Character is, indeed, the psychological muscle that moral conduct requires. Its bedrock? Self-discipline, as Aristotle observed, not to speak of self-control. A related keynote of character is being able to motivate and guide oneself, whatever your occupation, including the ability to defer gratification, and control and channel one’s urges to act.
Les Ames’ cricket was related to character, its particular, and the familiar, derived from experience. In other words, cricketing excellence to Ames meant more than conviction, where art had nothing to do with philosophic wisdom.
An outstanding wicket-keeper/batsman of all time, Ames’ theme song was simple, and direct. “Taking on the bowlers,” he once said, “was my idea of cricket, not worrying about dropping a catch.”
As a ’keeper, Ames was peerless; and, as a batsman, there was no denying his class — a beautiful striker of the ball — a man who played further down the wicket than anyone else. As England’s legendary wicket-keeper, Godfrey Evans, eulogised, “He [Ames] used to go yards to get to the pitch of the ball. He’d love to play a low skimmer over cover-point, like a three-iron golf shot. I called him ‘twinkletoes,’ and I have never seen a major batsman play so far out of his crease.”
Ames made 102 centuries in first-class cricket — the only ’keeper-batsman to score a 100 hundreds in the sport. He was also one of just three batsmen to hit Harold ‘Bodyline’ Larwood for a six. He was a damn good player of pace and spin bowling alike.
Witness, Kingston Test, 1935. England lost the Test, but not her face, thanks to Ames’ courageous 126. On an extremely pacy wicket, Ames stood firm against some fearsome fast bowling of Sir Learie Constantine, Manny Martindale, and Leslie Hylton — the trio that laid the terra firma for a West Indian pace dynasty to emerge a la Darwin’s ‘Origin Of The [Fast] Species,’ the naturalist would have been proud of. Oops! We’re mixing up time frames. Darwin foresaw the possibility of Artificial Intelligence [AI], all right, not Caribbean pace bowlers’ assembly line.
Ames’ batting methodology was profound. In a career spanning 25 years, Ames scored over 37,000 runs, over 2,000 of them in 47 Tests — at an impressive average of 43.57 — the best-ever percentage, perforce, for a wicket-keeper/batsman, long before Adam Gilchrist etched his name on the sands of time.
As a wicket-keeper, his career-record of 418 stumpings was fabulous. Think of it: the Kent scorebook shows 259 occasions of: ‘stumped Ames bowled…’ Would you believe it — that Ames became a wicket-keeper by accident? Maybe, you will… if you know that Ames was a fabulous soccer player too. Small wonder why he often stood up to the wicket, and displayed the mercurial, silver-footed skills of both the winger and swashbuckling batsman.
Pity, he did not see the dawn of instant cricket. Had one-day cricket existed in his time, Ames would have surely excelled — a run-chase was what he relished most, like a kid colliding their bumper car, with another, in Disneyland, or Mumbai’s EsselWorld.
This was his greatness.
— First published in Observer
