Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  Imran’s working relationship with Packer wasn’t the only liaison that would sustain him and bring him a certain controversy in these years. For all his aloofness, the Pakistani cut a dashing figure. A reporter for the London Evening News caught up with him during one ‘rock star-like progress’ through the capital. ‘Imran Khan is the sexiest man alive,’ she panted, ‘dark and Othello-like, perfectly proportioned; has burning brown eyes, deep black hair, a bedroom pout.’

  Most women Imran encountered individually at the time found him similarly engaging, and vice versa. It would seem that monogamy wasn’t as yet part of his game plan. Meanwhile, Imran would recall that from around October 1978, when he turned 26, ‘my mother actively began looking for a bride for me’ in Pakistan. Among Mrs Khan’s most promising early candidates was her son’s former Oxford contemporary Benazir Bhutto. I was told there had been ‘about a year’ of serious matchmaking efforts involving the couple. Bhutto had returned to Pakistan in late 1977, only to see her father first deposed and then imprisoned by General Zia. The young woman who remembered herself as ‘a waif … abjectly await[ing] developments in Islamabad’ was commonly thought one of the more eligible catches elsewhere. ‘All the mothers were getting in the act and asking Benazir to dinner,’ I was told by a particularly well-placed source in Lahore, reflecting on Bhutto’s frequent visits to the city. ‘You know, she was a good, intelligent, good-looking girl — and just as opinionated as Imran was.’ Despite the apparent compatability, there’s no evidence that Pakistan’s two rising (and eventually opposed) political stars ever seriously considered Mrs Khan’s proposal.

  As we’ve seen, however, Imran did enjoy a full and varied social life both in England and elsewhere. By the late 1970s or early 1980s he was clearly beginning to develop a rather more elevated public profile than that of the average county cricketer. And generally speaking it was less Imran’s prowess with bat or ball that attracted the interest of the British press than the insinuation that he was a robustly sexually active young man whose affairs were not entirely confined to a safe, committed relationship with one woman. Thirty years later, Imran would recall of his regular visits to London at the time that ‘you could go out on four different evenings and meet four different sets of people [from] different parts of the world. I loved that.’ It would be churlish not to take him at his word. Imran clearly enjoyed a wide acquaintanceship at all levels of society, with both sexes, in London, Lahore and several ports of call in between, making friends he later described as ‘like brothers and sisters’. But perhaps it would be fair to say that there was a special place in his heart for the distaff side of this extended family. I spoke to a now middle-aged Englishwoman who had known him quite well in 1981–2. Towards the end of their time together it had been brought to her attention that Imran’s relationship with her might not have been an entirely exclusive one. With heroic self-restraint, she told me, ‘Imran was a people person. It would have been strange if he withheld himself from half the people.’

  During his first year or two in Sussex, Imran’s renown was confined pretty much to a local stage. A number of factors contributed to turning him into a national and international celebrity, not least his starring role in his nation’s Test successes against her arch enemy India. But if there was a single defining moment that marked the beginning of Imran’s decade or more as a global sex symbol, it was the day he was introduced to a fellow Pakistani expatriate in England, a gregarious hairdresser-cum-personal stylist known as ‘Mr Dar’, or simply as ‘Dar’. Anyone familiar with the 1975 comedy-drama Shampoo, with Warren Beatty in the role of a priapic crimper, has only to think of that same character, transported to south Asia, and with a better sense of humour, to get a feel of the man. Until he met Dar, Imran was alluring but not polished. Left to himself his dress code tended to be a brightly coloured mishmash, dominated as it was by a variety of boots, wide-open shirts, neatly creased jeans and gaudy cricket blazers, for an overall look that might not have been out of place on stage in an edition of the Top of the Pops of the day. As Dar told me, Imran ‘hadn’t really cared about his image’ up until then, although he ‘wasn’t unaware of himself’. This broadly confirms the assessment of several of his early county colleagues. At Worcester, Imran had been known to casually walk into the unassuming town centre shop of a barber named Toby Veale and request a five-shilling cut — adding, perhaps unnecessarily, ‘Nothing fancy.’ His departure from the county seems to have been the occasion of a personal as well as a professional makeover. By the time Kerry Packer and his advertising executives got hold of him in late 1977 Imran was already teasing his hair into what became the trademark bushy black bouffant, a style which evolved into an art form, known as the ‘lion look’, under Dar’s expert curatorship. This carefully assembled package of clothes, hair and accessories contributed significantly to the public image of the ‘sexiest man alive’, who was quite self-aware enough to play along with it. By the mid-1980s, Imran walking in to a men’s boutique was a bit like Elton John walking into a florist’s shop, or Oliver Reed walking into a pub: he was happy to be there, and they were glad to accommodate him. In later years Imran became a partner in Dar’s international salon business, which perhaps in part owed its continuing success to his patronage.

