Cricket takes a dramatic stand
More than the game itself, the resumption of play this week was marked by a powerful campaign against racism
Two words (actually, a name): Michael Holding. July 8, 2020, marked the resumption of cricket in the time of Covid-19, with the first day of the first Test in the West Indies tour of England (by the time this column appears, we will probably have a result). In these uncommon times, the restart collided head-on with that most common constant of the game during the English summer — rain. Most of the first day was washed out.
It was not the cricket itself, however, but the way the broadcasters addressed racism that made this day remarkable.
A Black Lives Matter flag waved from the West Indies balcony as the team came out for the start. Each player wore a black glove on one hand. Both teams — and the umpires! — knelt on the ground. The Windies players raised their gloved fists in what was a clear mirroring of American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics.
Then Michael Holding took over in the commentary box. He, along with Ebony Rainford-brent, the first Black woman to play for England, delivered the most emotional, unflinching, eloquent and sweeping conversation on racism and why the Black Lives Matter protest is inextricable from sport.
As the rain-interrupted day wore on, Holding and Rainford-brent and the broadcast team delved deeper and deeper into the issue.
Rainford-brent spoke of the “constant drip-drip” of racism she has faced through her career, and pointed out how there are no Black people on the England Cricket Board, and no Black captains in the 18 county teams. Holding gave a masterclass on the insidiousness and the many facets of racism. It ended with a remarkable monologue in which he touched upon everything from the imagery of Jesus as a White, blue-eyed, golden-haired man, despite the fact that he was Middleeastern, to school systems, even in Jamaica, that never taught him anything good about Black people.
“These lights that are shining on us,” he said to his fellow commentators, “you can tell me who invented the light bulb, right? Everybody knows Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb with a paper filament. It burned out in no time at all. Can you tell me who invented the filament that makes these lights shine throughout? Nobody knows, because he is a Black man, and it is not taught in schools. Lewis Howard Latimer invented the carbon filament to allow lights to continue to shine.”
It took me back to perhaps the most remarkable documentary on cricket ever made, Fire in Babylon(2011). The film explores the 1976 West Indies tour of England, at a time when the Caribbean team was considered inferior in every way.
“I intend to make them grovel,”south Africa-born England captain Tony Greig said before the start of the series. The comment landed like a bomb in the West Indies dressing room. The team at the time featured the pace quartet of Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Colin Croft and Holding. Each of them could bowl at over 90 mph. This was their moment of reckoning, and their message would be delivered through the game of their former colonisers. The bowlers bowled with such ferocity, they became known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is where Viv Richards first met discrimination with a fiery bat.
The history of cricket is the history of Empire, and every cricketing nation has its stories of suffering, emancipation and reckoning to tell (South Africa is still living it, Zimbabwe too).
Last Wednesday, Holding brought all those memories rushing back. This time the weapon was his words.
The resumption of most major sporting activities has been marked by widespread solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement — footballers in the English Premier League have been taking a knee, F1 started its season with its drivers doing the same — but it is cricket that has made the strongest statement yet.
When Carlos and Smith protested, they were ostracised for decades; some went so far as to call them ‘dark-skinned stormtroopers’. Hardly anything had changed more than 50 years later, when Colin Kaepernick took a knee in 2016 and was thrown out of his sport.
Finally, change seems to be in the air.