Play Ball

By PAUL LEVY

Oxford: For the Ashmolean Museum’s first major exhibition in its new building, the title “The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy” sounds a bit self-evident. In what other country would you expect to find the antecedents of an Italian painter who was emblematic of the High Renaissance?

In fact, despite rearranging his given names from “Gabriel Charles Dante” to “Dante Gabriel,” Rossetti (1828-82), the most influential member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or PRB, never set foot in Italy. Of the other two founders, says curator Colin Harrison in his gripping catalog essay, John Everett Millais (1829-96) only finally visited as a tourist with his wife in 1885. And though William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was in Florence and Naples a great deal between 1866 and 1868, he only went because his plans to go to the Middle East had fallen through.

On the other hand, their mentor and champion, John Ruskin (1819-1900), spent much time in Italy studying its art and architecture. Of course, there were many other artists involved with the movement, most notably Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and Frederic Leighton (1830-96), but plenty of other nonhousehold names.

One reason this show is so pleasingly unpredictable is that there was no PRB manifesto, or even organization, and ultimately their tastes and views diverged. Ruskin veered away from the austerity of the early Florentines toward the sensuous qualities of the Venetian painters of the High Renaissance—contradicting the movement’s original aims.

Initially, the “Brotherhood” was opposed to what they thought of as Renaissance practice in favor of an earlier, more spiritual Gothic style, and Rossetti in particular drew on Italian literary sources for his subjects.

Holman Hunt, on the other hand, remained so true to the ideal of painting only what you could see in front of you, that though he had completed painting his subject in the foreground, he couldn’t finish the 1863 painting of a kneeling woman (“Past and Present”) until he made a second trip to Naples in 1868, when he got yet another woman to pose for the background. It’s next to an 1864 portrait of the same woman by Robert Braithwaite Martineau(1826-69)—a recent discovery, and one of the quirky joys of this exhibition.

The recent British TV series “Desperate Romantics” encouraged speculation about the PRB’s sexuality. Here, an array of PRB lily-pad ladies, made androgynous by their prominent chins, surrounds Holman Hunt’s “Il Dolce far Niente”—his wife’s features, but surely a drag queen.

Write to Paul Levy at wsje.weekend@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W10

By CANDACE JACKSON

New York

When he’s not vacationing on his yacht, partying with celebrities like Kim Kardashian or traveling between his so-hip-it-hurts hotels in Miami, Bangkok and India, hotelier and socialite Vikram Chatwal can be found in his grown-up SoHo bachelor pad.

On the second floor of his two-story, 4,000-square-foot condominium, purchased in 2010 for just under $6 million and designed and furnished for roughly $2 million, is his “wall of self-realization,” featuring framed magazine articles of himself as well as photographs with him and his father with heads of state like Bill Clinton.

On a recent afternoon, housekeepers clad in tan tunics shuffled around as Mr. Chatwal, 40, hung out between meetings and a fashion party. Earlier that week, he’d attended a Kanye West and Jay-Z concert. “I have also been playing a lot of chess and Scrabble,” he said.

Located on a quiet side street, Mr. Chatwal’s four-bedroom, 4½-bathroom townhouse with its own street entrance is housed in Soho Mews. Completed in 2009, the Gwathmey Siegel-designed complex has large windows and residents like Justin Timberlake. While the building has a modern, metal-paneled facade, Mr. Chatwal’s home’s interiors have incorporated more traditional elements and are darker and decidedly guy-like, with a slightly more classic atmosphere than Mr. Chatwal’s sleek-looking hotels

Mark Zeff, a designer who collaborated with Mr. Chatwal on some of his hotels, said the townhouse was originally “just a big white box. It had very little character.” To give the contemporary-feeling space more of a “turn-of-the-century feel,” he incorporated darker colors like brown hardwood floors and wall paneling.

In the living room, there’s an antique-looking trunk coffee table with an elaborately designed chess set on top, flanked by dark leather couches. The bedroom walls of the master bedroom are upholstered in dark leather. In the dining room there’s a long rectangular table with burgundy upholstered chairs and benches. The main living space has a glass wall overlooking a backyard patio lined with bamboo trees.

