the unconsidered grace of the
ballerina turning heads in the supermarket - out for
one of the many unmemorable scores that lowered his
Test average from over 50 to the mid-30s.

None of the modern West Indies players who

habitually throw away their wickets, even
Marlon Samuels, can hold a candle to Carl
when it comes to letting us down

There was never a cricketer who looked as good as

Hooper. Next to him, Jacques Kallis, the only other man
to have scored 5000 runs, taken 100 wickets, held 100
catches and collected 100 caps in both Tests and ODIs,
seems an oaf. In the slips or covers, players like Jonty
Rhodes, Gus Logie and AB de Villiers may have
approached Carl Hooper at his best - and all three
would probably admit that Hooper looked better; but
those men, and most others, with only a fraction of his
ability, consistently did better.
This was an athlete with a physique so fine, they
wouldn't have to Photoshop his image for the Carl
Hooper video game: broad shoulders, prominent chest,
ridiculously narrow waist, a six-pack before the term
was popular, long, strong limbs rippling with muscle,
and all of it wrapped in an elegance more befitting of a
gymnast, if not a ballet dancer. Indeed, you have to
leave humankind altogether to find his natural physical
comparisons: a barracuda slicing through the water; a
cheetah racing so fast it seems not to be moving at all -
or even the jeté-jumping gazelle it chases. Carl Hooper
could get out caught off a thick top edge more stylishly
than most batsmen could late-cut between the slip and
the wicketkeeper.

And he did. Often. Get out stylishly.

It was as enraging to tally his score as it was enthralling

to watch him bat, however long or short his innings
might be; and it was usually not just too short, which
you might forgive, but shorter than it ought to have
been, which you could not forget. Just watching him
walk towards the wicket, swinging his bat like a baton,
you could hear, in your mind's ear, the string section
being tuned for a symphony - which was almost always
not just left unfinished but ended before its own
overture!
All too many Hooper innings were shorter than they ought to have been Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images

After his first few appearances at the Oval, as he walked

to the middle, you would hear, from the then-
knowledgeable crowd, what sounded at first like an
affectionate contraction of his surname - "Hoops" -
until you realised people were dismissively predicting
the usual, unnecessary, entirely avoidable way he
would soon get himself out: Oops!

But there were and are many West Indian cricketers

who I could theoretically hate to love ahead of Carl. The
great Viv Richards, e.g., who could have grounded a
criminal charge of chewing gum with intent, seemed
not to notice that Brian Lara could carry his bat as
easily as he could towels and water bottles.

None of the modern West Indies players who habitually

throw away their wickets, even Marlon Samuels, the
closest I've seen to Hooper in unrealised potential, can
hold a candle to Carl when it comes to letting us down.
Because no one I've ever seen was potentially as good
as Carl Hooper. Not Viv, not the legendary Sir Garry, not
the otherworldly Kanhai, who caused a generation of
West Indian sons to be named Rohan and handed a
cricket bat in the crib. Not even Lara, who took back the
record from Matthew Hayden just to prove that he
could, or Mikey Holding or Malcolm Marshall or Curtly
Ambrose or Courtney Walsh, all of whom could take ten
wickets for fewer runs when needed most.

Carl Hooper was beauty and grace personified. In most

of the cricket world, that beauty would have been
nurtured, that grace finessed, that explosive potential
developed carefully, so as not to set it off prematurely
and waste it. In the West Indies, though, our interest is
in denying potential, in stifling possibility, not in
shaping it. You couldn't run successful slave societies
for 300 years without acquiring the knack, and the
habit has stuck.

Every time Carl Hooper walked to the wicket,

he filled me with the hope that makes all
West Indians go on, even as our little
economies grind to a halt

Every time Carl Hooper walked to the wicket, he filled

me with the hope that makes all West Indians go on,
even as our little economies grind to a halt. Because I
could see in Carl his beauty, because he had shown it
to me himself, so often, over so many games, in a
century in his second Test, in yet another impossible
catch in the covers, in awe-inspiring sixes; in his grace, I
saw our own hope.

And, too many times, the glory that should have been
his slipped away from him because he lacked the
concentration, or the professionalism, or whatever it is
he had to lack that day to be sure he would not do as
well as he ought to.

He would be shot down before he could soar. And

usually it was he who'd pulled the trigger.

You could line up all our greats and none of them

would be as great a disappointment to me as Carl
Hooper - because Carl was the most West Indian of
them all. Carl Hooper is me; if I ever stopped loving
him, I'd have to hate him.