There are prolific, pioneering and great T20 batters. Then there is Chris Gayle.
Whether or not the self-styled Universe Boss' schtick is to your taste, his utter dominance of the format is undeniable.
Gayle's 14,562 T20 runs are the most of all time. No one else has troubled 12,000 just yet. If we look at it in terms of centuries, the gulf between the West Indies great and the rest is truly absurd.
He has reached three figures 22 times, including the all-time format record of 175 not out for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Pune Warriors in 2013. Aaron Finch, the beleaguered Pune captain on that evening in Bengaluru, has scored eight T20 centuries and is joint-second on the list alongside long-time Australia opening partner David Warner. There is Gayle, a lot of daylight, then everyone else.
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"It's so hard to look past Chris Gayle, he's got so many more T20 runs than anyone else. He's hit more sixes, more runs than everyone else by far," Australia all-rounder Glenn Maxwell told The Sporting News.
That maximums count stands at a ludicrous 1,056. Gayle's fellow West Indians Kieron Pollard and Andre Russell are the only other players to have more than 500 T20 sixes.
"To be that dominant in this format for as long as he was is unmatched. I know at some stage those records will probably get broken by someone," Maxwell added with no great certainty. "But at the moment he's so far ahead. He set a benchmark for T20 batting that's going to be really hard to match."
Gayle became the leading man among a clutch of West Indies superstars who served as a counterbalance to Indian dominance of T20 cricket during the previous decade.
While India's best had the backing of the all-powerful BCCI and ample opportunities to shine in the IPL extravaganza, West Indies players were frequently in dispute with their own board and adopted a 'have bat, will travel'l approach to the franchise era.
"On top of all his records, he's done it everywhere in the world, in every league," said Ravi Bopara, who has crossed paths with Gayle numerous times on the global circuit. "He's got plenty of trophies under his belt. He revolutionised the game.
"Putting the ball out of the park, the technique, the swing: box office. He made T20 cricket what it is today — him alone. And look at West Indies: there is a long list of cricketers who have come through because of Chris Gayle."
A key and perhaps taboo part of the story is the ultimately transformative influence of a convicted fraudster now serving a 110-year federal prison sentence in the United States on account of a $7bn Ponzi scheme.
Before all that dastardly chicanery caught up with him, Allen Stanford was the incongruous and eponymous face of the Stanford Super Series, where England played his Stanford Superstars — effectively the West Indies team — in a one-off game for a $20m prize pot.
Gayle clattered 65 not out in a 10-wicket win over a woefully under-cooked England in the first and, as it happened, only Super Series game at the Stanford Cricket Ground (his name really was everywhere) in November 2008. Plans to make the matches annual events were shelved three months later when the Texan financier's vast crimes began to come to light.
"That's where it really all started, where it became big among the West Indies players," said Bopara, who was 12th man as England were bundled out for 99 in Antigua. "That million-dollar game, the West Indies boys had been training for six months to win a million dollars each and beat England.
"Gayle had seen something: T20 cricket was going to become the most popular version of the game. All the West Indies players got paid and they thought, 'This makes sense — why am I going to play a Digicel Test match for a thousand dollars or whatever and grind all the way through the year when I can be a multi-millionaire?'."
Out of the shambles of the Stanford debacle came a crop of players to inspire a golden era. World T20 successes in 2012 and 2016 mean West Indies remain the only side to have won the event twice.
"The West Indian talent that comes out at that time, it's a perfect storm. Gayle, Pollard, Dwayne Bravo, Sunil Narine — those are four different players who could claim to be the greatest T20 player of all time for particular reasons," said Machel St Patrick Hewitt, host of the Caribbean Cricket podcast.
"They all jump into IPL at basically the same time. They're all ahead of the curve in terms of understanding what T20 cricket is all about. As much as we won in 2012 and 2016, arguably but for rain we would have won in 2014 as well.
"That four-year period with the three T20 World Cups, I'd equate it to football where Spain won [two European Championships either side of the World Cup] in 2008, 2010, 2012.
"It was a golden generation of cricketers who had perfected a format of the game that no one else knew how to mimic. No one else could out-powerhit them, no one else had cottoned on to the tactics that West Indies had — similar to Spain and tiki-taka. No one had found a way to deal with that."
