"Some players do care about records. When Brian Lara was out for four in that match, he sat in the dressing-room and read a book. Occasionally he would go out onto the balcony and check the scoreboard, then go back inside. (Ramnaresh) Sarwan was watching him, because he was wondering. And every time Brian came out to see my score getting closer to his record, he looked more and more worried," Gayle writes in "Six Machine: I Don't Like Cricket...I Love It".
Gayle was out for 317 falling much short of Lara's unimaginable score of 400 not out against England a year earlier. In 2010, Gayle went on to score another triple hundred, 333 against Sri Lanka.
"Six Machine: I Don't Like Cricket...I Love It", co-authored by Tom Fordyce and published by Penguin Random House, is replete with some explosive stories of Gayle including several of his encounters with women.
"Maybe they misinterpret things. Maybe it's the way I bat. I play a lot of shots, and sometimes I get out. Maybe they think I don't care. Maybe that's how it looks on television, or through the pages of an old coaching manual. I play my shots and I get out. I get out on 40 so they say I don't care as much as the man who gets out on five.
Or he says it maybe because of jealousy.
"I am the Six Machine. Twice as many T20 sixes as the next man, the highest score, the highest average, the most runs. More international one-day centuries than Brian Lara, more Test matches than Ian Botham, more Test catches than Clive Lloyd. I enjoy every day, and I make people happy."
On women he says, "You'll always have women out there who'll want to touch you, want to throw themselves at you. That's something you have to handle out there. You get honey traps in cricket too. As part of the game's regulations we have to attend anti-corruption lessons. They let us be aware that there are stings on the prettiest flowers. Not everything good be great, okay?"
He says girls seem to just gravitate to the way he talks and comes across.
"In my later days, if a girl throws herself at me, I'm not interested. Too easy, no fun. When you're young, anything comes, you go. You have so much energy. It's all new. It's all an adventure. Enjoyment everywhere you look," he writes.
On his obliging to the crowd, he says people watch gladiators because they want to see man against man, but also because they want to be entertained, and one must understand his audience if he is to win their respect.
While batting in IPL matches, Gayle says he calculates before an innings. "The crowd might be chanting, 'Six! Six! Six!' I am an entertainer, so I'll give them a six now, and they berserk. You need one run to win. You know they want a six, so you give them one. And they go even more berserk," he writes.
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