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| West Indies Cricket Annual 1970 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Sir Garfield Sobers statue Barbados-30 (Photo credit: Gouldy99) |
I wrote this article in response to yet another of these
idiotic articles printed by Canadian newspapers from time to time in which a
reporter pretends cricket is a deep, dark mystery that is totally
incomprehensible to any sensible person.
Before I wrote it, I looked up the Globe
and Mail’s Web site to discover what length would be acceptable, and they
said 800 words. So I wrote it at 798 words, submitted it, and received an
automated response saying nothing over 700 words would be considered. What a
great newspaper: can’t make up its mind, eh? So here it is in its full glory:
For someone like me who has loved cricket all his life ---
and I am now in my ninth decade --- the repeated articles by North Americans,
such at that (in the Globe and Mail) by
Paul Waldie on Saturday, August 10,
treating the game as some deep dark mystery, totally beyond
comprehension, long ago became insufferable. What’s wrong with these people?
As a Canadian reporter in London
for The Montreal Star in the 1960s,
the heyday of the great West Indian teams, I did what I venture to suggest no
Canadian correspondent had ever done before: on the opening day of a major Test
match I would clear all my work away before 11 am, turn on BBC2 for the opening
session of the day’s play until lunch,
then to BBC1 for the afternoon session until the tea interval, and finally the
last session of the day, again on BBC2 until the drawing of stumps at 6 pm. I
would do that, watching every ball intently, every day for the five days of the game, and I
still remember the game elevated to beautiful artistry by such as fast bowler Wes
Hall (poetry in motion), beguiling slow bowler Lance Gibbs, and the superbly
graceful batsman, the incomparable Gary Sobers, certainly one of the greatest
of all time. The West Indies won the
five-match series in both 1963 and 1966, and I can say without hesitation that
one of the best experiences of my life was to be at Lord’s during the Saturday of the Second Test, which
eventually was drawn.
The West Indies were in deep
trouble with six wickets down in their second innings, when Sobers came to the
wicket to join his young cousin, Holford, playing in only his second Test
match. They batted all day, Holford shepherded along by the skilful and
inspirational Sobers, adding 264 runs in what is still remembered as one of the
great Test partnerships in history. Sobers was 164 not out at the end of the
day, made with magnificent strokes to all parts of the field, and Holford made
105. I have told many people about actually being there to watch this rivetting
event, and I was quite thrilled recently, when Sobers, asked which of his many
great innings was the best, said it was
his innings on that afternoon at Lord’s with his nephew that probably was the
greatest he had ever played. And I was there!
Another cricket occasion lodged irrevocably in my memory is of a day
in Trinidad where I had been covering a Black
Power demonstration in 1970, when rocks were thrown through the windows of the
Royal Bank. On my last day I went to Queen’s Park Oval, home to cricket in
Trinidad since 1896, tucked in beautifully beneath the northern hills, for a
game between Trinidad and Jamaica. I took my seat in the Learie Constantine
Pavilion, where I seemed to be the only white man in a boisterous crowd of
locals. Pretty soon the man sitting in front of me turned and asked if I was a
stranger. He said he was from San Fernando, centre of the island’s oil industry,
and wondered if I would like a drink (handing up a bottle of Scotch, and a
glass). When the lunch interval arrived he was just laying out a sumptuous
Indian meal when I was spotted by some of the revolutionaries I had interviewed
earlier in the week in Woodford Square. They beckoned me down and invited me to
sit with them. I had to defer, quoting my prior invitation.
By the middle of the afternoon,
with our bottle of Scotch almost gone, I began to understand how occasionally they
would have a riot in West Indies cricket: if a decision had gone against our
team, our emotions might well have got the better of us.
My third unforgettable cricket
experience came on the day I interviewed the great West Indian historian C.L.R.
James, whose book Beyond the Boundary
is probaby the best book ever written about a game that has always attracted
poets and writers (the great Neville Cardus was both cricket and music critic
of The Mancheter Guardian during many
of the paper’s greatest years.) James suggested we might finish our interview at the
Kennington Oval, where the Australians were playing Surrey, and as we sat there
he pointed out to me the small gate through which, when the great Indian prince
Ranjitsinji played for England in 1896, he had to enter alone because of his just
barely accepted racial coloration, while the rest of England’s team entered
through the regular gate.
The game has certainly proven
bigger than the class interests of Britain tried to make it --- infinitely
bigger --- and it seems to be only North Americans who cannot forget its
stuffy, pompous English beginnings.
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