Читать книгу No Win Race - Derek A. Bardowell - Страница 9

IN MY HOUSE, THE ATHLETES my father and mother admired did not try to hide. The foremost sporting names had been the boxer Muhammad Ali and the West Indies cricket team. I kind of missed the Ali era, only catching the tragic tail end of the most magnificent career in sport’s history. I grew up at a time when Larry Holmes ruled boxing’s heavyweight division, from 1978 to 1985. In truth, there was little to choose between Ali and Holmes. Both were wonderful boxers, great thinkers, with piercing jabs and an ability to control the narrative in the ring, to improvise, to ensure they had the final say in the storyline. Both were technically gifted and incredibly tough with a frightening ability to absorb huge punishment without being knocked out. Both looked good too, like lighter-weight fighters. Most heavyweights are lumbering, crude, one-dimensional, mechanical. Imposing. But difficult to watch. Ali and Holmes had speed, mobility, fluidity.

Holmes couldn’t scale to Ali’s heights though. Couldn’t come close. He didn’t have the charisma. He didn’t fight with the same balletic grace. Didn’t have Ali’s back story, the way he stood up for black people, his eloquence, his beauty, his ability to be vocal in situations when he had been expected to be compliant. Holmes, it seemed to many, stood more for money than politics. And rarely would his fights have as much drama as Ali’s. Holmes’ fights were well scripted, technically sound, not expansive, unrepeatable, intimidating in their excellence. Ali won against the odds. Performed miracles. Against Sonny Liston in 1964. Against George Foreman in 1974. On both occasions people feared for Ali’s health because, like Mike Tyson in the eighties, Liston and Foreman were frightening, more than human. Ali mocked fear and his opponents before the fight. He cracked jokes, made up poems, all while talking black politics, black liberation. All while spending as much time with ordinary people – signing autographs, delivering magic tricks, listening to their stories – as he was in training. Then he’d control the narrative in the ring. Perform a miracle. Then he’d crack more jokes afterwards. Talk more black politics, spend more time with people. Ali was the most grassroots megastar ever. Likely the first and only sports star crowned the most famous person on the planet.

Budd Schulberg, the Academy Award winning screenwriter of On the Waterfront, once wrote: ‘Nothing reflects character more nakedly than boxing.’ Schulberg once regarded the heavyweight champion of the world ‘with a reverence just this side of religious fervour’. According to Schulberg: ‘The heavyweight champion was no mortal man but stood with Lancelot and Galahad.’ Ali stood with Lancelot and Galahad, perhaps more so than any of the great heavyweights, from Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey to Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano.

Ali and Holmes faced each other on 2 October 1980, a few days after the Minter–Hagler fight. Ali was 38, Holmes 30. Ali had been retired for about two years. Holmes had graduated from being Ali’s former sparring partner to world champion. Ali by this point had already started slurring his words, walking slower, talking slower.

Ali’s biographer, Thomas Hauser, recalled on ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary episode Muhammad and Larry: ‘Before the Nevada State Athletic Commission licensed Ali to fight, they asked him to go to the Mayo Clinic for a full report. That report said that when Ali tried to touch his finger to his nose, there was a slight degree of missing the target. He couldn’t hop with the agility that doctors expected he would. He had trouble coordinating the muscles he used in speech. This is before he fought Larry Holmes.’

By fight night, Ali looked sedated. He was Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. For ten rounds, Holmes hit him. Over and over. In round nine, Ali screamed. Ali didn’t fight back, couldn’t fight back. But he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t go down. Holmes kept looking at the referee, he wanted him to stop the fight. He wouldn’t. Eventually Angelo Dundee, Ali’s long-time trainer, threw in the towel. Holmes cried.

I remember when highlights of the fight were shown on television. Not so much the details of what happened, more my father’s response to the fight. I had little to no conception of Ali’s full history, the 1960 Olympics, the poetry, Henry Cooper, Liston, the Nation of Islam, the Vietnam War, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, ‘The Thrilla in Manilla’. My father cherished Ali’s defiance and willingness to confront mainstream America, to defeat white America. If the Black-British footballers in the seventies, often victims of abuse from crowds, had symbolised what black people were going through in their everyday lives, Ali had been emblematic of what we could be. He did not bow when criticised for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and converting to Islam. He did not bow when he had been threatened with jail and lost his world titles because he refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He had been the highest profile athlete across the globe, yet he did not minimise his politics to attain or retain fame. He used his platform to highlight the plight of black people across the globe. With black history having been bleached, silenced and obscured, in education, on television, Ali was our great hero, our great king, a symbol of a heritage that had been denied, the black messiah.

I knew Ali had been an important figure to my father. My father would often pull an Ali pose in photographs with me. He’d pretend to be Ali when play-boxing against me. When Leon Spinks, a man who had no front teeth and the scowl of a demoted worker, defeated Ali in ’78, our house mourned as if a major political figure had been assassinated or something.

