Clearly, Dravid was - the past tense seems so unnatural - 'Mr Cricket' . He restored the meanings and metaphors associated with 'cricket' as only one who embodied it can. Meanings that had been eroded, thanks to the modern player's restricted sense of what the word stood for.
Dravid was aware of the dual nature of his calling, aware that cricket was both more than a sport and a trivial pursuit. Players who don't understand this, who believe that cricket is not merely a metaphor for life but life itself, find when they retire that they had been fooling themselves. It can be devastating.
Yet, when he made his debut in 1996, Dravid believed, because he wanted to believe, and all his reading then had led him to believe , that cricket was more important than life even. It accounted for his intensity, his inward focus, his inability to let go when he didn't meet his own high standards. He never lost the intensity , but was able to channelize it away from avenues of self-destruction . Later, he laughed at the absurdity of it all for he realized he could be serious without being boring, correct without being dogmatic , and acknowledged that a cricket team works by the dint of differentiation.
What changed Dravid was oneday cricket, the format where he was initially seen as a misfit but in which, after top scoring at the 1999 World Cup, he became a world class batsman. It unclogged his mind. He discovered aspects of himself that may have remained hidden but for the dictates of the one-day game. He gradually freed himself of the shackles of excessive orthodoxy and began to play a more creative game.
Sachin Tendulkar is probably the more orthodox batsman of the two, and also the one who quite quickly built an unconventional structure on such a foundation. Dravid was the more elegant, and the more subtle, and in a five-year period from 2001 was also the more daring. That was a period when he shifted clubs, from being a member of the 'very good' to taking his appointed place among the 'great' . He saved Test matches in Port of Spain, Georgetown and Nottingham, and played key roles in victories in Headingley, Kandy, Adelaide and Rawalpindi. He had four double centuries in 15 Tests, and made an incredible 23% of India's total in 21 of Sourav Ganguly's 'victory Tests' , at an average of nearly 103.
But it wasn't the figures alone. Dravid believed that the best sportsmen were incomplete if they did not conduct their lives with dignity, integrity, courage and modesty, all of which were compatible with pride, ambition, determination and competitiveness . He lived his ideals. The worst thing he did on a cricket field was chew on a lozenge. You can't be in a team with a man like that without some of that philosophy rubbing off on you.
It was the quiet, dignified confidence of Dravid that has allowed the next generation to display the aggressive entitlement associated with the likes of Virat Kohli.
It is frightening to contemplate the turn Indian cricket might have taken without the presence of Dravid, Tendulkar, Kumble and Ganguly after skipper Mohammad Azharuddin made that most depressing statement in the annals of Indian sport: "Maine match banaya." The match-fixing scandal could have destroyed cricket. Already, by then, if India caught a cold, the world sneezed. Virender Sehwag, with whom Dravid once shared an opening partnership of 410 runs, spoke of how Dravid was the psychologist "to whom we took all our problems ." It was a role that came naturally to the better-read , more widely-aware Dravid, cricket's equivalent to the chess genius Vishwanathan Anand. There is something about batsmen at No.3 which makes them outstanding fielders. Ricky Ponting , Jacques Kallis, Viv Richards, Don Bradman were among the best. Dravid was their equal, and by some way, the finest slip catcher India has ever had. One suspects it is not the batting failures so much as the catches that he dropped in Australia that hastened the end. "I can get over a dismissal quickly, but I linger over a dropped catch for much longer," he confessed recently.
Dravid had nothing left to prove. Critic Cyril Connolly has spoken about two of the enemies of promise that reduce motivation . One is success, and the other is a happy family life. "Children dissipate the longing for immortality ," he wrote. Thankfully, Dravid has both and they have sustained him throughout his career.
Where does Dravid go from here? More significantly, where does Indian cricket? It is not difficult to imagine Dravid responding to an SOS some years from now, and making a century in a Test. His friend Javagal Srinath certainly thinks he is capable of the feat even at 45. Pragmatism and nostalgia would combine nicely then.
Meanwhile, India's greatest crisis man has just gone against the grain, causing a crisis rather than fixing it. But that's the nature of sport, and Dravid deserves to hang up his cap, set his X-ray vision aside and repair his teeth after so many years of catching bullets in them. He will be missed at number three, at first slip, and in the dressing room.
