Frank Worrell - so much more than a cricketer

TELFORD VICE has twice been asked to write about his favourite cricketer. Here are both his pieces on the subject.

ESPNCricinfo - June, 2008

FRANK Worrell bought me plenty of coffee during the 2007 World Cup. That's odd because he died 40 years ago. But in Barbados the going rate for a double espresso is $4.50 in the local currency, and the face that beams with easy dignity on a $5 bill is that of Worrell. "Go on," his slight smile seemed to suggest as Australia ground towards their umpteenth victory, "it won't feel so bad if you have another."

So I did, often, and in the midst of a caffeine buzz it didn't seem to matter quite so much that Ricky Ponting's custard column was marching unhalted through another World Cup, or that one-day cricket had marked time since Steve Waugh had lifted the trophy at Lord's in 1999. What might Worrell have said about all that? "Stop moping and find a way to beat them," probably.

It is for real and imagined reasons like this that Worrell is my favourite player, despite the fact that I was but a year old when he succumbed to leukaemia in 1967. Among the more real reasons is that Worrell donated blood to help save the life of Nari Contractor after Charlie Griffith had bounced Contractor into hospital in 1962.

I can easily forgive Worrell's well-meant but silly insistence that guilty batsmen should walk. That lapse into unreality is more than made up for by his decision, in a match against Yorkshire, to pack the leg-side field and to instruct his bowlers to gun for the batsmen. When Douglas Jardine had employed similar tactics, he had been vilified outside of England as a darkly calculating figure. But no-one anywhere accused Worrell of being other than a creative captain who was merely trying to win the match in question, which his team duly did. Was this because Worrell was by all accounts an infinitely better human being than Jardine?

Another reason why Worrell is at the top of my list is that he was prone to nodding off in the dressing-room, particularly in the middle of a batting collapse. Yes, sometimes cricket really is a boring old business. Interest in the world beyond the game by the more abject professionals who play it for a living would seem to extend only as far as the nearest golf course. Worrell, by contrast, crammed as much life as he dared to into his 42 years. After retiring as a player, he became a warden at the University of the West Indies, and he graced the Jamaican Parliament as a senator. Who would want Kevin Pietersen for an MP? Who would entrust the tertiary education of their children to Shane Warne?

Worrell was born in Barbados, spent much of his adult life in Trinidad, and saw out his days in Jamaica. Those are three of the most disparate societies in the West Indies. "He saw the many diverse elements of the West Indies as a whole, a common culture and outlook separated only by the Caribbean Sea," Learie Constantine wrote in Worrell's Wisden obituary. Worrell propagated his views earnestly enough to berate Barbados for inviting the international community to celebrate the country's independence. A nation bristled, and for weeks afterwards the newspapers fairly rustled with harrumphing. Worrell was a cricketer who demanded to be so much more than only that.

And, of course, he was no mean cricketer. Neville Cardus wrote that "he never made a crude or an ungrammatical stroke". For CLR James, Worrell's late cut was "one of the great strokes of our time". Worrell's finest hour at the crease was West Indies' tour to England in 1950, where he scored 539 runs at 89.83. But his two stands of over 500 - 502 with John Goddard in 1944, and 574 with Clyde Walcott in 1946, both unfinished, and both for Barbados against Trinidad - provide a better epitaph for him as a player. He did, after all, believe in partnerships above all else.

Many will remember Worrell best as the first black man to be appointed West Indies captain. "[...] He was possessed of an almost unbridled passion for social equality," James wrote. "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." Not for nothing, then, was Worrell snidely referred to as a "cricket Bolshevik" in the corridors of West Indian power.

Such treason evaporated in the heat of his first assignment at the helm, West Indies' epic 1960-61 venture to Australia. Famously, 500,000 Australians lined Melbourne's streets to bid the West Indians farewell at the end of the tour. And that in an Australia that was in the grip of a racist mindset.

As a South African who grew up when apartheid was at its most murderous, I have had cause to wonder what difference Worrell and his team might have made to the history of my country had they spent just one summer playing here. I never met Worrell or saw him play, but in the words of James, "No cricketer... ever shook me up in a similar manner." Espresso for the soul, you might say.

The Cricketer - June, 2009

IN the South Africa in which I grew up, the kind of heroes who strode the cricket ground were worth diddly squat. You didn’t need to think too hard to work out why, but let’s remind ourselves, anyway.

