KARACHI: The age when boys dream for girls, I was crazy for cricket, said Pakistani all-rounder Shahid Khan Afridi while talking to ARY News program Sar-e-Aam anchor, Iqrar-ul-Hassan.
The audience burst into laughter with Afridi’s this jag. He often surprises people with his knocks and statements. ARY News held a special program with Shahid Afridi to pay him tribute for his 20 years of services.
The hall roared with applause when Lala climbed the stage. Seeing excitement of youngsters before him, ‘the Pakistan’s biggest star of modern times’, as Chairman Executive Committee of Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Najam Sethi has recently described him, said it was no more important for him to get an official farewell from PCB after watching these guys.
“I used to bunk my classes to play cricket in the ground beside my school,” he said. Many a times my father would censure me for ‘wasting time’, he said adding that cricket was not that lucrative game those days.
Blood flushed through his face when the player from pakhtoon background revealed his first love and that was cricket.
The smart cricketer has been witnessed to be of short-temper on several occasions, but he has a great heart and respect for others which has been admired by his seniors on and off the field as well. He has ruled hearts of not just Pakistani fans but fans across the globe for the last 20 years.
To a question, Afridi recounted an incident when he stepped out of his house and saw an old man with white beard picking up garbage. He asked himself that this man was also a father of somebody. He brought this man home out of respect for humanity and himself fetched meal from the kitchen and fed him then gave the old man some money he had with him at that time.
“I was overwhelmed with the happiness and satisfaction that flashed in me whole the day. I had lost words to express my feelings,” he said.
Once a girl in a bridal dress came to my house and asked me to marry her, he said recalling one of the numerous weird fan encounters of his life which included girls inscribing the hard-hitter’s name on their hands.
