India has fallen in love with cricketers from other countries before — Shane Warne, Brian Lara, Wasim Akram, Brett Lee. But never has anyone become such a big part of our pop culture as Chris Henry Gayle.

Chris Gayle is late. Fifty-plus guests, including former West Indies greats Joel Garner and Desmond Haynes, and the entire current West Indies Test side, have arrived at billionaire Ajmal Khan’s Barbados beach house for the launch party of the Caribbean Premier League — which will be funded by Khan — and everyone is waiting to take a photo of the West Indies Test team that beat Zimbabwe at the Kensington Oval two days before. The public-relations team for the tournament is now growing restless. The young West Indian players have already had a few glasses of champagne, which is going to make getting them to pose for a team shot a task, and popular soca singer Alison Hinds is scheduled to perform on the stage set up in Khan’s lawn.

Gayle has spent the morning taking photographs of the beach from his hotel room. The bikinis have been “stacking up” as the day progresses. He’s spent the rest of the day celebrating a Manchester United victory. I know this because I follow Gayle on Twitter, on which he succinctly updates the world on his daily machinations. “Me hungry.” “Boss on the go.” “Nandos!!!” Thanks Chris, that’s already more than any journalist has ever got out of Munaf Patel. When Gayle gets to Khan’s house, in a glittery T-shirt and jeans, he seems unperturbed by the fact that he has kept everyone waiting. He pulls a funny face during the team photograph and gets everyone to laugh.

Team photographs and Gayle have a history. In South Australia, a female reporter once requested that he put his legs together for a shot. He told her, “I’d love to, but I can’t.” I try, at various intervals during the evening, to have a quick chat with Gayle, but invariably lose him among the many guests who are eager for his attention. Once he has extricated himself from the mob and has sat down in a quiet corner, he finds that his girlfriend, Natasha Berridge, has been spending the time fixing her attention solely on the bar, and is a little worse for wear. Gayle spends the rest of the night as a responsible, caring boyfriend.

Gayle’s relationship with West Indies cricket has been strained, particularly in the last two years, and a degree of tension is evident at a party intended to celebrate Caribbean cricket. It is West Indies coach Ottis Gibson’s birthday, and Gayle, who once referred to Gibson as a “user”, is one of the few that doesn’t gather around Gibson during the cutting of the cake. When he sees Garner, who Gayle believes was one of the people in the West Indies Cricket Board who orchestrated his removal from the captaincy, Gayle restricts himself to a polite handshake with the legendary fast bowler. As the night progresses, Gayle begins to loosen up. He gives in to Dwayne Bravo’s repeated screaming of “Chris Gayle, Chris Gayle, Chris Gayle” from the stage, and joins his mate in a dancehall track, though Gayle’s contribution is restricted to a series of high-pitched yelps. Through the night, one thing remains consistent about Gayle’s behaviour: he exudes swagger.

The beginning of the 2011 IPL felt surreal. Indian cricket had enjoyed its finest moment in more than two decades, and days later we were expected to get excited about a tournament that pitted members of the World Cup winning team against each other. It felt a little like someone insisting you experiment with a coriander-flavoured beer the morning after a glorious bender. If you were working at the busiest sports-news desk in the country, it all felt like a cruel joke. Highlights of the first couple of weeks included a headline that managed to compare Paul Valthaty to Julius Caesar and Shane Warne looking as if his face had been taken apart and then stitched back together by mischievous pixies. Then, one morning, I entered the office, and everything had changed. Chris Gayle had arrived, late, and announced himself with a blazing century for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Kolkata Knight Riders.

Since then, Gayle has scored a staggering eight more centuries in Twenty20 matches. That’s as many as anyone has scored in Test cricket in the same period. He’s led the run charts in each of the past two editions of the IPL, helped RCB reach consecutive finals of the tournament, finished second on the list of run-getters in the 2011 Champions League, helped West Indies win the World Twenty20 in 2012, and also lit up the Big Bash League in Australia, the Bangladesh Premier League and even the Stanbic Bank 20 Series in Zimbabwe. In Barbados, I found myself surrounded by journalists who were new to cricket. The only bit of information they had was that Gayle was the No. 1 Twenty20 batsman in the world. I contemplated, for a brief moment, explaining that we didn’t really have a ranking system for that sort of thing in cricket. I decided to shut up. Of course he’s number one.

These days, when I tell young kids that I often meet cricketers, they don’t ask for Sachin Tendulkar’s autograph, or for a picture of Rahul Dravid; they ask me, “How huge is Chris Gayle up close?” When a picture of Gayle lounging on a balcony in a beanie cup is posted on his Facebook fan page, comments of “big up” and “cool” are interspersed with “bindaas boss” and “mast lag raha hai”. The man endorses Kannada movies, and inspires caricature competitions and figurines. In Bangladesh, fans wait in the hotel lobby to meet Gayle. In Australia, kids wear trademark Gayle goggles in the stands. Gayle is, in a sense, cricket’s first global superstar, not just admired in several different countries, but actually loved as one of their own by the people of each of the cities he represents.

What makes Gayle’s immense popularity in the subcontinent particularly interesting is how far out of the standard mould of quiet, well-behaved, diplomatic, insipid sports star we are used to in this part of the world. When talking about Gayle’s unique persona, cricket journalists like to retell a tale about when Gayle was at a tour match in Arundel, in England. The story goes that Gayle was sitting next to former MCC president and old Etonian John Barclay. Barclay was speaking about his first-class career and telling stories of how beautiful the Caribbean was when he visited it as captain of England’s Young Cricketers team. After Barclay was done with his eloquent reminiscing, Gayle looked at him and asked, “You get much pussy?”