  Dar provides a small but somehow touching example of Imran’s growing celebrity at about the time he joined Sussex. Although indifferent to cricket, the stylist accepted his friend and client’s invitation to travel down to Hove to watch him in ‘some mundane county match’. Also present in the party was a ‘fabulous-looking woman’ who hitherto had proved strangely resistant to their host’s charms, Dar recalls.

  Throughout the day, whenever Imran set foot outside the pavilion he was immediately swarmed by young boys with autograph books and scraps of paper. Out of earshot of the woman, he told all these kids to meet him at a certain gate at exactly six that evening, when he would be glad to sign for them. At exactly 6.05, the woman and I also turned up at the gate in question. Imran was standing there in the sunshine looking like a Greek god, surrounded by this adoring crowd of about a hundred kids and quite a few of their equally awestruck parents. It was like the woman had drunk an aphrodisiac. She took one look at Imran holding court and promptly went from ignoring him to fawning on him for the rest of the night. Privately, he was amused and appalled that she was quite so brazen about it.

  Since ultimately it made all the power and the fame and the sex possible, it’s worth repeating that Imran ‘work[ed] like a navvy’, to again quote Sir Len Hutton, to perfect his seemingly natural bowling action. (This was the same Len Hutton who remarked of one particularly well-known English player of the day that he was a ‘show pony’, and of another that ‘He always gives me the feeling that a chorus line of girls is about to appear and start dancing around behind him.’ Not a man to be easily moved, in other words.) It’s fair to say that Imran started with the advantages not only of regularly playing on one of the world’s quickest wickets, but also of having the classic fast bowler’s physique. In a fine display of traditional English homoeroticism, the London Evening Globe’s cricket correspondent devoted a quarter of his review of a Gillette Cup tie to waxing eloquent over Imran’s musculature. ‘Khan stripped to the waist would put Adonis to shame. At a time when too many first-class cricketers in this country could be mistaken for the man who comes to fix your sink, the more obvious templates here are the Incredible Hulk and Valentino.’

  Even so, there was always rather more to Imran’s professional success than a fetchingly broad chest and a narrow waist. Beneath the luxuriant hair there were also distinct signs of intelligence. Paul Parker said to me, ‘Imran was the world’s hardest working bowler and probably about the most creative one. He never stopped thinking about his game … Instead of just charging in, he’d experiment with the way he approached the crease. He’d vary the angle, com[ing] in wide and somehow swinging the ball away — almost unheard-of.’ Mike Procter would also have cause to refer ruefully to
Imran’s speed and versatility after facing him on a fruity pitch at Hove. Another player remembered thinking that the young Imran had taken a ‘somewhat mincing, medium-pacer’s run’ and was amazed to see the same bowler a year or two later ‘more or less push himself off from the pavilion steps’. Imran’s Sussex colleague and future captain Johnny Barclay adds: ‘I played against the great man at Oxford. Back then he had a decent, open-chested inswinger, but he wasn’t really quick in the true sense of the word. By the time he joined us he was lightning fast, sideways on, and he had the lot. And then some. That last-second jump he gave off the left leg was probably the most thrilling sight in cricket.’

  Ten years after being casually asked to turn his arm over in the Pakistan Under-19s trial at Lahore, Imran was the finished article.

