For all his titles and letters after his name, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, KA, PhD, etc, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, really does spout a lot of rubbish sometimes. Not content with his ill-advised comparison of the former West Indies cricket captain, Chris Gayle, with the Kingston ‘don,’ Christopher ‘Dudus‘ Coke, for which he was roundly castigated, he has now made another astonishing leap of the imagination.
In a recent piece, ‘Cricket, Cash and Country,‘ Prof Beckles argues that the inability of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) to field the best team possible is attributable to players rejecting “their national duty in preference for a bigger personal purse.” There is not much point in regurgitating Prof Beckles’ case here, for it is essentially a recycling of his 1998 thesis of “cash before country.” It is, moreover, a self-serving argument in that it seeks to absolve the WICB, of which he is a non-member Director, of any responsibility for the well-chronicled, serial mismanagement of the regional game and the core issue of Board-player relations. Why, he even blames “the crisis of political governance in the West Indies” for the current state of affairs.
If Prof Beckles had stopped there, his sophistry might have elicited little further comment. He, however, goes way over the top, lionising the current West Indies captain, Darren Sammy, thus: “…Sammy has a mandate; to revitalise the heart, soul, and mind of the cricket enterprise. He is a mighty warrior confronting global force with his team of little heroes. He is a leader charged with saying what each West Indian leader should say to cricketers: put your country first; play for your nation; you are given a competitive salary; the pursuit of more is too costly to the community. Sammy is the Worrell-like figure, leading a youthful West Indies team through the political debris that blinds us all.”
No, your eyes do not mislead you. Prof Beckles compares Darren Sammy, nice chap that he is, with Sir Frank Worrell, a true legend of cricket, described by CLR James as “an authentic national hero” to the West Indian people, whose appointment as the first black captain of the West Indies for a whole series, in 1960-61, marked the greatest turning point in the history of West Indies cricket. Let us bring a little more perspective to bear.
In his Wisden obituary of Sir Frank Worrell, Sir Learie Constantine wrote, “I am not one for averages myself. I am more concerned with how a batsman made his runs and not what his average was at the end of the series. Sir Neville Cardus wrote of Sir Frank that he never made a crude or an ungrammatical stroke. I agree with that. Worrell was poetry.” It should be noted though that Sir Frank had an outstanding Test average of 49.48, only dropping below 50 because he was required to play well past his peak, so invaluable was his leadership. He was also a more than useful left-arm seam bowler who had best Test figures of 7 for 70 against England.
The greatest batsman ever, Sir Donald Bradman, said “Players of his calibre are rare. Not only was he a truly great and stylish batsman, he was also a fine thinker with a broad outlook.” Sir Frank’s opposite number in that magical 1960-61 series against Australia, Richie Benaud, paid him heartfelt tribute: “He was a great leader of men and one of the finest cricketers on and off the field in the history of the game… Few men have had a better influence on cricket.”
CLR James went beyond the boundary to understand the essence of the man who had opted out of the West Indies’ 1948 tour to India, taking a stand as a professional player in negotiations with the Board over a pay dispute: “Frank Worrell was a man of very strong character… His relations with the West Indies Board of Control earned him the title of a ‘cricket Bolshevik’. What is by now obvious is that he was possessed of an almost unbridled passion for social equality. It was the men on his side who had no social status whatever for whose interest and welfare he was always primarily concerned. They repaid him with an equally fanatical devotion.” Here, clearly, was a man of principle and professional pride, who could never be described as a stooge of the Board.
In 1967, shortly after Sir Frank’s tragic, premature death at 42, CLR wrote poignantly of what might have been: “If his reserve permitted it, this remarkable intelligence could be seen in his views of West Indian society. To us who were concerned he seemed poised for applying his powers to the cohesion and self-realization of the West Indian people… His reputation for strong sympathies with the populace did him no harm and his firm adherence to what he thought was right fitted him to exercise that leadership and gift for popularity which he had displayed so notably in the sphere of cricket. He had shown the West Indian mastery of what Western civilization had to teach. His wide experience, reputation, his audacity of perspective and the years which seemed to stretch before him fitted him to be one of those destined to help the West Indies to make their own West Indian way.” Sadly, leukaemia robbed the region of a formidable unifying force.
It is unfair, heretical even, of Prof Beckles to compare Mr Sammy with such a man. Darren Sammy himself would probably be the first to admit that he is no Frank Worrell. No serious student of the game would ever confuse the two and no self-respecting scholar of the Caribbean should ever make such an odious comparison.