At the point when the Ali–Holmes fight was about to start, my father put on his coat to leave the house. I thought my father’s memory must have been fading. This was Ali. This was boxing. This was how we bonded. Yet what I had been seeing on the screen was not always what my father had been feeling. What I witnessed on the surface rarely reflected the reality of the situation. We were, in many ways, bonded by sport, but at times miles apart.

Maybe my dad knew the result. Maybe he knew the inevitability of the result. I didn’t. I asked where he was going. Informed him that the Ali fight was about to start. He turned, and I’ll never forget the look on his face. Anger mixed with hurt. A kind of disempowering look. Must have been the first time I’d seen my father display any level of vulnerability. When he said something like I don’t want to see that fight, and then left, something sank inside of me.

Ali retired in 1981. At the time, I was still at an age where my parents’ Jamaican culture conflicted with my external environment. I preferred chips to my mother’s rice and peas. At home, the sounds of Max Romeo and Bob Marley were a constant. But I preferred Adam and the Ants. In my house, my father had two large speakers (roughly the height of an average year four pupil) in our living room. Never saw speakers that size in my white friends’ houses. My father liked cricket. I preferred football. I was more cockney than Jamaican. Like two different worlds.

My attitude changed between 1981 and 1984. I had started to become more comfortable with my home world and friends with shared experiences. This gave me a sense of belonging, it welcomed me, strengthened me, put me at ease. Unlike the external environment – school, shops, transport – it had not been hostile or limiting. My emerging love of the West Indies cricket team played a fundamental role in that shift. The West Indies represented strength, they represented my parents’ history, my heritage. No single team captivated me more than the West Indies side that toured England in 1984.

Cricket had always been a feature in the stories that my parents told me about Jamaica. They grew up in Galina, a small district in the hilly parish of St Mary in the northeast. St Mary had been the former residence of playwright Noël Coward who lived in a place called Firefly. Apparently, Coward did not like to entertain guests there, so he kept a guesthouse by the sea called Blue Harbour where he hosted major public figures such as Errol Flynn and Sir Winston Churchill. Author Ian Fleming’s 15-acre Goldeneye estate was also in St Mary. As a teenager in the fifties, my mother, Magnore, would ride her bike from Galina to Goldeneye to deliver Fleming’s groceries. It was not until my mother moved to England in 1961, a year after my father, that she found out that Fleming had been famous.

At an age when I was studying for my GCSE exams, my father had already left school, lived alone, and had been earning money by selling stones and limes by the side of Galina’s dusty main road. His one-room shack had no running water, no toilet. My mother during her school years had been doing the books and shopkeeping for her uncle Frank or ‘thumbing’ a lift to go to the places where she could sell fabrics.

For my father, his childhood had been full of little ventures to earn money. He would go ‘crabbing’ at night, hoping that a little rain would entice the crabs to emerge from their burrows. Without a torch, my father made a light by filling a bottle three-quarters full of kerosene oil. He then wrapped a sardine tin lid round an eight-inch string of crocus, leaving about an inch exposed. My father dipped the tin covered crocus into the bottle leaving the inch-exposed crocus hanging outside of the bottle. To prevent kerosene leakage, he covered the bottle lid in soap and lit the exposed crocus to provide enough light to view and catch the crabs.

By morning, he would sell the crabs to people in the district or to local hotels. Once he’d made enough money, he bought a small rowing boat with his friend Jack Johnson to catch more fish to sell. They made wire fish pots (holes on either side) and used stale mackerel as bait. The method worked, but the only problem had been my father’s limited tolerance for inhaling stale fish while moving back and forth on a boat. He aborted the scheme and turned to selling bananas. He would go to the port in Oracabessa to scrounge for bruised or small bananas. Then he’d load them into a wheelbarrow, wheel it four miles back to Galina and sell the fruit by the roadside.

None of these ventures were particularly lucrative, but my father never went without food. He’d also pick mangoes, sweetsop, soursop, paw or custard apples; he’d drink coconut water and eat the white jelly of the coconut with some sugar if he had no money to buy food. If he wanted a hot meal, he’d pick ackees and breadfruit or he’d dig up yams or plantain from the fields to cook in the bushes. He’d also play competitive games of dominoes for a loaf of bread or something to eat. My parents worked hard, living off their wits and imagination.

Cricket had given my father some conception of a world beyond Galina. He had been one of the best cricketers in the district, nicknamed ‘HH’ after bowler HH Hines Johnson and then ‘Collie’ after batsman O’Neil ‘Collie’ Smith. HH only played three times for the West Indies, all coming against England, when he was 37 years of age. Despite his advanced years, he had taken 13 wickets in those Tests. Collie was nearly as good a batsman as Sir Garfield Sobers. Sobers is universally regarded as the greatest all-round cricketer in the history of the sport. Smith and Sobers were good friends. Sadly, Smith died aged 26 in 1959 when a car driven by Sobers on the A34 near Staffordshire crashed into a 10-ton cattle truck. Jamaica was in shock. They took Smith’s body back to Jamaica where an estimated 30,000 people mourned his death.¹

Galina had no cricket coaches or scouts fawning over young talent because it was such a small district. Fantasies remained fantasies when you had to worry about what you were going to eat the following day. Cricket represented something much purer. The British elite had the money, the resources and the facilities. My father and his friends could not even afford cricket bats. They would cut a coconut branch and, when it dried, shape it into a bat. They did not have professional cricket balls (made of cork, wound by string and coated with leather) so they used tennis balls. There were no cricket grounds or even-surfaced pitches, so they played in the street, on the sidewalk or on any patch of open land, private or not. It would be those same qualities – enterprise, hard work, toughness, pride, resilience – that would underpin the West Indian cricket team’s success and their determination not to hide. ‘Cricket was a part of you,’ my father would say. ‘We played it every day, rain or shine.’