  Added to his prodigous talent and old-fashioned oomph, he was also a remarkably consistent professional who was often in action for 10 or 11 months of each year. Imran’s devotion to the job was essentially no different when playing in front of a handful of spectators on a wet afternoon in Uxbridge from what it was in front of a packed house in Karachi or Lahore. He drove himself hard, and eased up only when nature took its toll. (‘He is human,’ as General Zia was to remind us a few years later.) The first half of the 1978 season had seen Imran in rare form with both bat and ball. But even before soccer was back on the sports pages in early August, The Times delivered a blunt and critical assessment; he looked ‘exhausted and feeble’, they said. An example of what the paper meant by that came in the rain-affected championship match against Worcestershire, to whom Imran arguably had something to prove. Playing in a steady drizzle at the normally fetching Saffrons ground in Eastbourne, both sides seemed a shade under-motivated, managing just 539 runs in four innings. Imran’s contribution was to score 18 and 0, and take one wicket. Sussex did, however, win the Gillette Cup, beating Somerset in the final at Lord’s. Imran struck no less a judge than E.W. Swanton as ‘under par’ and ‘the most restless fellow, pacing around with a frown in the outfield. His mind appeared to be elsewhere.’

  Swanton may well have been right. Imran, who was nursing a torn muscle, had just been named in the Pakistan squad to play in a home series of three Tests and three one-day internationals starting later that month. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the sense of anticipation among the players and spectators alike. Long before the first ball was bowled, much of the country was excited to the point of hysteria, with crowds thronging the streets, marching bands playing patriotic airs, and radios blaring sensational stories of moral lapses by the opposition players. In Lahore, whole families moved their homes into the open, sleeping under the arches of the Gaddafi Stadium for nights on end, all on the mere rumour of tickets. In due course there was rioting among some of the unsuccessful applicants. Imran’s and the team’s names were plastered over the front pages, and the forthcoming ‘clash of the century’ was discussed like a major state event, which in fact it was. After 18 years marked by incessant diplomatic rows and two wars, Pakistan were to play India again.

  The home press again deployed their boldest headlines for the occasion, and the accompanying stories tended to the partisan zeal and hyperbole that were to be a prominent feature of fixtures between the two countries over the years. To one Karachi publication the visiting Indians were ‘unholy’ and ‘to be humiliated, rather [than] beaten’. The newspaper’s depiction of the tourists’ predominantly Hindu players as ‘infidels’ gives a further flavour of the coverage. ‘Know your enemy for what he is,’ thundered the Pakistan Star, an expatriate weekly widely available in Lahore and other cities, ‘a godless, ruthless and sinister foe who should be destroyed on the field of play.’ (Somewhat belying this image of his team as a pack of ‘thugs and vandals … spiritual descendants of the Evil One’, the affable Indian captain Bishan Bedi would subsequently donate his blood to a Pakistani children’s hospital, one of several such goodwill gestures the press either buried on their inside pages or chose to ignore entirely.) In what perhaps amounted to an exercise in reverse psychology, the same Pakistani media generally praised the wily tourists’ technical skills to the skies, insisting that their famous quartet of spinners would be both ‘wicked’ and ‘the devil to beat’ on turning wickets. The whole, increasingly shrill build-up to the series swung to its zenith with Pakistan state television billing their ball-to-ball transmission of the rubber as ‘the event of a lifetime’ and large electronic scoreboards in city squares counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to the first Test. A global audience of some 300 million viewers would eventually watch some or all of the proceedings. Meanwhile, for their part the Indian press and public proved to be every bit as spirited as their Pakistani counterparts. There were an estimated 2,000 patriotic billboards appearing in either official or handwritten form along the main Delhi—Bombay railway, or an average of roughly three for every mile of the line. Many of these forcefully decried the opposition captain Mushtaq Mohammad and the other returning ‘Packerstanis’. The Indian poet Khadar Mohiuddin would later satirise the ensuing series of matches he referred to as ‘war without the nukes’ in the lines ‘Never mind my love for my motherland/What’s important is how much I hate the other land.’

