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| Sunday, 24 April 2005 |
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The gentle revolutionary of West Indian cricket by A. C. de Silva West Indian cricket has run into somewhat of a storm in recent times with individual sponsorship clashing with team sponsorship which resulted in finally former captain Brian Lara being sidelined and Shivnarine Chanderpaul being installed as captain for the clashes against South Africa. Cricket these days is all confined to money and bigger the stakes the better hold it has on the individual with the individuals not caring anything for the team or country. But this was not the way how cricket was played in the years gone by and in the West Indies there was one gentleman cricketer who held the country and the game in high esteem. Frank Maglinne Worrell is his name and cricketers some fifty or sixty years ago will no doubt pick him as the gentleman cricketer of that era and may possibly pick him as the gentleman cricketer of all time. Here's a classic example. Australian cricketer Brian Booth recalls one incident of the fine sportsman that Worrell was. In the West Indies, playing against Trinidad Colts, Booth was given out caught at short square-led. Both had left the field when the lad who caught the ball told his captain, Sir Frank Worrell, that the ball had bounced first. Sir Frank immediately recalled Booth to the batting crease. There was no need for this-it is normally put down to the luck of the game-but Booth says that he appreciated the gesture of a fine sportsman who quite obviously didn't wish 'to see a player lose' his wicket unfairly. Every cricketer who reaches the top when in the Test fold quite naturally waits for his farewell game in Test cricket. But Worrell was one cricketer who denied the crowds of his own farewell. His last ovation, had he come out into the Oval on that final afternoon of the Fifth Test match, would almost certainly surpassed any other magical moments on any cricket field. His popularity was such that no one, even covertly, would consider him guilty of exhibitionism, self-aggrandisement or over-sentimentality. The situation of the match was such that tactically it mattered nought who came in when Kanhai was out with the battle almost won. The public wanted Worrell, the cameramen of course wanted Worrell and so did Worrell's own players. They tried desperately to persuade him to pad up and walk out, as Bradman had in 1948, through an avenue of England players to the traditional three-cheers salute. His mission But the old black panther refused. He kept himself insulated as much as possible from his emotions by staying No. 7 in the batting order and mostly dozing his last day away in the dressing room. He had said a dozen times that those days he would just as soon not bat, that he was evenly scarcely interested in the outcome of matches any longer so long as the public had had their money's worth of entertainment. But it would have been an insensitive fool who could not in some way have understood his emotions as he lay there apparently idling away his last hours of sixteen years in Test cricket. You were looking down at a giant, not only at the last of the famed "three W's" of brilliant batsmanship but at a man who in the last three years in his career had a greater influence on cricket than any other player or administrator. Of course he was not as serene as he seemed. He admitted it a few days later when asked why, in the end, he had dodged the moment that so many entertainers love so much that they even make come-backs for the chance to go through it all again. Worrell never was that kind of entertainer and he simply said on that occasion: "I didn't really feel like facing all that business of a lump in the throat and may be a few tears in the eyes as well. If I needed to bat I would have batted. But I didn't see much point in just going out there for the sake of saying good-bye" He had just let fate take its course. "That's my way of life now", he said. "Nothing really bothers me any more". It was not always thus in the life of Frank Worrell. In a chat Worrell had with a cricket writer Ian Wooldridge in a dorner of the dressing-room at Canterbury in the dying days of the series, when asked what victory really meant to him, to find out if he actually had always been as relaxed as he seemed, to discover what he planned to do now that his last cricket mission was over. Outside, in the late summer sunshine, another eight thousand people were saying their rapturous farewells to his team, but inside it was darker and Worrell began to talk. For, without oratory or bitterness, he took the words mission and victory in a different context and talked of his other battle, his struggle to achieve social acceptance and end the economic exploitation of the coloured cricketer in the West Indies. Worrell raised the colour issue himself and as he spoke the gay calypse image, propagated in a hundred headlines to the comfort of a million consciences, crumbled apart. Life, of course, just isn't like that if one was born black in a white man's world. Even if your name is Worrell. The firebrand He had bumble beginnings. He was born the son of a Royal Mail line chief steward who left Barbados with his wife and family to make a new life in America. Frank, then three, was left behind and brought up by a grandmother. At 19 he, too, would have gone to America had it not been for cricket. Instead he remained to join Walcott and Weeks in the West Indies team. All three had been born within eighteen months and a dozen miles of one another on the same small island. Worrell, a man of immense principles that makes statesmen and revolutionaries, became the firebrand of the three. "As a young man, between about twenty-one and twenty-eight, I had a hell of a chip on my shoulder," he said. "I was fighting all sorts of issues, both actual and imaginary." He was branded as a big-headed and a rabble-rouser, and it was largely because of this that he left Barbados for Jamaica. But he didn't stop fighting for his cause. "I went on fighting alone for ten years. I lost friends who didn't want to become involved. I was described as difficult to get along with. Perhaps I was. But there were principles involved." Well-briefed What he was fighting was the attitude of some of the white minority in places of power in West Indian cricket. Of one of his antagonists he said: "He was the kind of man who would have seen you blindfolded on a precipice and not bother to warn you it was there." By way of example he said:"Even before we left for our last trip to Australia we were offered terms that were completely unacceptable. I protested. I said that if the English players were worth any sum in Australia then we were worth the same too. Those of us who protested got something. Those who didn't, got less. But then he added softly; "It won't happen like that again. You may be surprised to know that there were plenty if people back home who were praying that we would fail. In the latter stages were some who waited for me to bow out." In background "To me a man if a man irrespective of colour and in these last three years, first in Australia and now in England, we have achieved a big victory, a very big victory. It is simply that these chaps can go home as socially acceptable, first-class citizens. "For me there is nothing left to fight against. When I go home I shall go into the background and stay there. You remind me that I'm a senator. Well, when that happened I didn't really realise that I was being used by a political party. I'm not interested in politics. I am interested in the sociological problems of the Caribbean but I shan't 'go to the people', as it were, when I go home. I have already decided the level at which I shall work and that is simply as warden over the students at the University of West Indies in Jamaica. I shall be there to help them with their personal problems. But as for fighting, I've done with it". He strolled off to lunch, the easy smile across his face, stopping at places to accept congratulations from some businessman or there, with equal grace, to bend down and sign an autograph for small boy born to all the privileges that Worrell had to fight for. In the afternoon Frank Worrell, still waiting to bat, was stretched out across the dressing room floor. His head was on a folded sweater, his feet on a cricket bag and he was ten thousand miles away. Of what he dreamed it is unknown. But if it was of victory it was of a kind of victory that cannot be recorded among the other neatly tabulated triumphs within the covers of Wisden. |
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