J Hen­ry

"Crick­et is a gen­tle­man's game...so you'd prob­a­bly be a gen­tle­man if you're play­ing crick­et," laughs Daren Gan­ga, icon­ic sports­man and cap­tain of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Crick­et team. But in re­al­i­ty, he be­lieves it's about a lot more than that. His de­f­i­n­i­tion of a gen­tle­man? "Some­one who car­ries him­self with a cer­tain mea­sure of class," he says. "And when I say class, I mean how they speak, how they con­duct them­selves, how they op­er­ate with the fair­er sex as well; some­one whose in­tegri­ty isn't ques­tioned, and has an hon­est, un­bi­ased way of deal­ing with things." His gen­tle­man­ly man­ner­isms he says, had both in­for­mal and for­mal in­flu­ences, from his par­ents, as well as, of course, crick­et. About his parental in­flu­ences he says, "I think that is tes­ti­mo­ny to what I am to­day.

Sim­ple things as ta­ble man­ners, eti­quette, po­lite­ness, com­mon cour­tesy to peo­ple and the way you do things; those are things that I would have picked up while I was grow­ing up." Crick­et on the oth­er hand has taught him some­thing else, "there's a cer­tain pro­to­col in terms of how you op­er­ate with dif­fer­ent peo­ple. "When you have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to meet peo­ple like the Queen of Eng­land and Nel­son Man­dela and peo­ple in very high of­fices you know it's some­thing that you can't take for grant­ed and there's no ad hoc way about go­ing and deal­ing with peo­ple in those po­si­tions. So from a for­mal point of view we would have re­ceived groom­ing with re­spect to in­ter­act­ing with Prime Min­is­ters and Min­is­ters and peo­ple in high of­fice."

A Man with In­ter­na­tion­al Style

"I had the priv­i­lege of trav­el­ling at a very ten­der age, and have had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to shop at dif­fer­ent fash­ion cap­i­tals like Capetown and Jo­han­nes­bourg in South Africa; Mel­bourne and Syd­ney in Aus­tralia; in Lon­don, Eng­land; even in the sub­con­ti­nents, in Mum­bai and all these big cities, and that has sort of shaped my sense of style," ex­plains Gan­ga, who ad­mits to hav­ing a pen­chant for clothes with more of an Ital­ian / Eu­ro­pean cut. "As a teenag­er, when I had just bro­ken in­to the in­ter­na­tion­al style, I was ob­sessed with Ar­mani cloth­ing and Ver­sace be­cause of the cuts," he con­fessed. "I tend to pur­chase most of my cloth­ing from the Eu­ro­pean mar­ket where I get the close fit­ting cuts. Ar­mani is one of my favourite de­sign­ers; be­cause they're sim­ple, yet classy."

A life of fit­ness

Be­ing an icon­ic sports­man doesn't come with­out in­tense phys­i­cal train­ing, but for Gan­ga, his fit­ness goes be­yond his craft. "I feel very lethar­gic if I don't work out; if I don't have some sort of phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty," says Gan­ga, "and I feel that is some­thing that is go­ing to stay with me for the rest of my life. "I en­joy en­durance run­ning be­cause ob­vi­ous­ly, crick­et de­mands that, but I do en­joy run­ning for long pe­ri­ods," he con­tin­ues. "I'm not so much of a per­son who would work hard at get­ting a beach body though," he ex­plained. "I fo­cus more on keep­ing my en­tire body fit rather than try­ing to do a lot of bench press­es to have a big chest, or to do a lot of fore­arm curls to get your bi­ceps and tri­ceps huge. I'm one that will be con­tent with hav­ing an even shaped body that is fit and sup­ple."

A phil­an­thropist

"The Daren Gan­ga Foun­da­tion is a char­i­ty foun­da­tion that was set up in my name to help young peo­ple," says Gan­ga about his main phil­an­thropic ini­tia­tive. "My ex­pe­ri­ences ear­ly on in my life have helped me to ap­pre­ci­ate the help and sup­port of dif­fer­ent peo­ple around me and how very in­stru­men­tal and crit­i­cal it was to the per­son that I am to­day. This is my way of giv­ing back, not just to the com­mu­ni­ty in Bar­rack­pore (where I grew up) but to the wider T&T youth, be­cause the foun­da­tion's main ob­jec­tive is to pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ties and ex­po­sure to young peo­ple; to de­vel­op both their aca­d­e­mics and their ex­tracur­ric­u­lar tal­ents." Among the foun­da­tion's char­i­ty events is an an­nu­al golf tour­na­ment, which is held every Glo­ri­ous Sat­ur­day. "It's a fun, ba­sic tour­na­ment. I had no choice but to im­prove my golf so I could at least win a prize at my own char­i­ty event," joked Gan­ga, who re­cent­ly pur­chased a Nin­ten­do WII gam­ing sys­tem (where he prac­tices his golf.)

Not afraid of com­mit­ment

Gan­ga, who tied the knot in 2007, says he has found his true love.

"I found the per­son with whom I want­ed to spend the rest of my life, who's got all the qual­i­ties that I want­ed in a wife. I'm re­al­ly young in terms of be­ing mar­ried but what I can say is � its got its chal­lenges. It's some­thing you've got to work on. You learn as you go along, by tri­al and er­ror. We all would make mis­takes but I think if you have an un­der­stand­ing, you would be able to work things out."

De­sires of Fa­ther­hood

"You can con­sid­er me a po­ten­tial fa­ther," beams Gan­ga. "I would con­sid­er it a priv­i­lege to be a fa­ther and to have a child. I can't say that would be any­time time soon though, be­cause my wife is still study­ing, I'm still study­ing, so we've had to put that plan on hold for the mo­ment; but we're try­ing to make the right de­ci­sion and make sure the time is right. "I'm hope­ful that God will bless us with kids when the time is right and hope­ful­ly I would be able to ded­i­cate suf­fi­cient time to my kids. I would love to say I'd like to have enough kids to form my own crick­et team," he laughed, "but I don't think eco­nom­i­cal­ly, that that will be a wise thing to do. But yes though, I prob­a­bly would like to have (he paus­es) more than a cou­ple. But again time will dic­tate ex­act­ly how much." Boy or girl? "I'm not picky at all," he smiled, "let God de­cide what I will have, and I will be very much con­tent­ed."