MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 21 March 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Recently I was forced to reflect on a coincidence which never struck me before. In my last conversation with C.L.R. James he had spent a long time quizzing me about Andy Roberts’ statement, that basket-ball was challenging cricket among Caribbean youth. James had the highest regard for Andy Roberts. Over and over he said to me that watching Andy Roberts bowl, he saw a fast-bowler with the thinking head of a spinner. He often wondered how Andy Roberts developed to the point, and what circumstances produced him. What enabled him to regulate “almost immaculately” both swing and pace, and at times, one without the other “virtually at will”. He would mention the legendary MacDonald, S.F. Barnes, George Lohmann, Lindwall and Larwood when speaking of Andy Roberts.
Therefore said he, one could not dismiss a judgement “by Andy Roberts on cricket at any time.” Logically then we had to explore Andy Roberts’ comment that cricket was being challenged at its roots in the Caribbean, by youthful desertion from cricket to basketball, and with compelling logic, we were witnessing a profound shift in West Indian culture.
The coincidence of which I speak is that Michael Manley in his very last conversation with, as in the case of C.L.R. James, raised the same question. I had always thought that Michael Manley by virtue of being Jamaican was a Michael Holding devotee. I quickly realised that I was guilty of a mean thought. Or better, a superficial one. Michael Manley explained that Holding had the most marvellous of wondrous actions in all cricket, athleticism flowing on a splendid rhythmic base, into speed an accuracy, so that even if he hit a batsman, it did not look like violence, but as a kind of poetic justice, the penalty for having used license with one’s technique.
On the contrary, he had noted the change with the older Andy Roberts, who in Manley’s view, had made a remarkable adjustment. Bowling more from the shoulder, and open chested, rather than side-on, and Michael Manley insisted, the older Roberts often bowled one or two deliveries on dead tracks, faster than he did in his prime! (Frankly, I was amazed. I had never noticed it. He had however, seen film clips of Roberts on his last tour of India).
Manley insisted that this amazing change of Roberts in his run-up, and delivery, was the result, and could only be the result, of Roberts’ study of his own physiology, and was indeed adjustment of machine – the body – to purpose – bowling. Manley compared Roberts’ change in bowling style, and thought it comparable only to the great Headley’s change in batting style, or that of the great Jack Hobbs’ change in batting style in his later years. To be honest, I felt for once, out of my depths discussing cricket. Quickly though, I regained my balance.
Manley’s crucial point was that Andy Roberts observation about basketball displacing cricket was the product of a man who paid the most careful attention to his own game, and to the game, and therefore what Andy Roberts had observed, did not have the status of an “opinion”. It fell in the more exalted category of an “hypothesis”. For, said Manley, Andy Roberts was “a man of scientific method” whereas Holding was more related to the artist. Though artist and scientist are both part of the same piece.
I proceeded to make reply. First I argued, Andy’s “hypothesis” that basketball was displacing cricket, was a specifically Antiguan response, to what was now in the Caribbean – a heightened interest in basketball.
I argued further, as I had done with C.L.R., that in Antigua, in recent years basketball courts were built all over the island, when only one cricket ground had been up-graded. This was more political, that is, to garner votes, than sporting, that is, advancing the organisation and performance of the sport, in this case, basketball. Basket-ball courts were built, it is true, but with no provision for maintenance. The courts would deteriorate as would the game in time. It was more fad than development of the game.
Secondly, I argued, the interest in basketball in the region was aroused, in part, by Abdul Kareem Jabbar, Patrick Ewing but more significantly, by the phenomenon of the age – Michael Jordan.
Now I want to refer to one of the most remarkable essays I have read, in over 40 years of serious reading, from Hazlitt down to Isaiah Berlin and James Baldwin. This astonishing essay by Michael Eric Dyson is entitled Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire and it appears in his book Reflecting Black.
We have to follow Dyson very, very carefully. Dyson, one of the outstanding black thinkers in the world today, a preacher and a professor of cultural studies, wrote: “The culture of sport has physically captured and athletically articulated the mores, folkways, and dominant visions of American society, and at its best it has been conceived as a means of symbolically embracing and equitably pursuing, the just, the good, the true and the beautiful.” So good so far, and true for more than the U.S.A.
But then Dyson follows that with this: “The culture of athletics has provided an acceptable and widely accessible means of white male bonding. For much of its history, American sports activity has reflected white patriarchal privilege.” Dyson takes the point to its logical conclusion.
Namely, that American sports “has been rigidly defined and socially shaped by rules that restricted the equitable participation of women and people of colour.”