Inspiration also came from Mr. Chatwal’s 150-foot yacht, Fathom, which he said he spent a year and a half designing with Mr. Zeff. Some of the shiny surfaces, including a mirrored wall in the living room with an invisible, built-in television screen, are reminiscent of the boat’s sleek design.

The art is contemporary and eclectic. There are neon red light bulbs in the shape of the word “Vicious” in the sitting room, next to large nude photo of a seductively posed Pamela Anderson, by the fashion photographer Sante D’Orazio. Upstairs, a surfboard leans against the wall, with the word “Gratitude” painted on it. Hanging near a wall-size frosted glass pivoting front door is a large painting comprised of rows of colored dots, by Ross Bleckner. In the upstairs hallway and near the main entry are pieces by M.F. Husain, an artist often described as the “Picasso of India.”

“The collection is very much like Vikram; from one minute to the next you don’t know what he’s going to do or say,” said Mr. Zeff.

Born in Ethiopia, Mr. Chatwal is the son of Sant Singh Chatwal, the India-born founder of Hampshire Hotels & Resorts, which owns and operates hotels around the world. In 1999, with his father’s backing, he opened the Time, his first hotel in New York, known for its futuristic design. He subsequently opened nine hotels through his father’s company under several different brands, including the moderately priced Night brand.

The higher-end Dream Hotels, with their velvet-roped lounges, high-tech touches and elaborate design elements like a swimming pool with a clear bottom visible from the lobby, have attracted high-profile parties thrown by designers like Marc Jacobs. (Rates at the Dream Downtown start around $425 a night.) Over the next few years, in a partnership with Wyndham Hotels, his company will roll out nearly 50 more Night and Dream hotels world-wide.

A former model who has acted in a handful of films, Mr. Chatwal is as known for his social life as his professional doings. He befriended celebrities like model Gisele Bundchen and, in 2006, was married in a lavish ceremony spread across three Indian cities to Priya Sachdev, a former model and investment banker, with guests like P. Diddy, Deepak Chopra and Mr. Clinton in attendance. (Now separated, Mr. Chatwal said his wife stays with him when she visits with their daughter.) Last year, he hit the tabloids when he was linked to actress Lindsay Lohan (a representative for the actress said they never dated).

Mr. Chatwal, who also owns a home in London and frequently visits India for business and to see his daughter, said he spends about seven or eight months out of the year in New York. A 3,200-square-foot unit with three bedrooms and three bathrooms in Soho Mews is currently on the market for just under $5 million.

Though he said he has slowed down his partying a little as he has gotten older, Mr. Chatwal said when he’s at home, he is rarely alone. He likes to have gatherings at his house every couple of weeks and have friends or relatives over most days.

His father recalled he once chastised his son for spending too much money on a hotel’s design, pointing out that the design bill was nearly as much as he’d spent buying hotels. The elder Mr. Chatwal said he told his son at the time, “You don’t know the value of money.”

The Time hotel eventually gained widespread recognition for its design, and Mr. Chatwal said he generally no longer questions his son’s expensive tastes. The elder Mr. Chatwal said his son’s home has a homey feel that “doesn’t make you feel like you’re in Manhattan.”

By GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI

It is unusual for an author whose collected works run to three large volumes to be remembered for a single word. Yet that is the fate of the French playwright and novelist Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). His first play, “Ubu Roi,” which opened in December 1896 at the Théatre de l’Oeuvre in Montmartre (following the French premiere of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt”), began with the title character uttering the single word: “Merdre!” Fifteen minutes of pandemonium followed, including fistfights and a liberal use of “le mot ubu,” with Jarry’s supporters screaming: “You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare either.” “What more is possible?” wrote W.B. Yeats, who had been present. “After us the Savage God.”

What was all the fuss about? “Merde” is a noun, but, like its

scatological English equivalent, it is more often used as an expletive. The extra “r” added by Jarry only propels the word further from any semantic content and into the realm of pure scream and abstraction. What upset the audience, over and above the use of an expletive in the theater, was, as Yeats grasped, that once words were freed of their semantic content, anything was possible. And this felt dangerous in the prewar years.

