OCTOBER 15 — To those who know the late Professor Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim, who passed away recently, Malaysia lost a great historian. The Sultan of Perak Raja Nazrin Shah was not far off to refer to Khoo as one of the best minds in the country.

In fact, Khoo was a field hockey player with the late Sultan Azlan Shah too, who rose through the ranks to be the Chief Justice of Malaysia.

The point to be made is: Malaysia is the sum of all parts; from all walks of life. Khoo, who not only wrote authoritative articles on Malaya and states of Perak in the Royal Asiatic Society of Asia Studies but in the 1980 contributed regularly to a magazine known as All Sports.

What was interesting about All Sports, which has since been discontinued, was the colourful, albeit factual, recollection of Professor Khoo Kay Kim on amazing footballers like Ghani Minhat.

Ghani Minhat represented Selangor was the fore runner of top football talents like Mokthar Dahari, James Wong, Hassan Sani, Zainal Abidin Hassan and Khalid Ali, incidentally the elder brother of Zainal.

Professor Khoo was also able to speak highly of the Malaysian Hockey Team that reached the semi-finals of the 1981 World Cup held in Kuala Lumpur, due to the scoring prowess of Poon Fook Loke, and Stephen Van Huizen, who later became the national hockey coach of Malaysia.

Khoo's Annals of Malay History is a must read for his pith and brevity. More importantly Khoo, of the Peranakan background, built an inter racial family.

One of his sons was a disciple of the Indian classical maestro Ramli Ibrahim. The works of Ramli Ibrahim is both transcendental and beautiful as it involves a Malay practices the beauty of the Indian classical art form, indeed passing it down to the family of Khoo, all without anyone questioning if the art form — since it originated from India — was a slight on the “Malay dignity.”

Khoo had many admirers in the Japanese academia too, two of whom are Assistant Professor Sadhiko Hirakawa at Waseda University and Professor Jun Ozawa, who is now retired, but considered a doyen of Malay Studies in Japan.

But what makes Khoo an amazing intellectual was his ability to whizz in and out of various fields, be they sports, even foreign policy.

Khoo once explained to South China Morning Post that “there was no need to compete with China. China has a voracious appetites of high quality tropical fruits, such as durians, pineapple and papaya. All Malaysia needed to do was to be part of the agricultural supply chain of a China that was increasingly having an acquired taste of South-east Asia local fruits. And the trade balance would eventually be in both countries' favour beyond the support or export of bird's nest alone.”

On Malaysia, the future of the country, according to Khoo, rests with it's unity and compact but unorthodox understanding of the totality of the Malaysian history. Whether the football captaincy alternates between Soh Chin Sun, Santokh Singh, or Mokhtar Dahari, even Shukor Salleh from Penang, the key was a singular focus to defeat the opponent.

In this sense, the talk about who would be the eighth PM of Malaysia is not as important as the promise that was made by the people prior to 14th general election on May 9 2019. Since the people elected a system where the PM would first be Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed, followed by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, the key is that both have agreed on the plan and committed to the plan and it is best to leave it to them.

That, in essence, was what the full scholarship of Khoo evinced, which is the same kind of scholarship exuded by the likes of Professor Terence Gomez and Professor KS Jomo. Principled, cool and sassy to say the least.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.