  Perhaps inevitably, the cricket itself, though improving dramatically from a slow start, only rarely lived up to its advance billing. The first Test at Faisalabad was a high-scoring draw played out on a lifeless track. Imran recalled that the whole thing had been an exercise in futility from the bowlers’ point of view, and ‘the best Sarfraz and I could do was send down a liberal amount of bouncers to at least stop Gavaskar and company driving off the front foot. Without that, it would have been a slaughter.’ Contrary to popular expectation, both the Test and the series as a whole would be played in a generally cordial atmosphere, and, as Zaheer Abbas says, ‘anyone with strong feelings or prejudices [kept] them to themselves. [Pakistan] put the highest premium on maintaining courtesy and decorum.’ Courtesy, that was, towards the opposition team; colleagues weren’t necessarily eligible for the same consideration, and following the match Mushtaq informed a television reporter that Imran had ‘bowled much too short’ and employed ‘some odd tactics’ throughout. Rather understandably, Imran would remark, ‘I was disgruntled at this ill-informed criticism by my captain. With the burden of public anticipation on my shoulders, I didn’t need the extra pressure.’ For the record, it was the 13th consecutive Test between the two countries to end in a draw, which perhaps lends context to what followed.

  By contrast to Faisalabad, the groundsman for the second Test at Lahore produced a pitch which, if necessarily on the arid side (there was a drought), showed off Pakistan’s fast bowling, quick-footed batting and agile close-fielding to full advantage. India were inserted and hustled out for 199, Imran taking four for 54. He later told an interviewer that he had felt under ‘crushing pressure’ both from his captain and the capacity crowd (which included Benazir Bhutto) to make an early breakthrough. ‘As [a] result I found it almost impossible to control my line or length or movement. With each wayward over the accusing looks from my team-mates intensified. Fortunately, a bad ball got a wicket, which made me relax and bowl better.’ Imran added 42 further high-quality overs in the second innings, and Pakistan were left to chase 126 in 99 minutes. They got there with eight wickets to spare, and General Zia proclaimed the next day a public feast.

  With around 10,000 more people inside than the official ground capacity, the third Test at Karachi got off to a satisfactory start, meandered somewhat, and then produced an even better finish than Lahore. Pakistan eventually needed 164 to win in just under two hours. Promoted for the slog, Imran responded with a ferocious yet chanceless 31, which included a four and two straight sixes off Bedi, the second of them an immense and perfectly struck drive over the sightscreen, to see Pakistan to victory. It was 19 November 1978, which was to be a major watershed in the popularity, if not the long-term fortunes of Pakistani cricket. A series which had initially produced
all the attritional and tedious traits of past encounters between the two countries ended in scenes of delirious rejoicing. Pakistan’s 2–0 victory, which promptly shut down the nation for a second day, represented ‘a fulfilment of aspiration [and] pride never before seen in our history’, to quote General Zia.

  A senior and long-standing team-mate of Imran’s told me that what struck him most around now was an apparent paradox in the character of his ‘esteemed friend’. ‘He was a model professional in the way he devoted himself to cricket, but he also had something of an amateur’s mindset in his attitude to it.’ His colleague saw Imran as an ‘innocent’ in the best sense, a man not exactly naive but ‘pure’; his main motivation was ‘enjoyment, not ego’, and therefore he was sceptical, at best, about ‘becoming overnight the most famous man in Pakistan. It was a mania … There were stories about grown men who literally stabbed each other in fights about whether he or Hanif was the greatest of all time.’ Imran himself broadly confirms this thesis when he says that ‘cricket fever engulfed [us] and a whole army of fans was swept along on a tide of passion for a sport they didn’t really understand … I was singled out for much of the attention and consequently the [media] started to run wild.’ Although Kerry Packer had begun the process of personalising and glamorising Imran, it was only now that ‘everything went overboard. I was being followed around by the press … stalked … The result was a succession of ill-informed trash that portrayed me as [the] kind of sportsman who goes out with dumb blondes, rather than someone who plays a mentally taxing sport to a high degree of professionalism.’