For every centurion there was a host of infinitely more heroic souls struggling to stay alive under Apartheid. For every feared fast bowler there was a slew of fascist politicians defending the indefensible. For every predatory fielder there were legions of white voters returning the National Party to power.

Sport was part of what the government used to divide us and rule over us, and part of what progressives used to fight against that government. In this country, sport really was a matter of life and death.

So, you’ll have to forgive me for not picking my favourite cricketer from the likes of Graeme Pollock, Clive Rice and Mike Procter. From where I stood – in the admittedly sparsely populated ranks of white working class Lefties – South Africa’s most prominent players were part of the problem.

What about Basil D’Oliveira, a bona fide hero? By the time I was old enough to make decisions beyond what flavor of fizzy drink I liked best, he was an Englishman. I reckoned my patriotism ran as deep as the veins of gold in the Witwatersrand’s hard earth, and Dolly therefore didn’t make the grade.

Players like Hassan Howa, Tiny Abed and Taliep Salie were as homegrown as biltong and certainly worthy of hero hood. But the galling thing about Apartheid was that it worked – it put 317 different laws between me and South Africans it deemed too Other for whites to associate with at any meaningful level, even from the distance of grandstands and headlines.

I trudged on through life without a favourite cricketer until the early 1990s, when I met Conrad Hunte. He was in South Africa to spread Ali Bacher’s development gospel, and an inspired choice he was for the job. When Hunte spoke of the Tied Test, for instance, the magic of the moment leapt from his eyes into his audience’s hearts. He was a man in love with the world, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about throwing a spark of enthusiasm into every life he touched.

Hunte may well have been my favourite cricketer on those grounds alone. But one day he spoke two words which seemed to imbue him with the kind of tangible tingle he invariably engendered in me: “Frank Worrell.”

If there was a person who had walked this earth who was able to put the light into Conrad Hunte’s eyes, I had to know all about him. And so began my relationship with Frank Mortimer Maglinne Worrell. In those pre-Internet days, information was rather more than a click away. Books that might have told me more about Worrell than I already knew were as rare in South Africa as whites who, these days, will admit to having voted for the Nats. But I persevered, and I was amply rewarded.

Gradually in my mind emerged a figure who knew the vital truth that cricket was a part of life, and not the other way around; a man who understood the currency that cricket had given him to live a richly real life; who would have led with integrity and aplomb whatever his calling; who used his standing within the game to work for change outside of it; and, besides all that, someone who loved and respected cricket and played it like the champion he was. The first black man appointed to captain the West Indies, a Jamaican senator, a visionary for unity in the Caribbean, and the most elegant of the Three Ws: Not before time, I had found my favourite cricketer.

Along the way, I encountered Neville Cardus and CLR James. Can there be a better example of the vast but seldom grasped difference between Socialists and Marxists? For Cardus, Worrell “never made a crude or an ungrammatical stroke”. James would doubtless have agreed, but he had other issues on his mind on February 28, 1958 when the headline above his piece in The Nation, a strident Trinidad weekly, read: “Frank Worrell must captain.” Nothing crude or ungrammatical about that.

As this (then) young reporter clacked away at his keyboard with both of his typing fingers, he would have to remind myself that neither of those two pillars of cricket writing would read his sophomoric offerings as a wannabe member of their craft. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were looking over my shoulder.

I marveled at the fact that no less a legend than Learie Constantine had authored Worrell’s Wisden obituary. “Imagine,” I thought at the time, “Richie Benaud writing mine!” My memories don’t get more cringeworthy than that, but what the hell.

What would Worrell make of cricket today, what with the parachuted IPL rocking and writhing on millions of televisions screens, Pakistan forced to “host” Australia in Dubai, and sometimes as many as three Test matches competing for our attention?

Cricket is a vastly different beast from the genteel pursuit it appears to have been when Worrell would fall gently asleep as he sat padded up and awaiting the fall of a wicket. But it is too kneejerk a notion to assume he would turn up his nose in total disapproval. Worrell was that one thing that often separates the good from the great: Human. Wouldn’t he have looked past the lack of grandly essayed strokes in the IPL, and been moved by the cheerleaders’ moves?

Worrell always saw far beyond cricket’s boundaries. I’d like to think he would have enjoyed the view today.