It had of course been done before. When Polonius in “Hamlet” suddenly asks his interlocutors: “What was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something!,” we feel the same lurch into the unknown. And, after all, what Jarry put on the stage that memorable evening was simply an update of the world of Punch and Judy—violence, absurdity, masked actors, a stage where a bed cohabits with a snowy field and cacophonous music issues from a small band onstage. Children would have had no difficulty with it, yet by the late 19th century, adult audiences had grown unused to such things.

As Alastair Brotchie recounts in “Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life,” the playwright was just 23 when “Ubu Roi” opened. The only son of middle-class Bretons, Jarry had received an excellent education, first in Rennes in Brittany, then at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris, where one of his teachers was the philosopher Henri Bergson. But instead of going on, as his mother had hoped, to the École Normale Supérieure, then as now the gateway for advancement in France, he dropped out and joined a circle of avant-garde artists and writers who congregated around the Mercure de France literary review, which included the poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, the novelist André Gide, and the painters Bonnard and Vuillard.

At school, the boys’ lives had been made a misery by a ridiculous and pompous teacher, Félix-Fréderic Hébert, and they had retaliated by composing mock-epics depicting him as a gluttonous blunderer. What better subject for a first play that would shock the bourgeoisie and cement his growing reputation among the Mercure circle? Jarry was a skillful PR man, too, and, even before it was put on, the play was already being talked about. He helped orchestrate the first-night riots, inviting his drinking companions from a local bar to turn up, heckle and, if possible, provoke a fight or two. “All these distinguished people here to see something written by our Alfred!” exclaimed one of them in amazement at the sight of the smartly got-up first night audience. “Who would have thought it?”

Despite, or because of, the riots the play was a great success. Jarry, however, proved unable to renew himself. Novels and plays, full of brilliant phrases and scenes poured out from him over the next decade, but these tended to rely on incidents in his own life made “Jarryesque” by crude satire and a liberal use of expletives. A huge play, based on the Renaissance satirist Rabelais, kept being rewritten, first for marionettes, then as an operetta. Nothing came of it.

Jarry, who had always been a heavy drinker, began to find that he could not hold his alcohol as he had once done. His debts piled up, and his friends grew tired of his constant demands on them and of his increasingly erratic behavior. All were convinced that he was drinking himself to death. He died, destitute, at the age of 34. A postmortem revealed, however, that it was meningeal tuberculosis, not drink, that had done for him.

Yet Jarry was not a typical bohemian. He had a drive and an optimism that stimulated all his friends. Though probably homosexual, he seems to have had no close relationships with either sex. Cycling, rowing and fishing were favorite activities, and all who met him commented on his independent spirit and infectious humor.

Too little of this comes through in Mr. Brotchie’s biography. A Regent of the College de Pataphysique (the spoof society founded by Jarry) and a long-time editor and translator of Jarry’s work, Mr. Brotchie perhaps knows too much about his hero. He is unable to stand back and convey his spirit to the uninitiated. His lack of perspective renders a fascinating subject almost dull.

Mr. Brotchie does, however, make an important point about our perception of Jarry, who is mainly known to English readers through Roger Shattuck’s splendid chapter on him in his critical account of Paris in the 1890s, “The Banquet Years” (1958). Shattuck depicted him as a member of a doomed generation of fin-de siècle artists. But this is to read design into a life after the event. Jarry lived as he wanted to live: fully and without giving a damn for conventions.

And “Ubu Roi,” with that word, did change a great deal. It signaled the death of both the naturalist and the symbolist theater that had dominated late-19th-century stages, and it opened the way for the revolution of 20th-century theater and the works of Brecht, Beckett and Antonin Artaud. Not bad for a 23-year-old.

Mr. Josipovici’s most recent books are “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” (Yale) and “Heart’s Wings: New and Selected Stories” (Carcanet).

Email has been so commonplace for so long that some people consider it nearly obsolete. But in the health-care profession, its use for communications between doctors and their patients is still controversial.