When the West Indies’ matches were broadcast on the wireless, all the kids in Galina would gather round at Mr Reuben’s grocery store to listen to the likes of HH, Collie and Sobers play. Those early West Indian teams were pioneers but also children of the colonial era. They played with pride and with passion, but there was little they could do to combat the history, the stereotypes and the infrastructure that governed their every move. The West Indies players were treated more like subjects than peers. They had some respect because of their sporting prowess. Not quite like other blacks. Beyond black. But not equal.

Cricket had been brought over to the Caribbean in part to demonstrate English dominance. The early West Indian players were pioneers, the first black players to break through internationally. The cricketing authorities admired them. Not only their brilliance and their resilience, but the way in which they conducted themselves. Compliant. Integrative. Rarely did they overtly challenge. This served to appease cricket’s overwhelmingly white-led authorities, as they didn’t perceive the growing presence of blacks in international cricket as a threat to the existing power structures of the game. In Simon Lister’s book Fire in Babylon, he quotes what former England cricket captain Sir Pelham Warner said in 1950: ‘The West Indies are among the oldest of our possessions, and the Caribbean Sea resounds to the exploits of the British Navy. Nowhere in the world is there a greater loyalty to, love of, and admiration for England.’

As such, those early West Indian teams endured stereotypes with little recourse to counter such views. They were regarded as subservient, ill-disciplined, likeable but a little lazy, jovial, enthusiastic. ‘The erratic quality of West Indian cricket is surely true to racial type. At one moment these players are eager, confident and quite masterful; then as circumstances go against them you can see them losing heart.’² They were known throughout the world as ‘Calypso Cricketers’, a team that played for fun, a team that played to entertain.

West Indian cricket had also been governed as if a colony. There would not be a black president of the West Indies cricket board until the eighties. Black players were not allowed or indeed trusted to captain the team until 1959, when Sir Frank Worrell, after years of lobbying by writer, activist and historian C L R James, became the first black captain of the West Indies. James had been supported in his efforts by Sir Learie Constantine, a cricketer, lawyer and politician who fought against racial discrimination during his years living in England and a man who would become the UK’s first black peer.

There had also likely been a quota system in the West Indian team too, which meant that a certain percentage of the side had to be white. It’s unlikely that the white West Indians earned their place on merit. From 1928, when the West Indies played their first Test match to 1960, when Worrell became captain, against the England team, white players only had a minor impact on the team in comparison to their black counterparts. A look at the batting and bowling averages during this period illustrates the point that black Test cricketers outperformed their white peers.³

These early black and brown West Indian players put the Caribbean on the map long before Bob Marley. And nothing was as sweet as a victory over England. Jamaica did not become ‘independent’ of British rule until 1962. So, every victory had been significant. Defeating the rulers went beyond national pride. It caused mayhem, hysteria. Galina would have a street party. The cricket team were the soldiers; cricket had been the tool to undermine the rulers.

By the time my father arrived in England in 1960, the West Indian team served another purpose; they incubated him and his peers from the hostile reception of English folks. Caribbean immigrants huddled together, sharing houses, jobs, money and resources to survive. For sure, my father attempted to fit in. Like the many workers from the Caribbean who arrived between 1948, when the SS Empire Windrush docked, through to the sixties, my father had arrived from a country in Jamaica that had been like a little Britain, with brown faces. He learnt more about the Empire than anything else. Black history obsolete. He had no major anxieties about being black in England. This was the mother country. Another country. He would be as much a citizen in England as he had been in Jamaica. He felt a great sense of loyalty before he had arrived on these shores. It was only in cricket where he felt any resentment towards his new homeland. Cricket had been the platform where England flexed its authority, epitomising its supremacy. A platform where, more than any sport, colonial attitudes had been reinforced.

Against this backdrop, it had been no surprise that my father started a cricket team in Balham on his arrival. It had been no surprise that he put a cricket bat and ball in my hands at such an early age. Couldn’t say I liked cricket that much. But cricket soon became a part of me. The West Indies became a part of me. When I played cricket, I was not pretending to be Ian Botham. I was Michael Holding, Joel Garner or Malcolm Marshall.

If the West Indian teams that my father grew up listening to in the fifties were more compliant, the seventies’ teams set the tone for the squad that toured England in 1984.

