Former India opening batsman of the 1950s, Madhav Apte, breathed his last after a cardiac arrest at a city hospital here on Monday. He was 86.
Apte played in seven Tests in 1952-53 and scored an impressive 542 runs with one century – 163* in Trinidad against the West Indies – at an average of 49.27, which is considered very good even today, let alone in those days when the game was played on uncovered pitches and with minimum protective gear.
A technically-correct batsman that a typical Mumbai batsman is known to have, Apte was very cheerful even until last year when he was active with the Cricket Club of India's Legends Club. However, with age, he was conspicuous of his absence and abstained from attending social events including the Legends Club, of which he was the president until not long ago.
Apte's knowledge of the game was so vast and his acumen so sharp that he belied his age. When DNA approached him to pick an all-time great Mumbai 11 to mark the team's historic 500th Ranji Trophy match in 2017-18 season, Apte readily accepted the "challenge" and jotted down names from his sharp memory bank as if they happened yesterday.
Apte was active until about a year ago when he would not miss his morning walks and mixed them with the occasional badminton three times a week. For Apte, age was just a number. He played in the famous Kanga League well into his 70s.
An easily approachable person, Apte was always there ready to greet people with a smile and a joke that usually touched upon cricket that he loved so dearly.
One who was a good story teller, Apte had some of his favourite anecdotes. One of them included one about the legendary English cricketer Hedley Verity, which was actually told to him by someone.
In Apte's own words at a gathering to celebrate Mumbai's 500th Ranji Trophy match in November 2017, he reminisced: "Hedley Verity, left-arm spin England legend of the 1930s, was in Mumbai and the soldiers would roam around the city and preferred to bowl, and not bat. On one such instance, he was at the Cricket Club of India and asked to bowl. He knocked the stump with his second ball and was asked by the CCI member who was bowled if he played cricket and what his name was.
"When he said 'Hedley Verity', the member went about saying how he was privileged to be bowled by Verity."
Apte was one of the senior cricketers whom the legendary Sunil Gavaskar looked up to. In fact, when a young Gavaskar was dropped from the Mumbai side in the late 1960s, his place was taken by Apte and it was not until a couple of years that he made his comeback.
During the launch of Apte's autobiography 'As Luck Would Have It' in 2015, Gavaskar mentioned how educative it was during his time out of the Mumbai squad when he interacted with Mumbai giants like Apte, Ajit Wadekar, Vasu Paranjape among others. Once Gavaskar made it back to the squad, there was no looking back for him.
Apte, who would have turned 87 on October 5, captained Mumbai to two Ranji Trophy titles – 1958-59 and 1961-62 – during the time when Mumbai won an unprecedented 15 successive titles to dominate the domestic scene.
The right-handed batsman played in 67 first-class matches and accumulated 3,336 runs at 38.79 with six hundreds and 16 fifties. It was still a mystery as to why he did not play for India again after having a highly successful tour in 1952-53 in which he scored 460 runs at 51.11 including three back-to-back fifties in the first three innings of the series besides his lone Test hundred.
Even Gavaskar was puzzled as to why he was not selected for India again. "Why was he dropped after scoring so many runs? Nobody else would score more than 300 unless it was against India," Gavaskar once said.
Apte's squash-playing son Vaman said not long ago that his father had restricted his movements as age was catching up. But none expected his movements to completely come to a standstill so soon.
"He lived a full life," Vaman said on Monday.
Apte did not restrict himself to cricket. Besides badminton, he also played squash and tennis while also had tremendous interest in the sugar industry.
