No Win Race. Derek A. Bardowell

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СКАЧАТЬ very serious times and all sorts of things are motivating people – religious belief and racial conviction – and most of all these resentments. And I think it’s rather sad if you need a resentment like that to fire you up. You should glory in the gift that you’ve been given. I mean, he was a born athlete, Viv Richards. He surely could have gone out there and done just as well and retained his cool. I wish he didn’t get angry so often, because I believed in him. But after that evening I was left quite worried, I thought, Well, he’s talking to young kids, and if he preaches that sort of stuff, the world’s not going to be a very peaceful place.’⁸

      In Richards, cricket had found a player that had been fundamentally rupturing the status quo. Rupturing the norm. Rupturing every conceivable notion of what a West Indian cricketer could and should be. He had been creating a new blueprint. Changing the narrative away from the compliance demanded by the civilising abolitionists. Richards’ assertiveness was a threat. His politics became a proxy for radicalism. England had for many years treated the West Indies, both politically and in cricket, with contempt. It had not been right, in their eyes, for Richards to be fuelled by oppressions of the past; a past not relevant to the present or to the future.

      My mum couldn’t watch. The ‘othering’ of blackness, the casual racism, the biased commentary – my mum felt every remark, every dig, every complaint. She knew that most commentators had little or no conception of where these players had come from. Or where she’d come from. If in Ali–Holmes I saw for the first time vulnerability in my father, in my mother’s response to the critics of the West Indies, I had seen where some of my politics had come from. A staunch and boundless love of black people. For the first time, I recognised that the fear I felt because of others’ fear was in fact real. Not an abstract conception I had been internalising, running away from, trying to explain, failing to explain. The switch. A switch. I thought less about what we as black people were doing wrong and more about what the mainstream media had been claiming we were doing wrong. Not us. But them.

      As the West Indies’ dominance continued, the criticisms heightened. Not just Richards. Clive Lloyd – bespectacled, respected, more diplomat than cricketer – had been severely criticised for his tactics. The coverage of his captaincy often felt like he had betrayed his colonial masters; he had failed to follow in the footsteps of Sir Frank Worrell and others who never used such tactics. Lloyd had little or no respect for the former rulers. Didn’t care what they said, or how they portrayed him.

      In the eyes of the media and English public, it always appeared as if the West Indies were never worthy winners. They won because so many of their players developed their talent in the English county cricket system. They succeeded because of natural athleticism. They were successful because they cheated. Implied. Never really said. The bouncers unfair, the slow over rates an unsportsmanlike tactic. They made the game boring, they were boorish. The criticisms became a perverse obsession, lacking critical thought. The criticisms had frequently been vile. Often laced with what many would see as racist or stereotypical undertones. Usually delivered by the white establishment’s recognised names.

      ‘Until we can breed seven-foot monsters willing to break bones and shatter faces, we cannot compete against these threatening West Indians. Even the umpires seem to be scared that the devilish-looking Richards might put a voodoo sign on them!’ from a letter published in Wisden Cricket Monthly.⁹

      ‘The summer game, it had become something else. It had lost its romance, it had lost its sportsmanship, it had lost its lovely edge; it was now a place where people got frightened,’ said David Frith, editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly.¹⁰

      ‘Their game is founded on vengeance and violence and fringed by arrogance,’ said Frith.¹¹

      ‘Most people on whose support English cricket depends, believe monotonous fast bowling to be both brutalising the game and boring to watch,’ said the Sunday Times’ Robin Marlar.¹²

      English journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse was ‘sickened’ by ‘the downright thuggery of fast bowlers working in relays to remove batsmen by hurting and intimidating them’.¹³

      John Woodcock, editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, wrote an article with a picture captioned ‘the unacceptable face of Test cricket’.¹⁴ He had also classified the West Indies’ fast bowling as ‘chilling’ and warned that its ‘viciousness was changing the very nature of the game’.¹⁵

      ‘It seemed that cricket had been transformed into something really ugly,’ said Frith.¹⁶

      West Indian supporters felt every comment. And we probably only heard or read about a quarter of them. I did not realise until much later, when books such as Mike Marqusee’s Anyone But England and Simon Lister’s Fire in Babylon were released, just how bad the commentary and views published had really been. Seven-foot monsters, devilish-looking, vengeance, violence, brutalising, thuggery, viciousness, ugly. Shut your eyes. Hear those words and those phrases. Not describing slavery, colonialism or apartheid, but cricket. Twitter language. YouTube comments. Comments that can easily be traced to age-old stereotypes of black folks.

      If you can’t beat them on the field of play, change the rules of the game. How else do you undermine a movement? The media mediates, sways public opinion. There were calls for changes. Increase the over rate. Sanctions. Reduce the number of non-English players in the County Championship. Reduce bouncers. The media and authorities conspired to undermine the impact and indeed the legacy of the West Indies.

      The West Indies never stood a chance. No infrastructure. No sway. Still dependent, colonialised. Beginning of the end. The West Indies never controlled the narrative, never had control of the game in the areas where it really mattered. They always had a cricket board with no money, a board that bowed to bigger boards, aboard someone else’s ship.

      The colonial attitude of the establishment had not just been confined to the West Indies team. As a West Indies fan, I never followed the black players who represented the English national team. They felt like traitors, sell-outs. But those black players had been subjected to just as much hostility from the press as the West Indies team. And they were meant to be allies.

      In 1980, Barbadian Roland Butcher became the first black cricketer to represent England. Through the eighties, a steady trickle of black players like Gladstone Small, Wilf Slack, Monte Lynch, Norman Cowans, Phil DeFreitas and Devon Malcolm played for England, alongside several white foreign-born cricketers. The eighties had been a bad decade for English cricket. An emerging narrative through this period had been the English team’s identity crisis, born from the ‘foreign’ make-up of the team.

      You could hear it in the commentary. You could see it in the press coverage. Nothing quite as blatant or emotive as the boos on a football pitch. But similar criticisms you’d hear about black footballers and whether they were loyal to England, bled for England.

      In 1990, Tory MP Norman Tebbit would crystalise the sentiment when he questioned which side Britain’s Asian population would cheer for in a game of cricket. The Tebbit test brought to the surface the issues of belonging and national identity when he said, ‘Are they still harking back to where you came from or where you are?’¹⁷ For Tebbit, living in England meant supporting England over one’s place of birth. By giving up your culture, this would signify true loyalty to England. As the story evolved, Tebbit would apply the theory to second-generation blacks too.

      To me and my friends, Tebbit’s question sounded archaic and of little relevance to us. Like many of the kids at my school, I supported the West Indies in cricket, Brazil in football and Great Britain in basketball. Sugar Ray Leonard was my favourite boxer. For me, shared experiences remained stronger than a shared birthplace. I felt safer around my black and Asian peers than white. Practically all the conflict I had faced during СКАЧАТЬ