When Clive Lloyd captained the West Indies on its tour of Australia in 1975, they were humiliated by the pace and aggression of Aussie fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson. The West Indies lost the series 5–1. Soon after that tour, Lloyd realised he needed to change tactics. He started employing four quick bowlers to keep batsmen under constant pressure.

India toured the West Indies in 1975–76 and Lloyd unleashed four fast bowlers in the final Test, much to the dismay of the visitors. On an uneven Sabina Park surface in Jamaica, Michael Holding, Wayne Daniel, Bernard Julien and Vanburn Holder terrorised India, injuring three batsmen. By the time the Indian team came out to bat for a second time, they were battered and bruised. With five wickets down and only 97 runs on the board, Indian captain Bishan Bedi surrendered and ended the innings, losing the match. Three of his players were still injured from the first innings, two more were suffering from injuries too, so Bedi could not put any more players out. The West Indies won the series in brutal fashion and a new era was about to begin.

Had there been any doubt that Lloyd would use the same tactics against England later that summer, it was all but erased when England’s South African born captain Tony Greig said: ‘I think people tend to forget it wasn’t that long ago they [the West Indies] were beaten 5–1 by the Australians and only just managed to keep their heads above water against the Indians just a short time ago as well … You must remember that the West Indians, these guys, if they get on top are magnificent cricketers. But if they’re down, they grovel, and I intend, with the help of Closey and a few others, to make them grovel.’

Coming from a South African commenting on a team comprising black and Asian players, Greig’s statement carried racist connotations. The West Indies would make Greig grovel with one of the most brutal displays of fast bowling witnessed in England and one of the greatest batting performances by Viv Richards. During the Test matches in 1976, Richards scored 829 runs at an average of 118. The West Indian team won the five-match Test series 3–0 (two games were drawn) and all three one-day matches. The seventies version of the West Indies had been brought up in an independent Caribbean. They were more politicised, less willing to comply and keen, once and for all, to erase the image of Calypso Cricketers.

The West Indies’ ascendancy coincided with a period of increased activism by Britain’s black communities. The Windrush generation, the first set of Caribbean migrants to enter these shores en masse, were amenable. They had been ‘hunted’ down by the British. Post-war prosperity meant that Britain did not have enough workers, or at least enough willing workers to fulfil labour-market shortages in the new NHS, in transport. So, they sold the ‘British Dream’ to Caribbean citizens. The prospect of a new life, a better life. Britain did not have to pay for their schooling, their health or their housing up to that point. They were ‘ready-made workers’. But Britain was not prepared for its new arrivals. Didn’t think they needed to adjust. Wanted them to integrate. No questions asked. Shut up, be happy. All the run-down places and spaces that the now affluent white working-class people had vacated were now populated by the emergent Caribbean community.

For many of the Windrush generation, England had not been a dream. By the early seventies, opportunities and living conditions for their children had not vastly improved either. Jamaican-born poet Linton Kwesi Johnson encapsulated how many black people felt throughout the seventies when he sang ‘Inglan is a bitch’. Two generations were fed up. Fed up of being forced to integrate without a say, to de-colourise; fed up of poor working conditions, fed up of poor schooling, poor housing; fed up of having to minimise to progress.

By the seventies, it had become difficult for Britain to ignore the rising cultural and political presence of black Britain. This included cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall, the rise of the Notting Hill Carnival, the continued wisdom, writing and leadership of C L R James, the activism of Darcus Howe and Althea Jones-Lecointe, the victory of the Mangrove Nine which led to the first acknowledgement of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police, the music of Aswad, Janet Kay and Steel Pulse.

Whether it was the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, the rise of the Organisation for Women of Asian and African Descent and the Black Parents Movement, the proliferation of supplementary schools, the black publications that saw the light of day through Margaret Busby’s Allison & Busby and John La Rose’s New Beacon Books, or the Race Today Collective and the Institute of Race Relations holding power to account, black Britain had been gaining its identity, growing confident in its identity, creating platforms for self-knowledge and self-determination. So much of what these academics, artists, original intersectional feminists and activists fashioned had originally been ignored by mainstream institutions. We didn’t exist. Black didn’t exist. But these pioneers shoved their way through, often with minimal resource and against extreme opposition.

Fuelled by the activism and music of the Caribbean, Africa and the United States, the children of the Windrush generation took up the fight. They were actively fighting back with greater force, no longer fearful of the consequence and attracting white comrades to the struggle.

During this period, the West Indies continued to dominate cricket. They had won two World Cups (1975 and 1979) and been finalists in 1983, they had exacted revenge on Australia after the 1975 series and emerged from Kerry Packer’s World Series ‘Supertests’ and one-day series against Australia and a World XI as arguably the world’s most dominant side.

