Hilaire as whistle-blower
Tue, Jun 8, '10
At the recently concluded annual conference of the Caribbean Studies Association in Barbados, Dr. Ernest Hilaire, CEO of the WICB, spoke with great passion and verve about our West Indies cricket team, echoing all the pride and disappointments West Indians have felt for the team over the years. His thoughts were sincere and offered in a constructive manner with a view to strengthening the team and enhancing our collective pride. Alas, there are those who prefer to bury their heads in the sand, to blame individual board members or individual cricketers for the long drought we have been experiencing.
While there are always disagreements and alternative takes on board decisions, while even the very best players are sometimes known to be ‘out of form,’ while fans could be fickle, cricket is a team sport and any assessment of the team’s performance must take as its point of departure the wider context. That wider context is the West Indian society and culture to which Dr. Hilaire made reference.
Ours is a dependent capitalist region where the young people have imbibed all the narrow, narcissistic behaviours that are associated with the flashiness of North American and Western European sporting events and their stars. It is a reality in which instant gratification is mixed with materialist and individualist sensibilities, and where our young players have come to measure their worth in dollar terms. This is not to blame the individual players, but rather to understand the soil out of which they spring.
What Dr. Hilaire was referring to when he raised the question of education at the level of the team is absolutely essential. To say that other international teams are also less than fully literate is not the solution. If our players are not academically prepared we cannot take solace in the fact that others’ players are similarly bereft of education and sophistication. But what is more, Dr Hilaire was pointing to the fact that raw talent alone is no longer sufficient to compete at the highest levels of cricketing encounters. For apart from personal discipline, which is intimately tied to one’s level of educational preparation and one’s understanding of the role of self sacrifice in the service of excellence, there is the fact that other teams and their coaches and managers are into scientific management and training, and essaying techniques to perfect performance that are not accessible to the uneducated and the undisciplined.
When colonial governments made public education free and mandatory to the population at large, it was not because they had the welfare of colonial subjects at heart, but rather because the level of technological development in sugar production - and other areas - meant that brutalized and illiterate workers (e.g., former slaves) could no longer enable the British to compete effectively on the market with those whose sugar was being produced by more educated and disciplined wage workers, who could calculate temperature in degrees, crystallization by weight, chemical alkalization, and the operation of advanced physical apparatuses in the boiler houses etc. Slaves were deliberately kept illiterate (it was even illegal to teach them to read and write) so the transition from slave labour to wage labour meant that a new regime of worker was needed, and those who chose to stick with slave labour were soon beaten out of the market.
There is a lesson here for our West Indies cricket and it is one that Dr Hilaire hinted at. Of course we all remember the jokes we made about some of our past cricketers whose academic exploits were not the greatest, but who went on to define the commanding heights of the way the game was played; but those days are gone. Tactics, techniques, strategy, cunning and so on, are all part of today’s game and they inform managers, coaches, captains, vice captains and players. Those who think they can compete successfully without these are sadly mistaken. Cricket is more than a game, it is a way of life. For West Indians it is also played off the field and deals with such social and cultural phenomena as race, slavery, indentureship, empire, freedom, independence and sovereignty. What do today’s highly paid players know of this?
When Dr. Hilaire made reference to the lack of education among our young players he was indicting the wider society where education has come to take a back seat to making money by any means possible. That wider society is the product of globalization and Americanization that has seen the glory of a five day test match reduced to the 50-over games and now Twenty-20 encounters. In the process major thinking skills are lost and techniques are redefined as “vooping” has come to replace batting. Where did this come from? The Americanization of the game: quick, flashy, hard-hitting, big money, corporate endorsements, TV rights, clear winners and losers. The days when Lance Gibbs could bowl five straight maiden overs to Colin Cowdrey and be regarded as high cricket drama are long gone and we are all poorer for it.
Dr. Hilaire’s intervention reminded me of the calypso “Little Black Boy,” where Gypsy was pointing out the same problems and issues with our youth and for which he was roundly assailed for ‘picking on the little black boy.’ Like Gypsy, Ernest Hilaire was a whistle blower, and as we know, they are not always appreciated.
* Professor Allahar studies the economic and political sociology of the Caribbean, with particular emphasis on ideology, ethnicity, class and nationalism.