C. L. R. James wrote that, in the West Indies, test cricket players were “not a personage remote, to be read about in papers and worshiped from afar. They were all over the place, ready to play in any match, ready to talk.” This was true of even the best cricket player to ever live, Sir Garfield Sobers.

In one of my earliest, foggy childhood memories, I was with my father in Bridgetown, Barbados. He took me to meet the great “Sir Gary” outside a horse racing pool, the site of one of Sobers’s favorite postcareer hobbies. In a vague way, I already knew something of the magnitude of the man I was about to meet. He was closely associated in my mind with the nation of Barbados as a whole, and my father had likely forced me to watch old VHS tapes of him playing that I neither appreciated nor understood at the time.

Sobers strolled out of the racing pool, grinned, and shook my hand. Even then, I was struck by how casually public he was and how others interacted with him with a minimum of fuss. Soon I would become cricket-crazy and fully appreciate who I had met, devouring any video of him in action that I could get my hands on. Before the advent of YouTube, this involved hunting around on obscure websites based in the UK and Australia for video tapes and DVDs.