This profile of Michael Holding, which appeared in Caribbean Beat in January 2000, is one of the first pieces I ever wrote on cricket, and it remains one of my favourites out of all the things I’ve published. I recall transcribing the long interview I did with Michael in Jamaica and feeling about for a structure that would permit me to use more of his distinctive voice than would normally be acceptable in a profile. I eventually found that structure in a 1999 Rolling Stone profile of another former athletic star — Bill Bradley, who was making a bid for the US presidency that year.
Holding happens one of my favourite people in cricket, and not for just the reasons he’s one of many women’s favourite people in cricket. You’ll want to bear in mind, however, that this piece was written at the end of 1999 and that many aspects of the subject’s life, and of the cricketing establishment, have changed since then.
(Caribbean Beat doesn’t seem to have got around to making material from their 2000 archives available as yet, but those who insist on seeing the piece in its original form can download the cruddy-looking pdf I cobbled together from bad page scans via this link).
Tuesday March 27th 2007, 9:49 am
Filed under: General Posted by: Georgia
The meme-ing impulse goes against the grain of my mental processes, and being tagged usually makes me break out in hives. But this one from Geoffrey was refreshingly unchallenging. Here are the rules:
1. Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday, month and day only
2. List 3 events that occurred on that da
3. List 2 important birthdays
4. List one notable transition
5. List a holiday or observance (if any)
6. Tag five of your friends
As I write this, there’s a bush bug* on my desk. A few minutes ago (as the photo above attests) it was performing calisthenics on the rim of a drinking glass; now it’s burrowing under an envelope. I don’t like having bush bugs around, but as I tend to keep the windows open, I expect that, from time to time, insects will land on my desk. Some of them will stay only a few moments, like the moth that alighted on my credit card statement a while ago, then flew off within seconds, perhaps appalled by my credit card balance (or, more likely, in search of better lighting). Others, like this bush bug, will stick around for a while. This fella (gal?) has been here since this afternoon.
As I said, I’d prefer if there weren’t a bush bug on my desk. Nothing against bush bugs personally: it’s just that I like to reserve the space on my desk for things like MacBooks; bottles of Vitamin B12 tablets; bank statements; cordless phones; notebooks; cans of canned air; stray dollar bills; flash card readers; blocks of Post-It notes; trade paperbacks; grey sleep masks from some airline (still in their plastic wrapper; what the hell are those doing there?); camera-battery chargers; letters from newly re-branded airlines with frequent flyer cards glued to them; glue sticks; iPods; glasses cases; nest-like tangles of computer cables; small, elegant-but-sensible-looking Swiss watches; whirring external hard drives (one in the process of cloning the other); ceramic pencil holders; and, of course, microphones and mixers (how else is a podcaster supposed to practise her craft?). And let us not forget wine glasses.
But about my having nothing against bush bugs: I said that to be politically correct, of course. I actually dislike bush bugs quite intensely. The problem with bush bugs, however, is that once you disturb them, they emit a strong, Durian-grade odour which most people (myself included) find very unpleasant. An odour that takes hours to go away.
I look at my bush bug now, at rest on the sleep mask’s plastic wrapper, its antennae no longer making the frantic waving motions of a few minutes ago. So perhaps it is sleeping. Perhaps it is even dying (as there was no entry for “bush bug” in Wikipedia, and since I don’t know the scientific name, I have no idea what kind of lifespan these creatures have, and even if I knew–how old is this one? How close to the end of its natural life?).
While the bush bug rests, however, I continue to compose this post, undisturbed but for those moments when I glance over at the bush bug to check out its latest antics. And the only reason I’m even looking at the bush bug is because it’s the subject of this post. I’m 99% sure that by tomorrow it will be gone, either to bush bug Valhalla or back out the window to a more suitable habitat (like, say, the bush). And besides, it is only a tiny thing.
Wednesday March 21st 2007, 10:10 pm
Filed under: General Posted by: Georgia
Lloyd Best is gone and we are all alone now. So lonely and alone now. Left, bereft, to scramble in the Caribbean centre that should be our world. Unless, in time, those thoughts become flesh. So lonely and alone till then. Alone and so very lonely, wondering when.
Tuesday March 20th 2007, 12:47 am
Filed under: General Posted by: Georgia
We will desperately miss–because we desperately need, now more than ever–his hard-won but lightly worn knowledge, his insight, his optimism, his humour, his integrity. No one has understood the Caribbean better, and few have lived so selflessly.
Dare we say that CFR the podcast is back? Episode #45 arrives complete with cheap gimmickry and, fortunately, a bit of substance provided by the members of CFR’s house band, 3canal, whom we visit during a rehearsal of the repeat performance of this year’s edition of The 3canal Show at Queen’s Hall in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Listen to the podcast by using the player at the bottom of the post or access it using any of these methods: Download MP3 | RSS | iTunes
Saturday March 17th 2007, 10:47 am
Filed under: General Posted by: Georgia
Because I have no time to blog in the way that will satisfy someone like, say, Vernon; because I’ve been losing sight, lately, of the fact that I was once capable of writing paragraphs more than two lines long and not preceded by a subject line; and because it’s cricket season, I’ve decided to dust off some of my cricket writings, beginning with this 2003 profile of writer and commentator Tony Cozier (first published in Caribbean Beat):
“Why, you’re Tony Cozier,” said the rental car man.
