On a West Indian evening in 1989, a seaside encounter with a gum-chewing god. My friend Mudar Patherya, the former cricket writer, is batting on a beach in Antigua when he turns around. Standing in the slips is Sir Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards.
Viv, then, is the West Indies' captain, a 37-year-old virtuoso of the batting arts, but greatness hasn't dimmed the simpler joys he finds from sport. Cricket isn't only a manicured pitch in a grand stadium, it's a strip of sand with a visiting journalist as foe.
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