It isn’t just cricket

Serious cricketing fans probably sleep with a copy of James’s masterpiece in the bedside-table drawer, along with their Holy Book. They should stop reading this column at once. I am addressing myself here to people like me — more casual cricket lovers.

What interests me, in large part, is how the game remains part of the national psyche of many Caribbean peoples despite football being the most played sport in the region. In Barbados, where everyone plays some sport or other, and even geriatrics compete in the Seniors Games, cricket is still at the top of the tree in status terms, in Guyana, too. In Jamaica and TT it seems to have to fight more to retain its pre-eminence. I wonder at the importance in this of having relatively successful football teams and stars.

And further challenge is coming from more spectacular sports such as car racing. In Barbados, at any time about 10,000 people turn out for the country’s biggest spectator sport. The reason, apparently, is fashion — men in designer clothes, with sexy young women in equally expensive garb and perfect make up, the bubbly and, of course, the fast cars.

Car racing has always had more class than football and is the new status symbol of the glamorous young, but it still doesn’t have cricket’s snob value.

And for sure, when any Caribbean island has one of its own reigning as ‘world’s best’ whatever, be it Lara, or Viv Richards from Antigua or Michael Holding of Jamaica then the game reaches new heights of popularity. Even my octogenarian mother, who had not been to a cricket ground since my father whitened his pads for weekend play as a young man, happily accompanied me to a crowded Guaracara Park recently to see the great man score a couple of runs for TT.

Lara for captain, again, was always going to intrigue somebody as much as why Frank Worrell has not been declared a national hero in Barbados. Sir Garfield Sobers, their only living hero, was for his “extraordinary achievement and highest excellence during 20 years on the international cricket pitch.”

If TT were to name its national heroes, I wonder if Learie Constantine would be among them? Perhaps he would be seen off by Lara in the way Frank Worrell was from the Bajan list because two cricketers were too many, having to make way for politicians and liberators from slavery.

CLR would cry “foul.” Beyond the Boundary is the testament to cricket’s role in the politics and freedom of Caribbean people. He wrote that Sobers “was the greatest of living batsmen” and might have said the same about Lara but he gives his utmost respect to Worrell and Constantine. Of the former he says “Worrell not only said what should be done. Over and over again he did it himself in the very way he wanted things done… I caught a glimpse (1961 WI-Aussie test) of what brought a quarter of a million inhabitants of Melbourne into the streets to tell the West Indian cricketers good-bye, a gesture spontaneous and in cricket without precedent, one people speaking to another. Clearing their way with bat and ball, West Indians at that moment had made a public entry into the comity of nations.”

As for Constantine, he rose from average bowler to glory in 1928 in England when he “took 100 wickets, made 1000 runs and laid claim to being the finest fieldsman yet known…. (he) revolted against the revolting contrast between first-class status as a cricketer and his third-class status as a man.”

He was a TT national hero in his time, but his father had got there first. Constantine Snr, in 1900, hit the first West Indies century at Lord’s against the greatest of the day, WG Grace.

Learie had heroism in his DNA and he used it to great effect. In England, on the pitch in the 1930s he was considered the greatest league player of all time.

Off the field, he used his celebrity to make the lives of West Indians better. In TT he pushed for self-government. He became a lawyer of distinction, the Minister of Works, later our High Commissioner to London, and in 1969, the first West Indian Peer of the Realm, the Rt Hon Lord Constantine.

Not bad going for just a sportsman you might think, one who when he started his career couldn’t even afford all the kit, but who knew there were political reasons for that. He made cricket his secret weapon.