Cozier, you see, had spoken. Until he opened his mouth, he had simply been another middle-aged customer sent over by the Heathrow airport desk. But then he asked whether we could possibly exchange our Hyundai Sonata for a Volkswagen Passat, and Cozier metamorphosed before the elderly gentleman’s eyes into an icon. Here, demanding an audacious upgrade (though let me say, for the record, that our argument was trunk space), was the voice of West Indies cricket. The talk then switched from cars to the inevitable: Brian Lara, whom Warwickshire had fined again that week; the Test series (England vs South Africa) in full swing up at Edgbaston; and what in heaven had happened to West Indies cricket? In the end, we did drive away in the Passat. Read on >>
He looks like a man, but I suspect he’s really a machine (he claims the objects he carries around in that small bag are insulin and a glucose meter; but has anyone really checked?) Only a machine could live-blog the way Ethan Zuckerman does.
Doing the laundry this morning, a flash of yellow caught my eye through the breeze blocks. It was the subject of this photo, alighting on the fence. I ran for my camera, hoping he would stay put for a few minutes, and, miraculously, he did.
I don’t know much about birds. The fact that I even recognise this one as a yellow oriole is largely because of that Nestlé promotion the bookmann wrote about back in January. But being able to look out of my laundry room and see one of these is one of the many small reasons I remain in this place.
Friday March 09th 2007, 1:48 pm
Filed under: General Posted by: Georgia
Yasir Arafat just took a beautiful catch off one of the South Africans. I couldn’t tell you which South African, as the stand I’m sitting in here at the Sir Frank Worrell Memorial ground is right next to the venue’s sole scoreboard, and the pitch is too far away for me to read the names on the back of the batsmen’s lizard green shirts. In fact, the only reason I’m able to identify Arafat as the catcher is that he’s the boundary fielder just in front of our stand, and well — that name. If I lean forward, squint and angle my head just so, I can just about see the top few lines of the scoreboard, among which, thankfully, is the total (195/9 at the moment). Of the four Cricket World Cup warm-up matches being played today in various parts of the Caribbean, this is also the only one for which Cricinfo isn’t carrying live scores.
The scores are coming through load and clear, of course, for what is turning out to be the lamest match of the lot: West Indies v. India, taking place now in Trelwany on Jamaica’s north coast. The West Indies are 85/9 after only 25 overs (for those of you who don’t know cricket, this means we might as well say congratulations to the Indians and head back to the team hotel). “They should give the people they money back!” says a man listening to the broadcast on his cell phone. “Imagine,” says another, “the host team, collapsing like that in the last match before the tournament start.” They steups* in unison.
But the scene here in Trinidad is generally festive. Apart from the Asian couple in the row behind us, whom I suspect are Indian nationals (he’s wearing an India replica shirt, and the tentative manner in which they picked their way to their seats a couple hours earlier suggested they weren’t locals), nobody here probably cares too much about the outcome of the match. Like me, they’re probably just happy to be out here on a Friday afternoon, on the kind of breezy, slightly hazy day that Relator probably had in mind when he wrote the lines “A lovely day for cricket/Blue skies and gentle breeze. . . .” But that calypso, of course (whose title is “Gavaskar“) commemorates another of the West Indies misadventures against India on Caribbean soil (in 1971, to be exact), so maybe we don’t want to think about it.
The Sir Frank Worrell Memorial ground is a neat little facility on the edge of the University of the West Indies campus in Trinidad. It’s clearly a work in progress. The area beyond the cricket pitch is still bare earth, but at least they’ve done us the courtesy of covering it with black flannel to keep down the dust. The covers on the bleachers are party tents bound together with duct tape, which is not to say, either, that they don’t do the job. The media centre — almost empty today — looks bright and well-appointed. One of the Sir Frank Worrell Memorial’s ground best features isn’t on the ground at all: the backdrop of the northern range, grayish-green today in the light haze.
As we arrived this morning, there were scores of megaphone-toting volunteers directing the parking and announcing the infamous regulations (no plastic bottles etc) in cheery tones. And then again at the gates, directing women with bags to one line, men without bags to another, and offering plastic baskets for us to put our cell phones and keys and loose change. The security check was cursory, but then, this is a tame, non-partisan crowd comprising mainly locals, arriving at a ground that holds 3,000. I wonder how smoothly things will run at Kensington (30,000), Sabina Park (27,000) the Oval (25,000).
The team is on lunch now, and so are we. The air around me is filled with the aroma of KFC and beer. The deejay in the area I now realise is the party stand is jamming this year’s road march, though the only people who seem to be hearing the music are two exhibitionists wearing fancy Indian headdresses jumping around near the boundary fence.
