Tony Cozier, courtesy of ESPNcricinfo, …. http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/839157.html

Of all the numbers stacked against the name Everton de Courcy Weekes in scorebooks the world over, 90 carries an unfortunate significance. It was his score in West Indies’ first innings of the fourth Test against India in Chepauk, Madras, now Chennai, in January 1949. Ten more runs would have extended his overall record of five successive Test hundreds that has never been surpassed; he was cut short by a run-out decision by the square-leg umpire that Weekes now euphemistically describes as “rather doubtful”.

Sixty-six years on, the figure 90 carries an altogether happier connotation for a celebrated cricketer, now Sir Everton Weekes, Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG), holder of Barbados’ Gold Crown of Merit (GCM), who enters the tenth decade of a fulfilling life on Thursday.

Of surviving West Indies Test players, only Andy Ganteaume, the diminutive opening batsman with the unique record of scoring a hundred in his one and only Test innings, is older, at 94. In an interview five years ago for the series Cricket Legends of Barbados, Weekes told me he felt that if he made it to the end of that year he would get to the three figures in life that eluded him in cricket in Madras. Continue reading →