He was drunk, surely. What other explanation could there be for the giddy spectacle unfolding before our disbelieving eyes.
Few of his strokes made much sense, not in the received wisdom of how to hit a cricket ball anything like properly and not according to the science that explained which muscles did what in the human body.
But one stroke made no sense at all. His backside stuck out towards square leg, his head wobbled uncertainly somewhere past the line of his off stump, he kept his elbows tucked into his ribs, and only the very edges of his heels were on the ground at the fateful moment. He looked like a poorly erected tent a moment away from collapse.
And yet, and still, and somehow the ball scythed, utterly deliberately, through a gap of perhaps two metres between the fielders at gully and point and kept going, all along the ground, all the way to the boundary.
He played that . whatever it was . and all his other whatever they were having fetched his splayed front foot from outside leg stump, crooked his skinny arms, and aimed his soup strainer of a moustache squarely on an attack studded with Allan Donald, Fanie de Villiers, Meyrick Pringle and Brian McMillan. It was Charlie Chaplin versus the Fantastic Four.
The faster and more furiously they thundered at him the more he smiled, widened his eyes and waggled his head. Several times, for no discernible reason, he threw back that crazy head of his and sent a laugh looping into the sky.
Pissed as a coot. Had to be. Thing is, he stayed sloshed for the best part of four hours, twiddled his 'tache at 144 balls and scored 107.
He was Javed Miandad at Buffalo Park in East London on February 15 1993, and he was beautiful.
The profanity in pads was followed by the sacred swing of Wasim Akram, who took the new ball and with it 5/16 in 31 deliveries. He wasn't as much fun to watch as Miandad but his brilliance was arresting.
No one in attendance would have been at all surprised had Wasim bowled a ball that took all three stumps out of the ground and then changed course to skip clear across the Indian Ocean, its waves lapping nearby Eastern Beach, all the way back to Pakistan.
Also at Buffalo Park, not quite two years later, Waqar Younis ended New Zealand's innings with a hat-trick - Chris Harris, Chris Pringle and Richard de Groen, all bowled, all bamboozled, all made to look silly by balls that veered every which way, and at pace.
You fancied you could hear relief emanating from the dressing room, where the likes of Ken Rutherford and Stephen Fleming would have been quietly grateful that they hadn't had to face those deliveries.
More than any other team, Pakistan come to entertain, and to give you reasons to remember them. And they don't do so only on the field.
Younis Khan's pronouncements at press conferences were bits of sentences bound tightly together by the most irresistible enthusiasm and fired staccato style in what may or may not have been something fairly close to English.
In Bulawayo, during the 2003 World Cup, Younis and Inzamam-ul-Haq came close to blows in the wake of an overeager tackle in what should have been a warm and fuzzy game of pre-training session football.
Shoaib Akhtar went further in the dressing room at St George's Park in 2007, using a bat to hit a teammate.
Most infamously, from what we know about what Pakistan have got up to in Southern Africa, in 1998 Mohammad Akram and Saqlain Mushtaq said they were beaten up and mugged outside the Pakistan team's Joburg hotel.
Actually, they had paid the painful price for getting snarky with the heavies at a couple of strip clubs.
The racist slur Sarfraz Ahmed slung at Andile Phehlukwayo at Kingsmead the other day was not at all entertaining, but it was in the tradition of Pakistan refusing to be boring.
They couldn't be if they tried, not that they are likely to try anytime soon...