Roy Dookun and I were honoured the other night to receive awards from the Guyana Olympic Association for our contribution in the past to the sport of lawn tennis. It was a thoughtful and generous gesture by the President of the GOA, K A Juman Yassin, the Secretary-General, Ivor O’Brien, and the Assistant Secretary, Garfield Wiltshire and their excellent team. It was long ago, but they remembered. Their view is that a sport is strong not only through the exploits of its current champions but also in the long heritage of achievement which builds into a tradition which succeeding generations can respect and reinforce. Roy and I could not really have expected to be remembered after careers in tennis which began nearly 60 years ago, but we were remembered and we are grateful.
Sport has always been of immense importance in my life. “The trained body is as important as the cultured mind” early on was taught to me as a life-guide. And the satisfactions and epiphanies I have experienced in playing and watching sport have hardly been less than I have experienced in poetry and art.
I first played competitive tennis as a young boy in Trinidad in 1945 and my last competitive game was in 1985 when Roy Dookun and I, combined ages 104, coming out of long retirement the year before, won the Guyana National Doubles title in four hard sets, exhausted at the last.
In that forty-year span I loved the game of tennis, the unforgettable team-mates and friendly rivals, the triumphs and despairs, the excitement and the humour, the honour of captaining Cambridge University, Guyana and eventually the West Indies in the Davis Cup, the unique experience of Wimbledon, above all in the games that mattered most year after year, the rush of emotion, life gathering to a high point, the fear, the steeling of the nerves, the pure happiness, the desperate tensions, the fulfilment that comes with being fit and trying your best to the depths of your being. Well, those 40 years are like a dream now. But they were marvellous.
The game of squash was also important. In it I made friendships which will always last and in it, after tennis, I had a second playing career in which I became skilled enough to represent Guyana a few times and had a tremendous amount of fun and good fellowship doing so.
But, above all, for the sake of the game’s history in Guyana, I should record my part in getting the game started here. Edgar Readwin, Chairman of Bookers Sugar Estates, and I, his Marketing Executive, played tennis with and against each other for years in the 1950s and 1960s. I was basically the better player, and a lot younger, and I made a point of never ever losing to my Chairman. This irked Edgar’s very competitive soul. One day he came into my office and asked me if I had ever played the game of squash. I said no, despite there being courts at Cambridge when I was there, easily accessible, but, no, I had never played the game.
“Good,” Edgar said. “We’re going to build the first squash court in Guyana at the Georgetown Club. A completely new game for the country. I want you to help me organize it, get it going.” I said yes, of course, what a good idea. Short pause. “And when the court is finished,” Edgar remarked, “we’re going to play the first game!”
So said, so done. The justification for spending Bookers’ money on the court was that its use by staff would contribute to their greater fitness. The court was built – it must have been about 1967-68. Edgar and I took the court for the very first game of squash in Guyana. Edgar explained the rules and the scoring. Then he beat me, I think it was, 9-0, 9-0, 9-0, 9-0,9-0,9-0. Thus was exorcised years and years of losing to me at tennis! My Chairman, my good friend, Edgar Readwin. The beginning of squash in Guyana. I wonder if Nicolette Fernandes, our dedicated, world-ranking champion, knows this little piece of the history of her sport.
I have written here about sport in my life and I have not mentioned cricket. That is like Romeo speaking for the whole play and never mentioning Juliet. My devotion to cricket, my love of the greatest game ever invented, cannot be contained here except to say that the feast of life without cricket, especially West Indies cricket, would for me have lacked a supreme flavour. I may have left it too late to write my book on cricket but it is all there stored and treasured in my head and my heart.