But the umpires are walking back on to the pitch, followed by the South Africans, who look like they mean business, and the Pakistani batsmen Nazir and Hafeez (Cricinfo live scorecard’s finally working)**, bobbing and prancing and trying to convince us that they’re only limbering up, not trying to chase away the heebie-jeebies that any opening batsman in his right mind should be feeling at the prospect of facing the gigantic André Nel.
**[UPDATE: Actually the scorecard wasn’t yet fully working when I first posted this, which is why I wrote earlier that the opening batsmen were Gul and Sami, who happen to be bowlers and probably wouldn’t be allowed to open even for the West Indies. Apologies — though it’s really all Cricinfo’s fault. Here’s the final scorecard, by the way - congrats, Pakistan!]
In an e-mail I had from him recently, Marvin — who became a Stanford Digital Vision Fellow last year — tells me he’s been working on a project called Robotics Stimul-I, which will use LEGO robotics workshops to motivate children in Jamaica’s inner city communities to increase their literacy and numeracy. This coming July he’ll be launching a six-month pilot in Kingston, which will also offer workshops in filmmaking, photography and music. He’ll also be preparing a team to compete in the 2007 World Robotics Olympiad in Taipei, Taiwan in November.
Marvin’s work excites me not only because the teaching of science and math are two seriously deficient areas in the Caribbean education system, and because I feel that educators in this region are routinely failing to connect with the ways that children in the 21st century learn. It excites me as well for the very basic reason outlined here by Ethan:
Marvin sees a very stark choice for the youth he’s working with - they exercise their minds through robotics or other forms of creative expression, or there’s a good chance they’ll end up trapped in the violence that surrounds them.
So take a look at Marvin’s video. And a side note to Machel, just in case he and his crew decide to get copyright-happy on me for running a video that uses one of his tracks: “We Not Givin’ Up” is the perfect soundtrack for this programme. You should be proud they used it.
54-46 may or may not have been Toots Hibbert’s actual prisoner ID number, but I’m sticking by mine: C92. My prison is only metaphorical, of course: the CWC World Cup ticket office at the Hasely Crawford Stadium, where I sit now on a concrete staircase waiting for the ticket office people to open the door again so the 40 or 50 of us gathered here can start screaming at them once more. Well, not really screaming. More like clamouring for information that should have been given to us long ago, or at least posted on a wall somewhere, and for one of those squares of paper with a number hand-written on it. (Too bad I don’t have a Sharpie in my bag — I could have done a roaring trade in bootleg number-papers.)
Problem is, nobody knows what the numbers mean. “What time will C92 be called?” I asked the security guard. She shrugged and gave a non-answer about the tickets not having yet arrived. The saleswoman who handed out the first batch of number-papers did so with the speed and furtiveness of a drug pusher distributing gram-bags on a street corner. The next tranch was delivered by the security guard, who simply stuck a hand holding a stack of them through the grille. A man whom I’d seen slink into the ticketing area only minutes before was on hand to grab them. “Hey you!” I shouted. “I was was here long before you!” “Hold strain, hold strain,” he said, struggling to separate the tiny squares, which were loosely held together with a bent paper clip. When C92 finally reached me, the clip was still attached. I think I’ll keep it as a souvenir.
It’s now 11:16 am, which means I’ve been here nearly 45 minutes. The big orange sign on the door (still closed) says that opening hours are 8am to 4pm. I can’t say I blame the salespeople for shutting the door and hiding out. Nothing they can tell the crowd will make the us happy. They don’t seem to have either the information, or our tickets, and the supervisor is AWOL, as supervisors tend to be at times like these. Some of the people waiting here ordered their tickets online since November, which makes me feel only a little less peeved (I ordered mine–for the warm-up match between South Africa and Pakistan–two days ago).
As usual, there’s an apologist in the crowd, a self-righteous woman with permanently pursed lips who, in spite of the fact that she arrived here even earlier than me, keeps telling everybody to behave and to “use their common sense”. “It’s an international tournament,” she tells a man, a shortish middle-management type in shirt-and-tie and boots with heels just a little too high. “What do people expect?” I decide to ignore her, as earlier, in response to my comment about the lack of information, she’d pointed to a sign on the wall and retorted, “But all the information is there.” I decided that pointing out to her that the sign was the standard one posted in all the ticket offices since last year, bearing the standard info, and that we wouldn’t all be standing here bitching had things been working according to plan, would have been a colossal waste of time.
A nuts man* has entered the area, doing a brisk trade as it’s nearly lunch time. A couple of men sitting on the steps in front of me are saying, in that classic Trini style, that it’s a good thing we got “only the brown** matches”. “Look, the construction at the Oval ain’t even finish,” one says. They guffaw.
They’ve just opened the door, and I was about to pack up and join the knot of people in front of it, if only to find out what being number C92 means. But a man in a plaid shirt tells me it’s only for those purchasing tickets, not collectors of online orders. So seems I won’t be budging for a while. But the concrete’s getting a little hard now.
It just occurred to me that, with the West Indies facing Sri Lanka tomorrow in the Cricket World Cup, I should get a move on posting another of those old cricket articles I promised I would while my home team’s still in the tournament. 