That point is unarguable in the U.S.A. In the Caribbean circumstances were different, though similar. Whites tried to exclude blacks from Cricket. But because whites were in the minority in the Caribbean, from the inception of cricket, whites batted and blacks bowled. Not for nothing then that the first West Indian batsmen of note were, Challenor, Tarilton, Nunes, or for that matter Grant. Soon enough a Roach would penetrate the batting exclusive area, to be followed by the non-pareil, George Headley, the Altus of West Indies batting. By 1928 West Indian blacks were breaking into international sport, unlike their black counterparts in the United States – Jack Johnson, in boxing, excepted. The generality, of course, remains the rule.
Because of this, writes Dyson, American black “athletic activity often acquired a social significance that transcended the internal dimensions of the game, sport and skill. Black sport became an arena not only for testing the limits of social endurance and forms of athletic excellence ... but it also became a way of ritualising racial achievement against racially imposed barriers to cultural performance.” Unquestionably so.
In consequence, wrote Dyson, “Black participation in sports in mainstream American society, therefore is a relatively recent phenomenon.” It is a post-World War II phenomenon in the main, as the careers of Joe Louis, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe amply indicate. Even Jesse Owens was a World War II phenomenon. Or even Jackie Robinson. The point then ought to be clear beyond reasonable doubt.
Now we will have to spend some time on the incomparable Michael Jordan, and Dyson’s incomparable analysis of the phenomenon – Michael Jordan.
Dyson argues most credibly, that the nature of oppression of blacks in the United States produced in “African-American cultural practice the ability to flout widely understood boundaries through mesmerisation and alchemy, a subversion of common perceptions of the culturally or physically possible, through the creative and deceptive manipulation of appearance.” The important thing was for blacks to go beyond the established limits.
I could and do argue here that Ramadhin applied the same “mesmerisation and alchemy” to his bowling, which made it impossible for Englishmen to “pick” him. It seemed as if, by mesmerisation and alchemy, Ramadhin bowled the off-break and the leg-break with the same action. But, and this is crucial, the sub-soil, the cultural unconscious, so to speak, from which Ramadhin came, East Indian indenture, was essentially different from that of Afro-Americans. Simultaneously, Valentine, had developed orthodoxy to its Zenith.
It would be remiss of me, not to note, that the same “mesmerisation and alchemy” was present in Vivian Richards, who revolutionised batting, with his particular genius, by hitting across the line. I am going to commit a heresy. Vivi Richards hitting across the line is often illusory. He would begin an innings by penetrating the off-side. Then with his eye “in” and the off-side packed, his remarkable, astonishing, incredible, grease lightning footwork would place him on the off-stump, driving through the on-side, giving the illusion, the mark of all great art, that he had hit across the line. This is not to say, that Vivi Richards did not hit across the line, with a certainty and a placement, which no other batsman rivalled, let alone equalled. The creativity and improvisation, in the manner of Coltrane in Jazz, was uniquely Vivi Richards. Again the foundation of Coltrane in Jazz and Vivi Richards in cricket were the same, but, and this is a big ‘but’ the medium was different.
I am going to return to Dyson and Michael Jordan again. Dyson writes:
”Jordan is perhaps most famous for his alleged “hang time”, the uncanny ability to remain suspended in mid-air longer than other basketball players while executing his stunning array of improvised moves. But Jordan’s “hang time” is technically a misnomer and can be accurately attributed to Jordan’s skillful athletic deception, his acrobatic leaping ability, and his intellectual toughness in projecting an aura of uniqueness around his craft, than to his defiance of gravity and the laws of Physics. He has extended the boundaries of human creativity.”
”No human being” continues Dyson “including Michael Jordan, can successfully defy the law of gravity and achieve relatively sustained altitude without the benefit of machines. As Douglas Kirkpatrick points out the equation for altitude is ½g×t² = v₀×t (How does Michael Fly). However Jordan appears to hang by stylistically relativising the fixed co-ordinates of space and time through the skillful management and manipulation of his body in mid air .... Michael Jordan through the consummate skill and style of his game, only appears to be hanging in space for more than the one second that human beings are capable of remaining airborne.”
I contend that this is a specifically African-American response. A desire to express one’s being, despite barriers, in a unique way, in a national mode of expression. It is overcoming oppression in and through sport.
Basketball is a U.S. mode of national expression. It is not so in the Caribbean. It cannot be so.
However, Michael Jordan, by his unique creativity in basketball has etched himself into the consciousness of the world. I am sure that in the Arctic, even Eskimos who do not play basketball have become hooked on the game, because of Michael Jordan. They see something new. Not just something new, but something which extends the realm of human possibility.
In another manner of speaking, Michael Jordan has internationalised his play, and is probably the first truly global sports figure, penetrating all cultures and sharpening their perceptions of the physical, the intellectual, the good, the just and the beautiful, in a heightened way.