The singularity and specificity of focus first seen during the Stanford days was key to the success of this tika-thwaka era and, as Bopara recalls, Gayle was a leader who set the tone.
"When they won the World T20 in Sri Lanka in 2012, I remember the Caribbean boys coming to that tournament. I looked at them and thought, 'How are they so big?'," he said. "They had all just grown — chest out here, arms out here. They all looked massive.
"Speaking to Gayle and these guys, they made it a priority to get massive in the gym so they could handle bigger bats and swing harder and put the ball out of the park. They knew what they were doing and that's why, for me, they are the best T20 players of all time and Gayle is their number one."
This body of work should cast Gayle as an inarguable icon of West Indies cricket, a name to exist alongside the likes of Brian Lara, Curtly Ambrose, Viv Richards, Michael Holding and Garfield Sobers — a man as important to his own generations as those greats were to theirs.
However, as St Patrick Hewitt explained, a complicated relationship between T20, the forces it unleashed and the grandees of Caribbean cricket mean it's not quite as simple as that.
"Part of who Chris Gayle is is part of the Jamaican psyche and Jamaican culture — and I say this as someone who was born and grew up in Jamaica — we are a boastful people," he chuckled. "Cricket possibly wasn't ready for someone like Chris Gayle who was good and told everyone he was good. There's no humility there.
"The other aspect is that T20 cricket has been seen in the West Indies as destroying our game. I don't subscribe to that but that's certainly how it's seen among a certain generation of fans. Gayle was seen as the poster child of T20 cricket, he was seen as the first player within the region to 'turn their back' on West Indies cricket.
"Chris has always felt hard done by with that assessment. That's why when he does interviews you always hear him talk about 'I played 103 Test matches for the West Indies and I played 300 ODIs for the West Indies'. He feels hard done by, by this image of him being a mercenary. Because he was one of the first, he's been tarnished."
It is worth remembering this is a player with two Test match triple centuries, placing Gayle in an exclusive club of four alongside Lara, Virender Sehwag and Don Bradman. His peak coming at the time when an upstart short-form intersected with the established formats means he is likely to remain a one-off. Gayle was a player of impeccable red-ball credentials and uncommon skills who was presented with a blank canvas and created countless masterpieces in T20.
With the passage of time, he and his band of brothers from the Caribbean should come to be seen not as the men who killed West Indies cricket, but the heroes who saved it.
Chris Gayle's T20 career in numbers
| Innings | Runs | High Score | Average | Strike Rate | 50s | 100s | Sixes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T20I | 75 | 1899 | 117 | 27.92 | 137.50 | 14 | 2 | 124 |
| IPL | 141 | 4965 | 175* | 39.72 | 148.96 | 31 | 6 | 357 |
| All T20s | 455 | 14562 | 175* | 36.22 | 144.75 | 88 | 22 | 1056 |
Greatest performance: 175* for Royal Challengers Bangalore vs. Pune Warriors (April 23, 2013)
Pure, glorious, history-making savagery. The numbers from Gayle's implausible IPL assault tower as high as some of the sixes that challenged the stadium roof in Bengaluru. Ishwar Pandey, the leading wicket-taker in that year's Ranji Trophy, was welcomed on his IPL debut by Gayle crashing 21 from his first over. Shortly afterwards, it started to look like Pandey got off lightly.
Mitchell Marsh's first set of six disappeared for 28, while captain Finch dutifully turned his arm over and his first five deliveries to Gayle went for four sixes and a four. Ali Murtaza's two overs cost 45.
A 17-ball 50 became a 30-ball hundred, with 98 of his first 102 runs coming via boundaries. Perhaps only to demonstrate he was human, Gayle slowed down a little bit thereafter. Still, 175 not out off 66 deliveries with 13 fours and 17 sixes remains an astonishing body of work that remains the ultimate T20 batting achievement.
To rub salt in the Warriors' deep wounds, Gayle then took a couple of late wickets with his off-spin to return figures of 2-5 in a gargantuan 130-run win.
NEXT: LASITH MALINGA IS THE T20 G.O.A.T.
