Pataudi’s education had swapped Winchester for Oxford University – Balliol College, to study Arabic and French.
On the cricket field, Tiger continued to dish out lessons of his own.
Having scored a century against rivals Cambridge on debut, by the summer he had racked up 1,216 runs and was on track to break the university record run total for a season – 1307 – which had been set by his own father.
But this would be a run chase that came to a sudden halt.
Following a match for Oxford at Sussex, Pataudi was involved in a car crash.
A shard of glass from the smashed windscreen threatened to shatter the dreams of a young cricketer now blinded in his right eye.
As Sussex Cricket chair Jon Filby explains, Pataudi had the option to walk home from a restaurant that was quite close to his hotel but instead jumped in a car with Oxford University teammate Robin Waters.
As they turned onto the seafront road a car drove into them, It was an awful accident that had huge ramifications for him.
Who’s to know how great he would have been?
While many feared this would end Tiger’s cricket career, remarkably, he was soon back in the nets.
Defiantly adapting his batting skills – re-learning the game he loved, as BBC Cricket commentator Prakash Wakankar explains.
“Tiger chose to pick the right image of the inside of the two balls he saw when he played.
“To be able to go on and get a hundred so soon after his injury – well, his legend started to grow.”