The 1984 West Indies team had a distinct set of characters, particularly its fast bowlers. Each had unique bowling actions that appeared to speak volumes about their approach to the game. They were led by Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding and Joel Garner. Marshall would charge in and bowl at such pace that he appeared to be moving faster than the ball once it was released from his hands. But he had craft and guile. Holding was graceful, haunting, elegant. He would glide in to bowl effortlessly, quietly, only to unleash deceptively vicious balls, which is why he had the nickname ‘Whispering Death’. And Joel Garner, all six feet eight inches of him, bundled in like an old man with a stitch running for the bus, only to uncoil at the last minute, lengthy like the Statue of Liberty, before delivering the ball so quick, so accurate, so full in length, he would make the batsmen jerk violently as if a rug had been pulled from beneath them. Missing from the 1984 tour was Andy Roberts: no-nonsense, stoic and the ‘father’ to all these bowlers, the man through which the West Indies’ fearsome reputation had been established.

The West Indies remained the favourites in 1984, although there had been some belief that England could push them. In the 1983 World Cup Final, India surprisingly defeated the West Indies. India had made a modest 183 runs and it appeared as if the West Indies would run away with a third World Cup in a row. Inspired by captain Kapil Dev, India rattled the West Indies out for a paltry 140 in one of the greatest upsets in cricket history.

In 1982, the West Indies had also lost some of their best players to a rebel tour in South Africa, at that point banned from international cricket due to apartheid. South Africa had been desperate to get back on the world sporting stage, so they started offering large sums of money to teams, mainly in cricket and rugby, to tour illegally. Nelson Mandela would later say that the sporting ban contributed to his freedom and indeed the end of the apartheid regime.

The first target had been Viv Richards. By 1983, he was acknowledged by many of his contemporaries as the greatest player in the world, and the greatest batsman since Australia’s legendary Don Bradman. Imran Khan, currently the Prime Minister of Pakistan and one of the great all-round cricketers in history, called Richards ‘a complete genius … no other batsman could attack me when I was at my peak’.⁴ Dennis Lillee, arguably the greatest fast bowler in history, said, in his autobiography Menace, that ‘for sheer ability to rip an attack apart, animal brutality and no fear in taking you on, I have to put Viv Richards on top of the list’. In 2000, Wisden would vote him as one of the five greatest players of the century, alongside Bradman, Sobers, Aussie spinner Shane Warne and English batsman Jack Hobbs.

His refusal to go to South Africa in 1983 had been symbolic. He was the best player in the world. The prize catch. If ever there had been a symbol of West Indies’ shift from Calypso Cricketers, Englishmen with brown skin, and colonial subjects to anti-racists, to independence, to rebels, it had been Richards. Wearing a red, gold and green wristband, the sight of Richards strutting from the pavilion to the batting crease was as dramatic and intimidating as watching Mike Tyson walk to a boxing ring. Richards would scan the audience and the opposing team as if they were his subjects. He would walk to the crease as if failure was not an option. In an era of hostile fast bowling, where Richards faced the likes of Lillee and Thomson from Australia, Imran Khan from Pakistan and his West Indian teammates, who he regularly faced in the English County Championship, Richards never wore a helmet. He had been a king without security, a superstar without a bodyguard, a target without protection.

Had Richards gone to South Africa, his departure would have signalled the premature death of West Indian cricket dominance and indeed all that the team had stood for since 1976. It would have opened the floodgates and made it acceptable for other Caribbean players to go.

‘The whole issue [of race and apartheid] is quite central to me,’ said Richards. ‘I believe very strongly in the black man asserting himself in this world and over the years I have leaned towards many movements that followed this basic cause.’⁵

In the end, a West Indian team comprising world-class batsmen like Lawrence Rowe and Alvin Kallicharran, all-rounder Franklyn Stephenson and fast bowlers like Colin Croft and Sylvester Clarke went on tour, much to the wrath of the Caribbean. Each had been paid allegedly around US$100,000, huge sums at the time, for two tours against the banned South African team. Upon arrival in 1982, they had been honoured/insulted by being classified as ‘honorary whites’. The tour had been a low point in the history of West Indies cricket. An unforgiveable stain. The ‘rebel’ players were less than ‘house negros’ and more like slave traders in the eyes of the Caribbean.

Former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley summed up the feelings of Caribbean people in A History of West Indian Cricket when he wrote: ‘To the members of the black diaspora the oppression which continues unabated in South Africa has become the symbol of more than a tyranny to be overthrown. Apartheid points like a dagger at the throat of black self-worth in every corner occupied by the descendants of Africa.’

In South Africa, these players became heroes. In the Caribbean, they became outcasts, banned for life from playing for the West Indies. Some of the players moved to the United States, hiding until the controversy died down. Others resumed their careers in England, away from the gaze of the Caribbean authorities, media and fans. For the lesser players on that tour, those who could not command interest in teams outside of the Caribbean, they were not so fortunate. Richard Austin, who would later be known as ‘Danny Germs’, ended up a cocaine addict, begging on the streets of Kingston. Herbert Chang would end up losing all his money. According to Robert Craddock of The Courier-Mail, Chang was last seen ‘standing listlessly in the middle of the road … clearly out of it.’⁶ Chang had allegedly been heard saying, ‘Man, man, man, I just, I just wanna know which end I bowl from tomorrow.’⁷

The West Indies team that toured England in 1984 remained strong. In captain Clive Lloyd, opening batsmen Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes, Viv Richards and fast bowlers Marshall, Holding and Garner, the team were fielding seven legends in every match they played. Think Brazil’s 1970 World Cup football team, the All Blacks rugby union team from 2010 onwards, the Soviet Union’s great ice hockey teams in the seventies or USA basketball’s Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics. That West Indies team may have been the greatest Test side ever assembled.

