Proccie was the affable captain of Gloucestershire whose name conjured a cricketer of a higher calling, writes Alan Wilkins.

There was no-one quite like him before, and I don't believe we will see anyone like him again. He was unique with a set of skills combined with the fiercest competitive edge that made him an opponent's nightmare. He was the Great All-Rounder.

Michael John Procter was the reason I made the emotional decision to leave my home county, Glamorgan, in Wales, crossing over the Severn Estuary into England to join Gloucestershire for the summer of 1980. Disgruntled at Glamorgan, Procter made an offer I couldn't refuse. It was the stuff of dreams. Mike Procter just asked me to join his county!

Mike Procter matched the leading players of his era - from Garry Sobers at the start of his career to Ian Botham, Imran Khan, Richard Hadlee and Kapil Dev towards the end. It was just that Procter had an 'X' factor that, in my opinion, made him stand taller than the others. The blonde tanned cricketing adonis for whom adoration came from every angle - fans, team-mates and even opposition players - and at times the county was referred to as "Proctershire" for the heroic deeds performed by this extravagantly gifted South African.

Proccie was the affable captain of Gloucestershire whose name conjured a cricketer of a higher calling, one of the most revered cricketers in the world and, in terms of stature, possibly second only to Sobers. He played cricket with a cavalier freedom that was mesmerising. He was genuinely quick, charging in to bowl off a long run with the most explosive whirlwind delivery motion that bamboozled the best batsmen of the day. Fast inswinging menacing deliveries with a yorker akin to a guided exocet. He resorted to off-spin when he felt the situation necessitated it. He stood majestically at first slip (I never saw him spill a chance) and he was a magnificent stroke player with the bat with immense power emanating from a pair of shoulders you would normally see on a heavyweight boxer. Procter's batting was based on classical orthodoxy, but there were few inhibitions. He punched his weight with devastating power and effect, as aesthetic on the eye as it was brutal in its destruction of opposition bowlers.

In fourteen seasons for Gloucestershire in England, with the southern hemisphere summers spent with Rhodesia and Natal, Procter made 21,936 first-class runs at an average of 36.01 and took 1,417 wickets at 19.53 apiece. His ability to tear the heart out of any opposition batting line-up was reflected in his four hat-tricks in first-class cricket and six consecutive first-class hundreds - for Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a participant in South Africa's Currie Cup competition - a feat that he shares with England's Corinthian, CB Fry, from another century and Sir Don Bradman.

He was the first cricketer to score a hundred and take a hat-trick in the same match twice. In 1977 in a one-day semi-final at the County Ground, Southampton, he blasted four wickets in five balls to blow away the Hampshire top order that included Gordon Greenidge and Barry Richards. The official TV footage is still there to see and once you watch the devastating spell you'll see that he actually took five in six but the umpire simply couldn't bring himself to lift the finger yet again!

The South African Government's policy of apartheid meant that Procter played in only seven Test Matches, all against Australia, who were probably the best team in the world then, taking 41 wickets at 15 runs apiece. Procter therefore had to be content to play non-international cricket from 1970 onwards. He also excelled in his brief stints for the Rest of the World in five "Tests" against England in 1970 and in Kerry Packer's breakaway World Series Cricket in Australia in 1977-78. But it was at the County Ground in Bristol, the HQ of Gloucestershire CCC, where he was regarded with the same awe as WG Grace, Gilbert Jessop and Wally Hammond.

He had it all. He bowled as fast as anyone in the land. He was as intimidating as any of the fast bowlers of the time, including the great West Indians, and his cover drive was a stroke of such beauty that even Hammond, or Tom Graveney would have approved. Or in the modern game, as good as anything Rohit Sharma could produce. Proccie was the hero for legions of young cricketers, a character out of the 'Boy's Own' newspaper, a legend for the ages.

I never saw Keith Miller play, but Ian Chappell's description of his fellow great Australian was possibly why many in the game considered Mike Procter as near to Miller as anyone had been before. Keith Miller was an Australian Test cricketer and a Royal Australian Air Force pilot during World War II. Miller is widely regarded as Australia's greatest ever all-rounder. His ability, irreverent manner and good looks made him a crowd favourite wherever he played. Proccie followed suit in another era.

Procter the captain led by example and intuitively. It was difficult not to be awe of this goliath of cricket, so much so that when I first joined Gloucestershire I addressed him as 'Captain' and never by name. Not one for extended conversations certainly when it came to match days Proccie expected you to get close to what his acceptable standards were. Easier said than done.

He had the means to raise his game to even greater heights as and when the match situation demanded. I recall one of the most phenomenal centuries he crafted on the picturesque ground of Cheltenham College against visitors, Middlesex, for whom his great South African friend, Vince van der Bijl, was playing. Big Vince knocked his off-stump out of the ground in the first innings but Proccie had the final word in the second as he nullified his Natal team-mate with a display of batting that had all of us in the changing room in raptures and that included the superb Zaheer Abbas, another man of Gloucestershire's folklore.

Procter's county career was cut short by a crippling knee injury which consigned his mesmerising fast bowling to history much to the delight of a platoon of county batsmen all over England. After his playing days Proccie ventured into the television commentary box for a while then turned his hand to becoming an ICC Match Referee, but somehow, seeing him confined to a room watching cricket all day long seemed incongruous to the warrior he once was as a player. He was the national coach for South Africa when they were readmitted to international cricket. Bitterness at missing out on a long international career never surfaced. He went on to become his country's convenor of selectors.

In latter years he set up the Mike Procter Foundation, a project designed to improve the lives of thousands of underprivileged children in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal, coaching sport and life skills to those who flocked to his classes. The Foundation will continue in his name, as benefactors have promised to continue the world of Mike Procter and cement his legacy in his home city of Durban.

Tenacious, free-spirited and supremely gifted, Mike Procter played a brand of cricket that left people gasping in awe, many in his slipstream. His presence on the field was magisterial. He was the Chief Magistrate. The Governor. Sometimes cavalier but always with steel in his DNA, he didn't suffer fools, but he made many suffer in his tenure as the greatest all-round cricketer of my generation.