Cricket, Lovely Cricket

Sometimes living in America is like living in a bubble. March Madness is the great excitement right now (apart from American Idol), and there is a strange assumption that this madness is international—that the world is somehow involved with this madness. Well, it isn’t. In Jamaica right now, there is another excitement. In fact, through out the Caribbean right now, the big excitement is cricket. Heck, in India, Pakistan, Ireland (they have a team now, too), Zimbabwe and South Africa, cricket is the excitement. World Cup cricket is unfolding in the Caribbean. The West Indies beat Pakistan today. Does this mean anything to you?

My friends are sending me the score, over after over. And now I am being pressured by the coincidence of my travels to extend a trip I am making to Jamaica for another day so I can catch one of the matches. I am tempted, but I can’t. I have to hurry back to enjoy the March Madness. Not really. I have to hurry back to my day to day life. And my ordinary day to day life is a pressing one and a consuming one. And if I miss a day, things will pile up..
But there is another reason I am managing to resist the temptation. I fear that I will jinx the West Indies. I have not watched an international cricket match at the highest level live in over twenty years. The last time I saw a test match, the West Indies won. They won as they had been winning for years before. I feel responsible for those successes in the same way that I feel deeply responsible for the demise of the West Indies team over t6he last ten years. I stopped watching. Stopped paying attention and that ended the ascendancy. To go now, just when things have started to pick up without my help, would be to jinx things.
There is that, and there is the way in which a sense of skepticism can consume even the most hopeful. Kamau Brathwaite has a great line in his poem, “Rites”, “Yuh cyan find a man to hold up the side” which is a lament about the propensity of the West Indies of an earlier era to collapse without effort. I understand that anxiety only through empathy, because when I ruled the vibes waves, when my presence and focus and concentration were causing the team to win, I did not understand such pessimism, such fatalism. It was alien to me. To go to a cricket match today to watch the West Indies, requires another mindset—a deeply honed sense of irony, self-deprecation and tough-mindedness. Above all, it requires that casual way of saying, “Well, same old same old—cyaan find a man to hold up the side,” without rancor of shock. I don’t know if I have that. So I must not go.
But what I will miss is the excitement of hearing people who know every detail of the game commenting about each ball, each stroke, each field placement, and about the people in the stands, and the fate of the war in Iraq. I will miss the humor, the sound of dancehall music forming a new propulsive rhythm to the game. I will miss the carnival celebration when a ball speeds across the green grass of Sabina Park and knocks the boundary boards with that sweet sound of success. I will miss the satisfaction of knowing that I understanding everything that is going on the field and in the head of the players because I have been there, because I know what it takes for them to succeed. I will miss feeling some of the shame and anger that a good batsman will feel as he walks back to the pavilion after making very few runs. I will understand it because I have been there. I miss that.
Here, I reach into the emotion of a game through the imagination—through a translation that is at best a compromise. I never played basketball competitively at school and the closest I came to baseball at that age was in an elementary school game called rounders, that the girls let some of the boys play. Football is alien to me. I don’t think anyone can really understand football without having experienced once the crushing blow of other bodies, ramming them into the ground. I think that is a necessity. I don’t have that experience—to in that game. So I come to these games as someone trying to make sense of an alien space.
So for the sake of the West Indian team’s success, I will be depriving myself of something visceral and special. It is a twisted circumstance.
Thank God for American Idol. I get that. I mean I understand it. And the young Indian fellow is amazing everyone. He will continue to be kept in the show, I suspect, despite the fact that his decent voice has not been able to break through the cacophony of the supporting band and back up singers. They should play more softly, with more space, with more bass and drum and less keys and guitars and that boy will shine. Of course I am joking.
But I can watch that show. I can’t watch the West Indies. I, though, can write about the game. I can rejoice in today’s victory and imagine the party going on in Kingston tonight.