I spy Jesse Ryder. I could hardly fail to. He’s a big boy.
When Ryder was picked for New Zealand, Adam Parore scoffed. ‘You’ve only got to look at him,’ he said. ‘He’s too fat.’
Wrong, Mr Parore, wrong. You don’t have to look at him. You have to watch him play. And to anyone who knows cricket, it is obvious that Jesse Ryder has got the greatest gift that any sportsman can have. It is unfakable. It is beautiful. We know it as time. Ryder’s got time.
Since the series against India in which Ryder took a few useful wickets, hung on to some fabulous catches and averaged 90 odd with the bat, we’ve heard rather less from Mr Parore. But he was voicing the spirit of our age.
For this we have to thank the army of busybodies who ostensibly concern themselves with other people’s health. They are the modern puritans, worried, as H.L. Mencken once observed, that someone else may be having more fun than they are. They want to outlaw butter, they squeal about an obesity epidemic, as if obesity were somehow contagious, and they urge us to see fat as a sin.
Such people don’t actually care about the health of others. They care about control. They want to make rules. They want the world to conform to their will. They would have made splendid lieutenants in the SS. They are bullies and they are wrong. Ryder proves them wrong.
In the remote sixties, when I was a kid and fat was just fat, a man called Colin Milburn was picked for England. He was shorter and fatter than Jesse Ryder. And in his first test match he played an innings of 80 odd that thrilled the country. I don’t remember whether it was against a frightening Australian attack or a terrifying West Indian one, but I do remember that he walloped them into the fence and over it. Forty something years later I retain a mental picture of him hooking. Five years after Parore retired I can’t remember a single shot he played.
Milburn played only a handful of tests. A car crash robbed him of an eye and though he tried to make a comeback he was never the same. But he will live in memory as the guy who did a beautiful thing.
I’ve played cricket with numerous fat people. Some have played poorly, others well. Some have been gloomy, others hilarious. None of these qualities had anything to do with their being fat.
As a young club cricketer I used to love to bat with Ian Thirkell, a man known universally as Magic. It was only many years later that I got the joke in the nickname. At the time I thought it had something to do with the way he batted. For though he wore size 48 flannels he batted like Twinkletoes. He shared with Jesse Ryder the ability to make the game look simple. And when I was standing twenty two yards away and watching him treat good bowling with disdain, I felt not envy but delight. What he did was beautiful to watch. And it was especially beautiful emerging from such an unlikely frame.
And so it is with Ryder. There is an aesthetic joy in watching him play. Which is why, I suspect, and all unconsciously, New Zealand has fallen in love with him. As they never did with the slim and vain and shallow Adam Parore.