Stokes’ heroics have new context

The miraculous deeds of England’s cricketing superstar do not exist in isolation.

colossus heaving sixes like a lumberjack felling a redwood, he, like many others who have reached the pinnacle of their craft, is the product of his own complex circumstances.

Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, did not evolve seamlessly from backstreet kickabouts in Madeira to a career that has drawn global adoration. As became clear in his interview on ITV this week, he has long carried the torment of losing his father, Jose Dinis Aveiro, to alcoholism when he was only 20. Tragedies have lifelong ramifications, while glories are fleeting.

This is a concept central to any appreciation of a star such as Murray. He wins one major tournament, he moves on to the next. But that terrible day at Dunblane Primary School, where Thomas Hamilton shot 16 children and a teacher dead in a gym just moments before Murray was due to take a class there, has left a scar that can never fully be erased.

For his first eight years on tour, it was tacitly understood that the subject was off-limits. Only his tears in a BBC interview in 2013 – ‘‘you have no idea how tough something like that is’’ – bore out the depth of his agony.

Murray, of course, was able to address this most difficult of topics on his own terms, at the time of his choosing. Stokes was not afforded the same courtesy, and the ethical implications of that decision are likely to run and run. There is little point, though, in treating his tragedy as somehow extraneous to his path through life.

Everybody bears the scars of their past, while the public fascination exerted by the finest athletes demands that journalists mine their backgrounds in search of any explanation for their superhuman abilities. The Stokes controversy marks the logical extension of that impulse.

You can question both the timing and taste of the story, but there is no denying the significance of its substance, or its role in illuminating the resilience and courage that Stokes has since made his stock in trade.

– The Daily Telegraph