Opponents worry that doctors can’t read patients by reading their emails. Important signals can be missed, they say, when doctors can’t see their patients’ facial expressions, hear the tone of their voices or take note of their body language, and care can suffer as a result.

They’re also concerned about the security of email communications, as well as doctors’ potential liability for the content and results of email exchanges.

Others say email is a valuable tool in building a relationship between doctor and patient. It makes doctors more accessible, they say, and allows a more thorough exchange of information than the traditional office visits and phone calls.

The security and liability risks, they say, can be managed, and shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of providing an important service for patients.

Yes: It Builds Trust

By Joseph C. Kvedar

Talk about being behind the curve: Health-care professionals are among the last, if not the last, service providers to not use email to communicate with the people they serve. And it’s the patients who pay the price, because email communication could help improve the quality of care they receive.

There are several reasons why many health-care providers won’t use email for anything but the most basic, administrative interactions with patients, like scheduling appointments. But for many the biggest concern is possible breaches of privacy.

Sure, privacy is a problem with email. But it’s a problem with any communications system. Phone conversations can be overheard, patients’ paper files can be misplaced or left exposed to the view of people who shouldn’t see them, and so on. Emails can also end up in the wrong hands or be read by the wrong eyes.

But such fears are overblown. Privacy can be protected to a great degree by encryption of email messages, or by the use of secure messaging applications that are often a feature of a patient portal or the electronic medical-records systems offered by physicians and hospitals.

What’s more, I believe that patients understand the risks of email communication, and are willing to bear those risks in exchange for the more timely, useful and personal care that email can help bring about.

Building a Relationship

A number of studies have shown that a trusting, caring provider/patient relationship makes it more likely that a patient will follow a doctor’s advice, resulting in a better outcome. And what’s the most critical feature of a trusting, caring relationship? Robust, clear and frequent communication. This far into the 21st century, it’s hard to conceive of achieving this goal without using multiple channels of communication.

The time doctors allot to the traditional interactions of office visits and phone conversations with patients is so strictly managed these days that it rarely allows for extended discussion. Sometimes patients can’t even see a doctor without waiting for weeks, or reach a doctor directly by phone. Little wonder that so many patients feel that their doctors are inaccessible.

In my own experience, making myself available via email gives my patients a sense of direct access to me. It sends a message that I care and that I’m available to answer questions in a timely manner. It builds a bond between us that has tangible benefits for my patients’ health.

Of course, not every communication between a doctor and patient is best done by email. Doctors still need to see patients in person sometimes to accurately gauge the patient’s health and determine if a plan of care is being followed or whether changes in care are needed.

But there are plenty of interactions that don’t require face-to-face communication and that can be more effective via email. Email messages allow for clear instructions and follow-up to an office visit, eliminating or correcting some of the misunderstandings about medications or treatment plans that can result from oral communication. Email messages also can include helpful educational information for patients and links to other resources. And they create a written record that can be useful for the doctor to refer back to.

Good for Business

There are other benefits for doctors, as well. Email communication improves efficiency. Medical practices often worry that opening a new channel of communication will overwhelm the staff with more work. A number of studies have shown this typically isn’t the case. Instead, what seems to happen is that email in many cases replaces less-efficient phone tag. Most medical practices communicating with patients via email, the studies show, have seen their voice-mail volume drop.

Email can also help doctors retain patients. As new health-care models emerge, patients are gaining greater freedom to see any doctor or other health-care provider they choose, rather than being limited by prohibitive costs for venturing outside a defined group of providers. Building affinity with patients through regular communication—and providing better care as a result—can help encourage their loyalty.

Some doctors raise concerns about lack of reimbursement for email communication. But many insurers—with the notable exceptions of Medicare and Medicaid—cover online consultations. And the reimbursement landscape is changing in ways that will reward doctors for the efficiency of the care they offer patients, making email an important part of any practice.

Liability Concerns

Some doctors may also be concerned that email, as a new element of patient care, opens them up to new liability related to the content of their communications with patients, the security of those communications or other issues.

