Happy birthday Chris Gayle - You chose happiness over being the best

Gayle’s persona

“Shower. Dinner. Rum. Party. Drunk. Sleep.”

Each and every individual in this world has a goal of her/his own. Some people strive for perfection, to be the best in their field. While the others just want to enjoy life for what it is.

Let’s say, for example, Cristiano Ronaldo. He has a strict diet, never drinks, sleeps and wakes up early and trains with diligence. He rarely ever takes a day off for his obsession to be the best doesn’t allow him to do so.

And then there was George Best. His love for women and alcohol was so much that he considered the money he spent on things apart from them as “squandered.” There are many eulogies about him that end with the eerie feeling of, “oh, what could have been…” - something which we will never be able to answer.

When we look around in the cricket fraternity, the man who resonates the character of the former Ballon d’Or winner is Chris Gayle. His theory of life is simple: he wants to have fun and involve others in the process. The amount of times he has been pictured partying before a high-pressure game outweighs the number of acts of stupidity that Joey Barton has done in his life.

The quote in the first line is how Gayle describes his life. Being the best never mattered to him, although he had all the tools to end up as one of the top 5 batsmen to play the game.

It is not as if he spends all the money on himself as he has been an ambassador for countless charity drives and it is his coming of age in a humble surrounding that has made him the person that he is today.

Along with Sir Donald Bradman, Brian Charles Lara and Virender Sehwag, he is one of the only four players to score 2 triple hundreds in Tests. With 7214 and 9221 runs at an average of 42.18 and 37.33 in Tests and ODI, respectively, he has earned the reputation of being a fantastic player even with half as effort as many.

It is in the T20s, however, that his status as a legend has been immortalized.

In 218 T20 innings, he has scored a mammoth 8224 runs with an unbelievable average of 44.21 and an inhuman strike-rate of 149.25.

These are stats that just goes to prove the raw talent that he possesses. He himself once acknowledged this claiming that he grew up in a surrounding that adored cricket and that his grandfather was a cricketer himself.

Consistency was never Gayle’s strongest point, but not one player could better him on his day. When he made his ODI debut in 1999, many predicted that he would go on to become the first person to score a double hundred in the format. He might not have been the first person, but he did make those predictions true when he smashed a groundbreaking 215 against Zimbabwe. That inning was a display merciless brutality on a cricket ball.

Only goodness knows how many records he would have shattered had he lived a life of sobriety and reservation instead of flamboyance. But perhaps it is this grandiosity that makes him the ruthless batsman that he is today.

A tour around his home would reveal his love for an all-guns-blazing lifestyle. He carved out a personal strip club in his home and went on to describe it, “if you don’t have a strip club at you home, you ain’t a cricket ‘player’… I always make sure my guests [are] well entertained and feel like they are at home.”