It is not that basketball will seize hold of the world and supersede all other national games. It is that Michael Jordan, his stylisation, his mental and physical agility has captivated the entire globe. It is an unprecedented phenomenon.
Dyson points out that Michael Jordan has developed “a resourceful repertoire of dazzling dunk shots that further express the performed self and that have garnered him a special niche within the folklore of the game: the cradle jam, rock-a-baby, kiss-the-rim, lean in, and the tomahawk.”
Michael Jordan by this resourcefulness, helped to lay to rest “the notion that inferior black intelligence limited the ability of blacks to perform excellently in those sports activities that required mental concentration and agility.” It was a most important great leap forward. It was and is a moment, an important moment, in the struggle for black liberation. I think that it is the excitement of that liberation which captivates and captures the attention of black youth all across the Caribbean. It may even extend beyond the Afro-Caribbean or Afro-American into the realms of wider human liberation, in which the world, worn down by the deadness, drudgery and dehumanising characteristics of modern work, share and participate in Michael Jordan’s movement of liberation. It is symphonic. On the grand scale of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, or like the chorale in Beethoven’s ninth.
But I insist Michael Jordan’s medium, is a specifically American medium of basketball. It is bound up in American history, American racial struggle and evolution or revolution, or both. It is not transferable to the Caribbean. It is like a poem translated. The original, in the original language, can never be conveyed in the translated language. The translation is almost a separate work of art by the translator.
The translation of basketball into the English-speaking Caribbean would require a particular ethos, which would take a century or more to construct in order to make basketball the national mode of expression in the region. Therefore, basketball cannot replace cricket in the collective unconscious of the Caribbean, from which I hold, all creativity springs.
As I did with C.L.R. James, I quoted James at James to prove my point. Cricket is bound up inseparably with Caribbean history. It is impossible to separate Rohan Kanhai’s style of play from East Indian indenture in the sugar-fields of Guyana, and the need to emancipate one’s self from the restrictions, by using a base of orthodoxy on which to improvise in the particular national mode of expression. And so create the performed self, unique, and therefore adding a dimension to the game. I will not go into the everlasting great Sir Gary Sobers, that would take several articles!
The same is true of Vivian Richards. Coming from one of the territories long excluded from Test cricket, he had to incorporate into himself the long tradition of West Indian batting from Headley to Sobers, and upon that platform improvise, and improvise like no one had done before, or for that matter since, and so extend the boundaries of creativity. With the platform everything is possible. Without it, not much, except play. To take it beyond play to art, requires, the tradition so to speak, and upon that tradition to break it by extending it.
I now reminded C.L.R. James of his own words in Beyond a Boundary that:
“The limitation of spirit, vision and self-respect which was imposed on us by the fact that our masters [at school], our curriculum, our code of morals, everything, began from the basis that Britain was the source of all light and learning, 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 was of course impossible. Both masters and boys accepted as in the very nature of things.”
Beginning in particular with Headley, but more so with Herman Griffith, the early fine West Indian fast bowler, and reaching its acme in Frank Worrell, West Indian cricketers refused to accept “the very nature of things” that they could “only approach the distant ideal” of excellence in cricket, and that to attain it was impossible.
Through cricket, from Headley to Lara, from Herman Griffith to Curtly Ambrose, Afro- and Indo-Caribbean repudiated, and more important, went beyond the limitation of spirit, vision and self-respect imposed on us. It was a revolution.
Cricket and cricket alone provided the medium in popular sports, through which we could take the English an institution, and transform it, re-create it in our own image and likeness and stamp our personality on it, liberating ourselves from impositions which the heavy weight of centuries had re-inforced with the limitation of spirit, vision and self-respect. It took Sobers’ incredible all-round abilities, Worrell’s unequalled leadership, Andy Roberts’ scientific method, Holding’s poetry in motion, the wizardry of Lance Gibbs and Malcolm Marshall’s pyrotechnics to establish the West Indian personality in the international arena free of past encumbrances. Free at last! In a Federal State, created by all three races namely, African, Indian and European, in cricket, though not in economics and politics.
It is for that reason that I am convinced that no amount of basketball can dethrone cricket. A mode of expression, of national expression, is not created by chance or by whim. It is the product of history and historic striving, conscious and unconscious. Michael Jordan ‘flies”, Vivi Richards “hits across the line”, each expressing his particular genius, in their own specific mode of national expression. Cricket is ours, not basketball.
Our participation in basketball is, in the main, a celebration of the new universality created by Michael Jordan – the first truly global sportsman.
Last updated on 14 February 2022