As health-care providers, our priority is to deliver the highest-quality care to our patients. Delivering that care, and communicating in any manner with patients, has inherent liability. However, we shouldn’t allow potential legal issues to prevent us from delivering care in the most effective way, including email communication. With proper guidelines for such communication, and the usual diligence providers typically employ when addressing patients, any potential legal pitfalls can be overcome.

We in health care can no longer sit back and say, “I don’t do email with patients.” We can no longer hold back from acknowledging the improved efficiency, convenience and care that can be achieved by adding email communication to our practices. It is time to move our service delivery into the 21st century.

Dr. Kvedar is the founder and director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston, which promotes the use of information technology to improve health care. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

No: You Miss Too Much

By Sam Bierstock

It’s hard to argue against something that has the power to increase communication between physicians and their patients. But given the technological and legal context of today—and with due regard for the physician’s art—I have to do just that when it comes to email.

In short, email can be useful for certain very basic patient-doctor communications, such as appointment scheduling, prescription refills and questions about drug dosages. But it is no way to practice medicine.

Providing care includes an ability to interpret body language, facial expressions and other silent forms of communication that allow doctors to assess patient reactions to information about their health (apprehension, fear, anxiety) and the accuracy of their responses to questions. Online communications eliminate the ability to interpret these important signals. People also generally are more glib and careless in email interactions than they are in face-to-face meetings, again possibly masking their true condition.

By depriving doctors of the ability to interpret key patient reactions, email could diminish the quality of care delivered. Physicians also could lose control of a patient’s care at a crucial moment: Patients may panic in response to an email about their condition, run to the Internet for self-diagnosis, make incorrect assumptions, or forward emails to others for advice (which may be good or bad, from qualified or unqualified individuals).

Inviting Trouble

The argument that email can help build a relationship between doctor and patient that will result in better care is simply too much of a generalization. The relationship that develops in an email exchange depends on the people sending the messages. Some are sensitive, intelligent and well-meaning; others are curt, demanding and have unreasonable expectations—and are willing to run to a lawyer if anything goes wrong.

We all know that there is no shortage of attorneys willing to take on a case no matter how ludicrous the claim may be. And email is a treasure chest for malpractice attorneys. Among the questions an attorney might raise in a particular case: Did the doctor scroll down to read the entire note? How long did it take to respond to an email? What was he or she doing when the email came in, and how were the doctor’s time and actions prioritized from that point on?

There are broader questions as well: What liability is associated with the accuracy or lack of accuracy of information contained in an email? What obligation does a doctor have to respond to an email from someone who isn’t his patient if that person has obtained his email address from an established patient? The breadth and level of detail in electronic health records already expose physicians’ thoughts and actions to analysis and criticism more than ever before. Adding email exchanges to the records increases the risk of loss of professional standing and personal assets.

Privacy Concerns

Email raises privacy issues, as well. Systems exist to encrypt email, and many people who are comfortable with computers can easily deal with the extra required steps to open encrypted mail—but not everyone will be willing or able to do so. What if a patient needs help in opening encrypted mail but doesn’t wish to share the information with the person they are receiving assistance from? Even if a patient can open encrypted email or can communicate with a doctor through a secure, dedicated channel online, there is no guarantee that messages will remain private—email can be forwarded, shared or misdirected entirely. Spouses, children or work colleagues may have access to a patient’s email account.

Risk of Misunderstanding

There is also no guarantee that email communications between doctors and patients will be any clearer than information imparted in person—indeed, the opposite could be true. Patients’ ability to understand what a doctor writes in an email varies enormously, and messages can almost always be misinterpreted, no matter how carefully they are written.

The problem again is not being able to see how a patient reacts. Without that input, it can be difficult for a doctor to judge whether a patient is fully understanding what’s being communicated. So the argument that email can clarify communication between doctors and patients and thus help reduce medical errors doesn’t hold water.

Even the benefit of having an email record of interactions with patients is uncertain. Besides the legal issues already raised, there are practical issues for doctors using electronic health records. These systems usually can readily capture emails, so they become part of a patient’s record. But if the system doesn’t capture specific information from the email—new symptoms, a recently developed allergy, a diagnosis made by another doctor—and record it in the appropriate place in the patient’s record, then one of two things has to happen: Either someone has to go through each email and update the patient’s record manually, or the doctor will have to review the patient’s email record along with the electronic health record for each encounter with the patient.

