When he came out to bat there was at once that expectant, almost fearful, silence that tells you are in the presence of some extraordinary phenomenon. Of course you could look forward to his technical brilliance. Was there ever a more perfect square cover drive? And has anyone in the history of the game made a thing of such great technical beauty out of a simple forward defensive stroke?

There is a request to vote for new entrants to the West Indies Cricket Hall of Fame located in Antigua. To vote you have to go to www.thestickywicket.com and click on Hall Of Fame 2007.

In the list of those for whom we are now asked to vote is the name of Rohan Kanhai. I am surprised that he was not in the original list but now the opportunity has come to correct the glaring omission.

It is unrealistic to compare the great sportsmen of one era with those of another - even though thousands of sports lovers spend millions of happy hours attempting just such comparisons. Circumstances change too much to allow a valid judgment of how good a champion of yesteryear was compared with his modern counterpart.

It makes little sense to look at the statistical record of a champion athlete today and say the record shows that he would have beaten his predecessor of 50 or 100 years ago. Who knows what might have happened if the champion of long ago had had the training opportunities, the medical knowledge, the sophisticated technical aids and coaching that the modern champion has?

So I believe that it is impossible to make an objective measurement between champions of different eras. Yet I also believe that it is quite possible to form a vivid impression of who the greatest champions have been through the years.

Such an impression is a matter of emotion, intuition, a seventh sense we all have that responds at once in the presence of real, once-in-a lifetime, inspired genius. We all simply know when we have seen a really great champion even though we may be tongue-tied in describing why we know it. For instance, having seen him dominate Wimbledon like a God among pygmies I believe that Rod Laver is the greatest tennis champion of all time, the phenomenal Roger Federer included.

And it is by the measure of this seventh sense that I judge, of the sportsmen in all the many sports I have witnessed in my life, that sportsman who has possessed the most compelling genius is the Guyanese and West Indian batsman, Rohan Kanhai. The only others to compare I can think of are Michael Jordan, Brian Lara and Tiger Woods and it says something that, for me, Kanhai stands equal in stature and charisma with those other great sporting icons. In another era I would have travelled far to see Rosewall and Gonzalez play tennis or Pele and Puskas and Maradona play football or Palmer and Nicklaus do battle on the golf course or Zatopek and Sebastian Coe run at the Olympics or Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard move like quicksilver around poor befuddled opponents. But in his time I would have taken the longest voyage of them all to see Kanhai come down the pavilion steps in a Test Match.

When he came out to bat there was at once that expectant, almost fearful, silence that tells you are in the presence of some extraordinary phenomenon. Of course you could look forward to his technical brilliance. Was there ever a more perfect square cover drive? And has anyone in the history of the game made a thing of such great technical beauty out of a simple forward defensive stroke?

And, more than just technical accomplishment, there was the craft and art of Kanhai's batting - no mighty hammer blows or crude destruction of a bowler, simply the sweetest exercise of the art of batting in the world.

But in the end I am not even talking of these things, important though they are. There was something much more about Kanhai's batting. It was, quite simply, a special gift from the Gods. You could feel it charge the air around him as he walked to the wicket. I do not know quite how to describe it. It was something that kept the heart beating hard with a special sort of excited fear all through a Kanhai innings as if something marvelous or terrible or even sacred was about to happen. I have thought a lot about it. I think it is something to do with the vulnerability, the near madness, there is in all real genius.

It comes from the fact that such men - the most inspired poets, composers, artists, scientists, saints as well as the greatest sportsmen - are much more open than ordinary men to the mysterious current that powers the human imagination. In other words, their psyches are extraordinarily exposed to that tremendous, elemental force which nobody has yet properly defined. This gives them access to a wholly different dimension of performance. It also makes them much more vulnerable than other men to extravagant temptations. The Gods challenge them to try the impossible and they cannot resist. This explains the waywardness and strange unorthodoxies that always accompany great genius.

When Kanhai was batting every stroke he played one felt as one feels reading the best poetry of John Donne or W.B. Yeats or Derek Walcott or listening to Mozart or contemplating a painting by Turner or Van Gogh or trying to follow Einstein's theory of relativity - one felt that somehow what you are experiencing is coming from "out there": a gift, infinitely valuable and infinitely dangerous, a gift given to only the chosen few in all creation.