I have dipped in to my old, school-time scrap book to pull out this extract from an old issue of Sportsworld, which in turn quotes from “Face to Face with a Tiger” from “The Illustrated Weekly of India of May 1986. This small piece beautifully captures Tiger’s stamp of style on Indian cricket. Regret I do not have the author’s name:
"If you’ve got a moment, try this experiment. Take a ball, close one eye, toss it up and try catching it. The chances are you will miss. Because with one eye you will have what is known as a “parallax” problem.
Now imagine facing Jeff Thomson, John Snow, Fred Trueman or even Lance Gibbs with one eye. Or imagine taking a hot, low catch. And imagine doing all that with style, power and international class. Hard to imagine an ordinary human being doing that. But what about a Tiger? Or Mansur Ali Khan – the Nawab of Pataudi? Ah! Now that’s possible, isn’t it?
Within the first two minutes of meeting him, you’ll know Tiger’s no pussy cat. He stalks in to his lair - a brown, dark den loaded with books and a few photographs - and fixes you with a steady, unblinking gaze. His agile mind ripples with tough opinions and he expresses them with a tigerish conviction. Mansur Ali Khan is every inch his epithet – Tiger.
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