Either way is inefficient and creates opportunities for something to be missed.

There are patient-physician email systems, including patient portals, that function well, but frequently they confine communications to nonclinical discussions such as appointment scheduling and prescription refills or instructions. When anything more important comes up, the patient is asked to make an appointment with the doctor. The doctor’s office is where medicine should be practiced.

Dr. Bierstock is the founder and president of Champions in Healthcare, a health-care IT consulting group in Delray Beach, Fla. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

By JOE LIGHT

Harvard Business School is expanding its executive education offerings in China to meet growing demand for management instruction there, says David Yoffie, senior associate dean of executive education at Harvard.

The school has rapidly expanded overseas in the last four years, focusing on China, India and Europe with programs that teach everything from venture capital to strategy execution. China has seen the quickest growth.

But Harvard has had a trickier time in India. It found strong demand at low price levels, but companies have resisted paying the same prices Harvard charges in the U.S.

At the same time, the university is planning an expansion back home. In October, the Tata Group, an Indian conglomerate, said it would give Harvard $50 million to build a new residence hall to house executive education students.

Meanwhile, demand for Harvard’s custom programs—in which businesses hire Harvard to develop company-specific courses—has come back after a dip last year, Mr. Yoffie says.

Mr. Yoffie, who has led the executive education department since 2006, is also on the boards of Intel Corp. and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He recently spoke to the Journal.

Excerpts:

WSJ: What’s your strategy for international expansion?

Mr. Yoffie: Our strategy is to focus on key core markets and go deep in those. So we’ve focused on China, India and Europe.

WSJ: Does your content change much for international destinations?

Mr. Yoffie: If you don’t offer content tailored to the geography, it doesn’t work. We require that faculty have Chinese content if they’re going to teach in China. So you’ll see case studies of Chinese companies if you take classes there.

WSJ: How are the students there different?

Mr. Yoffie: Because we teach the Chinese courses in simultaneous translation, a very large percentage of students is Chinese-speaking with limited English, which leads to certain types of students.

The average amount of knowledge of basic accounting and finance in China is much lower than it is in the U.S. We do a program for CEOs in China where we teach those basic skills, which would never work here. CEOs in China just don’t have a lot of the formalized training that’s commonplace in the U.S.

WSJ: How have the international programs been received?

Mr. Yoffie: The demand for executive education in China is insatiable. They have a deep belief in education of all types.

India is different. Companies already have their own extensive internal training programs. There’s a lot more skepticism of the value of outside education beyond a certain price point. When we entered India, we priced very aggressively and had great demand for our programs. But we found that as we raised the prices, we met resistance.

WSJ: What has that meant for your program offerings?

Mr. Yoffie: We’ve had to go through a little trial and error. The prices we can charge for programs in India are 50% to 60% below what we can charge in China, the U.S., and Europe. We hope that as the programs become more successful, we can move prices higher, but it’s going to take a long time.

WSJ: What about Europe?

Mr. Yoffie: We’re working on that strategy right now. It’s still in its formative stages. At the moment we’re hoping to expand our programming there to eight weeks over the next two years, up from the five to six weeks we have now.

WSJ: Have Harvard’s programs come into competition with other American schools that are expanding internationally?

Mr. Yoffie: No matter where we are in the world, all of the major competitors are engaged in those marketplaces too, though some of them are in the Middle East, which we haven’t entered. We’re not stepping on each other’s toes yet. The markets in China and India are too huge for that.

WSJ: What will you be able to accomplish with the Tata Group gift?

Mr. Yoffie: Our facilities are running at 90% occupancy, which makes it difficult to introduce new programs. We also need to refurbish our old buildings. We built these buildings thinking of the Holiday Inn as a model, when today, we need to think of the Four Seasons. That said, we’ve also committed to not increasing demands on the faculty. So we’d expect an extra 20 to 30 faculty members before delivering new programs.

