by Abhishek Mukherjee
WG Grace was born on 18 July 1848. Growing up, I had a vague idea who he was. To me, he used to be an overweight bully who bullied teammates and umpires more than he played cricket.
By the age of six I had read in a general knowledge book that Bradman was the greatest cricketer to have lived, but it not explain why. Such was the usual Indian approach towards cricket history in the 1980s.
"They have come to watch me bat, not you umpire" was one of these. A favourite was snubbing the batsman who had bragged of never having scored a duck. There were more, many more.
But I had never been told how great, how colossal a cricketer WG was. Even when I had internet access, my initial reaction was "Test average 32, First-Class average 39, what's the big deal? Typical British media hype."
But at the end of the I should hold myself responsible, for it was nobody else's fault that I had been looking in the wrong places.
How great was WG? Between 1869 and 1877, he was the leading run-scorer of the summer every time. Barring 1875, he topped the averages for every season as well. And in six of these seasons he averaged at least 40% more than anyone else.
Grace also scored the most hundreds every time (joint most on two occasions). In 1871 he scored 10 hundreds. Nobody else got even two.
Between 1869 and 1877 he also scored most fifties every time (he shared it twice). In 1871 he got 19 when nobody else got seven.
But despite his glory year of 1871, his most famous phase came in 1876, when he scored 839 in eight days, including the first two First-Class triple-hundreds in history. He later scored a third, in 1896.
Over these eight days he also took 15 wickets and travelled way more than 370 km (Canterbury to Clifton to Cheltenham), which is the current total distance on Google Maps.
He was the first to score a thousand runs by May in an English summer. His season had started on May 9, the latest after anyone else's on the list.
He was also the first to score a hundred FIrst-Class hundreds. After all these years his 124 hundreds are still the 11th-most.
Remember, he did all that while bowling a lot. In fact, his 2,809 runs are the tenth-most in history, his 240 5WIs the seventh, his 64 10WMs the eighth. He was the first to take 10 wickets in an innings twice.
Grace also has the second-most catches. He had 54,211 runs and 2,809 wickets. Let alone 50,000-2,000, nobody else has even the 40,000-1,000 double.
Grace did not play a lot of Test cricket, but he was still the fifth-highest run-getter of the 19th century. Remember, he turned forty in 1888.
Grace played Test cricket till he was almost 51, more than five years older than any other Test captain. In his last Test he bowled 22 overs. Then he tricked the selection committee into dropping him for good.
Grace was also one of the most-travelled cricketers if you consider only land travel. Remember, travel was almost always by train that were nowhere as fast as today's. And after the train, the last leg was often on non-motorised transport.
But more than anything, Grace revolutionised batting. Till Grace came along, batsmen could usually be classified into front-foot and back-foot batsmen. Mastering both was rare, almost unheard of.
Grace did that, added to that a near-maniac appetite for runs (and quick runs!), elevating batting to a level cricket has never seen before.
Till Bradman came along, nobody else had dominated cricket to this extent for two decades. And left a legacy that lasted long enough to feature in a Monty Python movie sixty years after his death.
And he Duracelled on and on and on, from 1865 to 1908, outlasting the careers of both his sons, CB (1900 to 1906) and WG Jr (1893 to 1903).
WG Grace loved money, and he was unapologetically ruthless about it. Make no mistake: he fleeced organisers, forced them to pay for his honeymoon, and more.
But he would also use his influence to find jobs for the unemployed. Or show up with food or coal at the doorsteps of whoever needed them.
Indeed, such was his impact that a letter from him to The Sportsman convinced the MCC to put an end to the farce of the 1914 County Championship when the Great War broke out.
Never another like WG. Never ever.