Marshall's grave in a quiet corner of Barbados is revered by fans even a quarter century after his untimely death
BARBADOS: Tucked away in a quiet corner of Bartholomew's Church is a graveyard. You can see the flights taking off from Barbados at a distance. You can hear the birds sing and the breeze rustling through the leaves. You can feel the stillness of it all. There lies covered by the beautiful red gulmohar on a summer afternoon - Malcolm Marshall.
For those who grew up in the 1980s, Marshall was the greatest. If you had turned up at the Eden Gardens on December 10, 1983 for the first time to celebrate your first sporting hero Sunil Gavaskar equalling Don Bradman and breaking Geoff Boycott's records in the second and third Tests of the series against West Indies, Marshall would be your ultimate dream wrecker. The original Little Master was dismissed by Marshall off the first ball of that Test. That might have left you destroyed for the moment, but you would grow up to realise you had witnessed something special.
And 41 years later, you're left with a lump in your throat when you stand in front of the grave of a man who died at 41, cancer calling the shots.
The little red cherry - a cricket ball replica - on the tombstone says it all. It was with that ball that Marshall weaved the poetry of pace which left us terrified and enthralled at the same time. Gavaskar, who fought many a battle against the man, winning a few and losing a few over a decade, remembers him as the bowler "who still wakes me up from a deep sleep".
An integral part of the magnificent pace quartet of the West Indies, Marshall had comfortably the highest Test wickets - 376 from 81 games. But numbers don't tell the entire story. You need to be in Barbados to know what 'Maco' actually means to those who still feel connected to cricket here.
Roger, the cab driver, who took us to Marshall's grave, is in his 40s and plays the occasional club cricket. His immediate response to the query was: "Malcolm for us? Simply the greatest. Growing up, all of us playing cricket here wanted to bowl fast and aspired to be Malcolm."
That's the common man's view. Now let's hear one of the resident legends. Wes Hall, who was at the Kensington Oval on Tuesday to present his autobiography to the Indian team, was asked about the stand being named after him and his pace partner Charlie Griffith. "That's a privilege, but see Marshall to me was the greatest bowler of all time," the octogenarian, who has seen every great West Indies fast bowler, said.
Hall had become a priest in the 1990s and it was he who administered the funeral of Marshall in 1999. "When I said that during his funeral, you could hear a pin drop. Now many reputable cricketers acknowledge that, but I knew way before. Malcolm was beyond comprehension," Hall said.
Years have passed. New names have come and gone. The little red ball on the tombstone, too, has lost its lustre. But those beautiful black and white memories of a slightly angular run-up from the High Court End at Eden Gardens on a misty winter morning, what do you do with that?