In the first meeting between England and the West Indies that summer, a one-day international match at Old Trafford, Richards set the tone. He hit a then record 189 not out off 170 balls in what had been considered the greatest one-day batting performance in the history of the sport. But the one-day games had only been warm-up matches, starters. The main course would be the Test series.

Test cricket. Two teams. Five days. Two chances for each team to score the most runs. Team game. But a sequence of one-on-one challenges, bowler versus batsman. Difficult to follow all the way through. Long. Too long for even the most rational sports fan to follow. But surely one of the greatest of tests for any sportsman. Batting. Bowling. Fielding. Tactics. Weather. Violent weather. Control. Uncontrol. Beyond control. Pitches can dictate, be it hard, cracked, flat, great for batting, bad for bowling, bad for batting, great for bowling. It can all change from day to day. Momentum swings. Swinging all the time. Need for concentration, patience. Need your team, need all eleven men. Tuned in. Tuned on. Ready to battle, ready to roll, to play their role.

Couldn’t imagine. I played cricket to a high level at school. At one point, I represented four teams. These were one-day games. A few overs. A few hours to compete. Half a Saturday or weekday evening lost to the game. Exhausting. Couldn’t get over the powerlessness of cricket. During the many hours you play, you have a limited amount of time to have a direct impact. You may bowl five or ten overs. Can’t bowl all of them. If you’re batting and you’re bowled out, you’re out. No second chance. Better make the most of your time. The rest of the time you’re either fielding while teammates are bowling or sitting in the pavilion watching the game while your teammates are batting. If you don’t seize your moment with bat or with ball, you spend a lot of time limply thinking about what could have been, while trying to motivate your teammates to seize their moments. Too much damn time to think. Couldn’t imagine having to do it for five days.

For the viewer, bliss. A friend for five days. You end your week on a high. In those days, a Test match in England started on a Thursday (the build-up), reached its peak over the weekend (when you could go to see it live if you had been working during the week) and, if you were lucky, it would reach a conclusion on the Monday (a great way to start the new week). A novel. A box set. For the live audience, unpredictable. They don’t know what they’ll get. Five days can at times blend into one. But the 1984 series was different. The games didn’t blend. The results were predictable, but the drama within the games was unpredictable.

First Test: A Malcolm Marshall bouncer strikes English Test debutant Andy Lloyd in the head. Dramatic. As the ball rises towards Lloyd’s head, he twists to avoid it. Too late. Hits. Hurts. In a split second, it looks as if the ball has spun Lloyd round 180 degrees. Pause. He’s down, toppled, facing the stumps that had once been behind him. Lloyd is hospitalised. He never played Test cricket again. West Indies win.

Second Test: England are close to victory but West Indies’ opening batsman Gordon Greenidge starts limping. Hobbling as if struck with cramp. Greenidge’s limp is like Michael Jordan’s tongue sticking out or Zinedine Zidane puking up on a football pitch. Something beautiful is about to happen. Greenidge scores 214 not out. West Indies win.

Third Test: Malcolm Marshall, the best bowler in the world, arguably the greatest fast bowler ever, a man at/near the peak of his powers, breaks his thumb. Larry Gomes is close to getting a century, but nine West Indian wickets are down. Either Marshall comes out to bat with a broken thumb (in two places) or Gomes will be disappointed. Marshall comes out. Cast on one forearm, holding the bat in his other arm. Batting with one arm, he fends off England’s meagre attack. Gomes gets his century. Marshall returns, cast on forearm, cricket ball in the other. He is now bowling. Decimates England. Gets seven out of 10 English batsmen out. Michael Holding, a great bowler but a poor batsman at best, also demolishes the bowling of Bob Willis, hitting five sixes on his way to 59 runs. Willis retires from Test cricket. The West Indies win.

Fourth Test: Winston Davis is a fast bowler who cannot get a game for the West Indies because of Holding, Marshall and Garner. He gets his chance here and fractures English batsman Paul Terry’s arm. Terry returns, arm in sling to help teammate Allan Lamb get a century. But he never plays for England again. Davis, like Holding, is a mediocre batsman. But he scores 77 runs. West Indies win.

Fifth Test: England blackwashed. West Indies win the series 5–0.

Gordon Greenidge was voted Player of the Series, with an average of over 81. Marshall, Garner and Holding scooped almost 70 wickets between them. For Viv Richards, it had been a relatively quiet series. He averaged just under 42 with the bat. But for the best part of the summer, Richards had been subdued, which was unusual for a player who saved his best for England.

