Ben Stokes will remember little of our conversation. He was then, as he is now, a man who refused to meet mortals even halfway, informed entirely by instinct who listened only to his own voice.
In my role as media manager of the sports management company that represented Stokes it fell to me in 2011 to impart some advice on managing his public profile in the age of social media. I might as well have been addressing a door.
The meeting at the Riverside was convened by his long-standing advisor Neil Fairbrother and attended by his parents. Despite his arrest for obstructing the police during a night out, and his mother’s obvious concerns about the damage he might be doing to his career, Stokes was impressively unmoved by my counsel.
He looked at me as he has every one of his victims since, just another batter to knock over, another bowler to bounce out of the ground. The gathering ended at his choosing with me questioning my place in the universe, not he evaluating his.
There was no way of knowing then just how impactful his career might be, just a sense an unanswerable, uncontrollable singularity was among us.