WSJ: Are companies continuing to order customized programs for their employees?

Mr. Yoffie: Our custom business was down 20% in 2009, but our comprehensive leadership programs and short programs made up for the drop. For the custom business, money wasn’t the issue. It’s the symbolism of sending people to Harvard at a time when you’re laying off people. It wasn’t the same for individuals. If an individual decided to go to Harvard on his own, that doesn’t have the same symbolism.

By GABRIELE MARCOTTI

Sunday morning marked the passing of Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, better known simply as Socrates. The Brazilian midfielder was 57. He is survived by his wife and six sons. Sometimes greatness is measured through intangibles like leadership and personality, sometimes it is gauged through empirical achievement, like statistics and championships. Sometimes it’s a combination of all those things. But Socrates stood on an even higher plane: Soccer will probably never again produce anyone like him.

The 1982 Brazilian team that he captained was perhaps the greatest never to win the World Cup (along with Hungary in 1954 and Holland in 1974). It was also one of the last Brazil teams to fully embody the romantic stereotype that comes to mind when we think of the green-and-gold. Sublime touches, languid pace, creativity … the sheer joy of what they call “jogo bonito,” or the beautiful game. Zico was probably the best player on that Brazil side, but Socrates was its philosophy made flesh.

At 6-foot-4 and rail-thin, he strolled through the midfield sporting his trademark beard and headband. He could have been Bill Walton’s long lost Brazilian cousin. On the ball though, he was more Magic Johnson, thanks to his signature move, the no-look backheel pass. It’s one of those things that isn’t particularly hard to do, but is frightfully difficult to do well, mainly because you have to weight and execute a pass to a point on the pitch you can’t actually see. Plus, rather than kicking the ball with your foot, where you at least have some level of sensitivity, you strike it with the bony part of your heel. When you see it these days, it’s often a hit-and-hope move of last resort. For Socrates it was his bread and butter, something he nonchalantly pulled off in congested midfields, surprising not just his opponents, but often his teammates too, who would suddenly receive assists in mid-stride.

The backheel is not something any youth coach teaches. Nor is it something any pro coach particularly wants to encourage, precisely because it is so unpredictable. But in the carefree world of 1970s Brazilian soccer it had its place, especially when used as effectively as Socrates used it.

His résumé is actually surprisingly bare. A few regional titles in Brazil, just one season in a major European league (with Italy’s Fiorentina), 60 appearances and 22 goals for an outstanding Brazil team, albeit one that failed to win the World Cup. Yet that only tells part of the story.

Even as a professional, Socrates was a throwback to the amateur era, one where athletes were not defined solely by the sport they played. You want to talk student-athlete? For the first chunk of his career he was playing full-time for Botafogo while going to medical school at the University of Sao Paulo’s campus in Ribeirao Preto. He didn’t actually practice medicine until after his retirement, but when he tucked away this rocket against the Soviet Union in Brazil’s opening match of the 1982 World Cup, he became the first (and probably last) M.D. to notch a goal on the game’s biggest stage.

He was also an activist who, while at Corinthians in the late 1970s, founded a movement opposing the country’s military regime. A self-described Maoist and pacifist, his heroes – unsurprisingly – were Che Guevara and John Lennon, making him an instant legend among the radical chic Euro-left. After retirement in 1989, he went back to university, eventually earning a Ph.D. in philosophy.

The talent and erudition, the political views and beard-and-bandanna look, all of it meshed with his avowed taste for tobacco and alcohol to make him a romantic outsized figure: part rebel, part intellectual, part Latin hunk, part superstar. You can’t definitively rule out the possibility that one day someone may match or even surpass his achievements on and off the pitch, though it may take a long while for the next doctor/political activist/World Cup legend to roll on the scene. They may even do it with a beard, shaggy hair and a bandanna.

But what is certain is that nobody will do it with the style, panache and overall “cool” of Socrates. And they certainly won’t be spraying no-look backheels all over the pitch when they do.

Gabriele Marcotti is the world soccer columnist for The Times of London and a regular broadcaster for the BBC. His column appears on Sundays.