During the ‘grovel’ series of 1976, Richards hit 291 in the fifth Test at The Oval. In the 1979 World Cup final at Lord’s, it had been Richards’ 138 not out against England that had been the game-winning performance to secure victory. Later, in 1986, in front of his home fans in Antigua, Richards would hit the then fastest Test century ever, in just 56 balls. The combination of Richards’ cruel excellence and posturing on the pitch, his aloofness and politics off the field made England’s cricketing establishment uncomfortable. He did not fit their notion of what a black man should be. Didn’t come across as grateful enough.

Former Wisden editor Dave Frith once wrote, ‘For me that should be the limit of aggression in Test cricket, but now we are in 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 school had been the result of anti-black racism. I couldn’t support England, because England rarely supported me. Not every black person felt the same, however. Tebbit’s theory seemed to target people of colour. Not a nationality test. A colour test.

Tebbit’s test mirrored much of casual racist commentary of the eighties. I couldn’t think of a time, a moment, when I was watching cricket through the eighties and regularly buying cricket publications, that white foreigners had faced as much scrutiny. For much of the eighties, black English players, like the footballers, stayed mute.

Years later, when former civil servant Robert Henderson penned an essay in Wisden Cricket Monthly in July 1995 entitled ‘Is it in the blood?’, the casual racism and elitism of English cricket surfaced once more. Henderson, who referred to black people in the article as ‘negroes’, claimed that ‘a coloured England-qualified player feels satisfaction (perhaps subconsciously) at seeing England humiliated, because of post imperial myths of oppression and exploitation’. Myths. He would go on to say that ‘mixed groups’ would never ‘develop the same camaraderie as eleven unequivocal Englishmen’, describing foreign-born English players as ‘interlopers’ and describing West Indians based in England as ‘generally resentful and separatist’.

The article was widely condemned by cricket legends such as Ian Botham, David Gower and Michael Atherton, who would resign from Wisden’s editorial board as a result. Black cricketers like fast bowler Devon Malcolm and all-rounder Phil DeFreitas, implicated in Henderson’s piece, would later successfully sue the publication (despite being advised otherwise by cricket’s players’ union). But the cricket authorities had been at pains to cover up the fact that the legendary publication had just published an ill-informed, ill-researched piece of racist propaganda. That Frith, Wisden’s editor, couldn’t see it, was hardly surprising. Frith once said that Jamaican-born Devon Malcolm ‘acts, thinks, sounds and looks like a Jamaican. This hits the English cricket lover where it hurts.’¹⁸ What qualified Frith to know what a Jamaican acts like, how they think, what they looked like, I don’t know. I’ve never read all of Frith’s articles. But I cannot remember him condemning South African-English players like Allan Lamb or Robin Smith for sounding South African. Did they look like typical South Africans? Translated: Malcolm is black and that hits the English cricket lover where it hurts. Even allowing for the time, the politics of the English press seemed embarrassingly dated, perversely discriminatory, lacking in self-reflection, humility or understanding. They may have known black players, been friends with them, gone to the West Indies, eaten jerk chicken and rice and peas, but they had little conception of what it meant to be black. They made little attempt to find out. The message seemed to be that blackness could not equal Englishness. Worse still, in my mind it felt as if these writers and commentators were implying that English identity was some sort of proxy for racial purity.

Malcolm would later say in his autobiography You Guys Are History!, ‘My kids had all been born in England, for heaven’s sake. They went to integrated schools and had white godparents. We all considered England our home, and colour wasn’t an issue in our choice of friends at school.’

Phil DeFrietas, who also had his Englishness questioned by journalists throughout his career, continued to play for the national team despite threats from the National Front to kill him and his family if he played for England. DeFreitas turned down the opportunity of going on a ‘rebel’ tour of South Africa during apartheid when white national team members sacrificed their England careers temporarily to cash in on the riches offered by the racially corrupt regime. DeFreitas, in his autobiography Daffy, said that he never had the ‘desire to play for West Indies’ and given that he had learnt the game here, he felt he had a debt to pay to England. Not all black folks the same. Just like white English folks, there will be some who will die for England, and others who will not. The problem had less to do with black players and their motivations and much more to do with England and its own fragile state. That appeared to be the barrier, or at least a rarely questioned barrier, to true cohesion.

England attributed their failure to a crisis of identity because they were trying so hard to hold on to the idea of Empire as the bonding force for the team. But this conception was now dated. Imaginary. The past. The English team no longer reflected England’s imagined self. And that’s what really hurt.

My PE teacher and cricket coach in secondary school clearly did not, in my view, see blackness and Britishness as compatible. A stout, flushed-face man, more darts player than athlete, he often verbally abused pupils with his breathy, sour tones. I found him intimidating. I did not join the school football team in my first year because of his constant shouting and bullying. When, for the first time, he umpired one of our cricket matches, I had been captain. I dropped an easy catch. ‘Why the hell were you made captain, Beardwell?’ he shouted. Always called me that, Beardwell, with a dismissive tone.

