I recently read an article in the Financial Times by reporter Mark Damazer entitled “An Englishman’s love of baseball.” The piece recounts this journalist’s discovery of the great American pastime while he was traveling in the United States nearly thirty years ago. The title alone was enough to draw my attention, having experienced a similar transplanted passion – this one, for cricket.
As an undergraduate I decided in my final year to write my senior honors thesis on the development of cricket in South Africa, and the evolution of the sport in relation to changing values under the apartheid system. In particular I focused on how cricket was used (effectively) as a means of combating racial segregation within the country and garnering international attention without. When I would introduce this topic to my peers and professors at school, I nearly always received the same response: “How did you come up with that idea?” It is with this question that I begin my latest entry, appropriately titled, “An American’s love of cricket.”
When I lived and “worked” in Cape Town nearly three years ago, it was in the midst of the Commonwealth Games, hosted in Melbourne. Having very little responsibility and much time to spare, I spent many an hour on the couch watching SABC coverage of the Commonwealth Games. As a social studies major and a dabbler in post-colonial theory, I was astounded to see how many countries currently associate themselves as being members of the British Commonwealth – not “former commonwealth” as in the “former Soviet Union,” but contemporary members of a voluntary organization whose express economic and political purpose is to maintain the ties between formers colonies of the British Empire. As someone who understood colonial theory largely from the crevices of the library and the corners of my classroom, it baffled me completely that this type of archaic and pre-modern institution could still exist – and in fact, could be celebrated! From this perspective I began to gaze anew at the sporting institutions so revered in South Africa, perhaps one of the most complex and legatorial ex-colonies of the British crown.
From the Commonwealth Games and the Queen’s blessing it was only a small hop, skip and jump to asking similar questions about games like rugby, soccer, and cricket. From previous knowledge I understood that each of those sports had its origins in the British Isles, and had found their way around the globe by means of ships, schools, and armies. A little research began to reveal the details of cricket’s introduction to regions like southern Africa, the Caribbean (West Indies) and the Subcontinent. From there it took zero to point five seconds to catch a glimpse of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic distinctions between each of these sports as currently carried out in a country like South Africa. Thus, and thence, my thesis’ guiding question was therein contained.
When people ask how it was that I became involved in cricket as a subject of academic study, I can only think back to the first test match I watched live in Cape Town. It was a bright summer’s day and my friend and I had arrived at Newlands Cricket Grounds just after lunch break to snag cheap or free tickets for the afternoon play. Upon entering the stadium, I was shocked by the general vacancy of the seats (it was a Thursday afternoon, after all), the pristine nature of the oval, the crispness of the linen uniforms, and the whiteness of the stands and players. This was no sport of mass-consumption. I later learned that more modern derivatives of the classic test match game of cricket have since become infinitely more popular with the masses, but it was test cricket that caught my attention. The precision of play, the duration of time and strategies employed, the patience of both the players and the fans – these were elements of this sport I immediately recognized as being uncommon amongst most modern games. In the age of 20 second shot clocks and 30 second commercial breaks, it seemed to me that proper test cricket truly “tested” the bounds of people’s attention spans, yet everyone in the stands seemed riveted by the play. Not only that, I was soon to learn that test cricket has also a substantial radio audience who listen to gaps of silence punctuated by commentary and an occasional cough or mutter. All of this is simply to say that despite its seeming endlessness and prolonged periods where nothing is happening aside from the occasional voluntary stretching session, test cricket has a substantial following in those nations into which it was introduced as a part of the colonial project.
Whether it was simply for academic and theoretical reasons, or perhaps because I actually enjoyed the comatose state into which cricket often pushed me, I continued with my obsession for nearly three months. I found myself eagerly awaiting Thursday match openers and hoping a draw would not be called by Saturday for fear that I would have to actively pursue Sunday plans rather than hope to camp out in the living room with my tea and a box of rusks, gazing wistfully as Andre Nel bowled a maiden or Polly came through in the clutch with 10 runs for 6 balls. Perhaps it was a substitute addiction for what I was missing of American college basketball season and opening day of Major League Baseball, or perhaps it was only because an outsider’s view of a game is necessarily fresher and more objective than a native, but I was hooked – totally and completely – on this new game I’d discovered. And though it was next to impossible to spread my newfound passion amongst the cynical and xenophobic American friends I had back at school, I managed to turn my interest into a (semi-legitimate) academic pursuit. It’s not every day, after all, that someone, Commonwealth citizen or no, can claim to have written nearly 200 pages on the history of cricket in South Africa… and live to tell the tale! (RIP Bob Woolmer!)