That is the kind of story that makes Chris Gayle not just a batting phenomenon but a complete novelty in the cricketing world. The man’s Twitter profile says, “World Boss/ Chris Lion”; he celebrates by doing the Gangnam-style dance on the field; he dances to Bollywood music at IPL parties; he’s started a record label with his brother Vanclive ‘Father Bulla’ Paris, because “as a sportsman I am always in the streets and I love the music. Also, mi just wanna support Bulla thing”; he tweets the news that the West Indies bus is being stoned by fans in Mirpur after the team thrashed Bangladesh in a World Cup group game, and follows it with the exclamation, “Kiss teeth!”; he flirts with the RCB cheerleaders on Sidhartha Mallya’s chat show.

Gayle personifies this new age of razzmatazz cricket. Keep in mind, he has been around since 1999, and had two Test triple-centuries to his name before his defining IPL season with RCB. But if you ask anyone now, they will always associate Gayle with the shortest format of the game. The man himself has shown a lackadaisical attitude to Tests. In 2009, he showed up for West Indies’ Lord’s Test just two days before the match. And he has said, unreservedly, that he wouldn’t mind if Test cricket died. That amounts to blasphemy for any cricket puritan, but for Gayle’s young fans it is a cry of rebellion against the fuddy-duddies who turn their noses up at the new form of the game.

Gayle’s stardom is also an indicator of what the new-age cricket fan wants from a hero. We get to live vicariously through Gayle, imagining what the three British women found in his hotel room in Sri Lanka were doing there, wishing we could pull off wearing a sailor’s hat to an IPL after-party. It is almost as if we picture Gayle’s performances on the field as an extension of the one big party that his life seems to be. When I ask a senior sports journalist in Bangladesh about Gayle’s time in the BPL, he says, “Gayle says he really likes playing in Mirpur, though I’m not sure what he does in a city without any nightclubs.”

Perhaps it helps that he is a foreigner in most of the countries he plays in. We can enjoy his antics guiltlessly, without labelling him a “loose cannon” or “bad boy”. Ask West Indians about Gayle, for example, and you won’t find such unanimous adulation.

At the height of the spat between Gayle and the West Indies Cricket Board, one of the directors of the board, Hilary Beckles, said, “Frank Worrell is the father of the nation, Sobers is the king of cricket, Clive Lloyd is the statesman, Richards is the general of the army, Brian Lara is the Prince, and Chris Gayle is the don.” Beckles made the statement with malice, and went on to seriously offend Gayle by saying that West Indian cricket was trying to uproot the donmanship that had beset it in the same way that the Jamaican people were trying to uproot drug lord Dudus’ donmanship from their politics. But, if you remove the negative connotations, Gayle really does appear a bit like a don, or a movie-don at least, on the cricket pitch. His preparation for each ball is unhurried.

There’s no fiddling around with his ball-guard, no frantic tapping of the pitch with his bat. He may as well broodingly scratch his chin. He will often defend a few balls early in his innings, almost as if teasing the bowler, knowing he can face several dot-balls and still end up with a ridiculous strike-rate. He stands feet wide apart and barely has a backlift. Everything is a calm build-up to an explosion. The front leg is cleared and the heavy bat drives through the ball with ferocious speed.

Like any great entertainer, or any great don for that matter, Gayle has an eye for theatre. He knows he’s not the most elegant batsman to watch — there’s no languid follow-through to the cover-drive. He’s not a big fan of innovative shots like the switch-hit either. Gayle provides flair simply by hitting the ball harder and longer than anyone else. A good example of this was an over Brett Lee bowled to him during a league game in the 2009 World Twenty20, at the Oval. Gayle took 27 runs off the over. People have scored more in six balls, but it was the manner in which Gayle did it that made that over memorable. The first six landed on the road outside the ground, the second on the roof and the third in the 20th row of the stands. After the over, Lee smiled at Gayle, as if to say, “Thanks for not hitting the last one as far.”

Gayle’s “donmanship” is also evident in the way his team-mates react to him. There is a reverence mixed with a genuine love for the man that is apparent. Virat Kohli, whose usual demeanour on the cricket field suggests that he has recently had his car scratched with a key by every member of the opposition, is suddenly a bundle of joy when he’s around Gayle. When Gayle arrived for the first season of the IPL, he, apparently, spoke to everyone in the Kolkata Knight Riders dressing-room in Jamaican English, just to see if they would pretend to understand him. He then spent the season learning how to play poker from Rohan Gavaskar. In the RCB dressing-room, the muscular Gayle is often asked by the younger players to show off his “guns”, and always obliges.

Gayle’s casual manner, though, should not be mistaken for apathy. His passion often boils over into anger, particularly against Australia, whose players have often been on the end of a long wagging finger. When Andrew Strauss, then England captain, criticised Gayle for arriving late for the Lord’s Test, Gayle told the media, “Tell him, don’t sleep with Chris Gayle on his mind.” He even once sent his friend Sulieman Benn off the field for refusing to bowl over the wicket.

The 6 foot 3 inch, 98-kg Chris Gayle also gets hurt sometimes. His public statement during his exile from the West Indies cricket team was one of the most dramatic emotional outbursts cricket has seen in recent times. Gayle said that members of the board and the coach had questioned his character and never given him a chance to respond, which had caused him more pain than any physical injury. He said he had always dreamed of playing for West Indies but now had to look after his family and seek whatever cricketing opportunities he could get. It wasn’t very muscle-man, world boss, #gayleforce stuff. Shortly before that statement, Gayle had been seen cheering the West Indies team in their ODI against India at Sabina Park, sporting a huge afro and dressed in bright green.

That is what Gayle makes so appealing. That he is a soap opera all by himself: the sex, the drama, the fun and the huge success.

By: Dustin Silgardo
Courtesy: MANS WORLD INDIA