He assumed I supported the West Indies. So, he would mock me and every other black kid during PE lessons when they lost. Can’t remember ever saying I had been a West Indies fan. Thank God for Viv. It seemed like every time this teacher found fault, Viv, even in his later years, would do something to shut him up. In the 1987 World Cup, the West Indies lost their first match against England. This teacher prowled around making scornful comments. He’d probably call it banter. But it was offensive. Often discriminatory. But I had little option but to take it. I mean, who could I complain to? And what would they really do about it?

This had been a weakened West Indian team; no Marshall, Holding or Garner, no Greenidge or Lloyd. But to lose to England, still embarrassing. West Indies’ following match came against Sri Lanka, then still a minor side. But given that the Sri Lankans were playing at home, I feared the worst. Richards once more rose to the occasion. He hit 181 runs off 125 balls, momentarily silencing my teacher.

Temporary reprieve. The teacher took the captaincy of the school cricket team away from me. No reason. Gave it to a white kid, one of his favourite players from the football team. The only white kid on the team. Under my captaincy, the team had been poor. Under the white kid’s leadership, we were just as bad if not worse. I wanted the captaincy back. I’d been playing well. Felt as if I was still the best player in the team.

I approached the teacher and told him that I wanted to captain the team again, or to at least co-captain. He said no, insulted that I would ask such a thing. I asked him why. He refused to respond. So, I refused to play. He made me run laps around the sports field in every PE lesson. At the start of every session, he’d growl, ‘Are you going to play?’ I’d say no. And then he would make me do laps while the other kids played football or cricket.

I didn’t know whether the teacher’s decision to take the captaincy away from me had been racially motivated, even if I suspected it was. Wasn’t the sole point. I didn’t like the way he dismissed me, the way he treated me, the way he bullied me. Without prompting, the rest of the team agreed with my assertion. They didn’t like my treatment either. So, they refused to play too. The cricket team went on strike.

A black teacher summoned me and the other black and brown players to his classroom to try and end the strike. I sat staring out the window as he tried to reason with us, make us aware that it was our duty to represent the school. The meeting ended in a stalemate.

The situation had become embarrassing to the school as it could no longer field a cricket team. The PE teacher relented. He made me co-captain. We ended up with three captains: one black, one white and one Indian.

The PE teacher continued to shout at me. He continued to try to intimidate me. I don’t believe our results were significantly better, but it had been a slight victory. It was probably the first time that I didn’t minimise myself. The first time I had not been hiding.

Cricket represented the first time that I can remember feeling a true sense of pride in my Caribbean heritage. At home, my cultural reference points were more Jamaican than they were English. Outside of home, black and Caribbean culture and its history had been non-existent. Indeed, the only black person I would learn about through my whole school life would be athlete Jesse Owens, and that had only been in the context of Hitler and World War II. Until I discovered West Indies cricket, there had been a whole side of me that did not exist to my white peers and teachers. When the West Indies forced its way into public consciousness, I didn’t have to minimise as much. Didn’t have to apologise or hide as much. In these cricketers was hope; hope that I wouldn’t always be anxious about being trapped between blackness and Britishness.

Couldn’t win though. Couldn’t change this narrow perception of blackness. A perception that we were subjects. If we were not subjects then we were somehow extremists, enemies of the state. Couldn’t change the perception that we were all the same. I was no different to my father. No different to a Nigerian. We were possessions. Guests. Barbaric, devilish-looking, ugly. Couldn’t win by rebelling. Couldn’t win by being compliant. Couldn’t win for trying. Blackness had been a white problem, not my problem. I’d started to recognise this through cricket and the establishment’s illogical response to black players. The establishment’s inability to see blacks as equals, its inability to see blacks as truly English, its inability to acknowledge us on our own terms. Blackness could only be seen through their eyes, their history, their struggles. Our version, our history, our lens did not exist. It didn’t seem to exist to my PE coach and it didn’t exist to the establishment.

‘It was only long years after,’ said C L R James, ‘that I understood the limitation on spirit, vision and self-respect which were imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion of success was to have succeeded in approaching that distant ideal –to attain it of course was impossible.’¹⁹

The West Indies cricket team had been the purest sporting experience I had witnessed. It was John Edgar Wideman on ‘race’,^* Serena Williams’ return to Indian Wells after being racially abused by its crowd early in her career, Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without a Pause’, the Newham 7. This uprising had been televised. It was legal. Attractive. Brutal. In living black and white. It fractured whiteness (opening the doors for India and Pakistan to follow) and made the rulers the subjects, providing an image of what it would be like if you were us and we were you. England had been colonised. We had been decolonised.

I’m not sure I could ever support a team as much as that West Indies side. They meant more to me than Ali. They were activism, style, excellence and heritage. They amplified my parents’ childhood stories. They never minimised, despite criticism. They exposed the fragility of the Empire state of mind. They validated me, my past, my present. They represented a part of me, the heart of me, but not all of me. I was stillborn in England. Still more English than Jamaican. I needed to find the English me, the non-white-defined English me, the something that represented a side of me that my father could never be.

^* John Edgar Wideman is an American writer and professor, and the author of ten novels and five non-fiction books. Wideman was the recipient of the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1990 and an American Book Award in 1991.