Beyond the Boundary: The Rowe Row
(Barbados Advocate)
For most of the Caribbean's cricketing nations, the Scotia Bank West Indies Jubilee has been a fairly pedantic affair. The bank along with Wisden Cricket Annual is sponsoring a competition to pick the greatest players in 75 years of West Indies cricket.
First, twenty-six cricketers emerge via public voting in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, the Combined Islands (Leeward & Winwards) and Guyana. A jury will then weigh the merits of each pick and choose without prejudice one king of the hill which must surely be the Right Excellent Sir Garfield St. Auburn Sobers, a.k.a. the Greatest Cricketer on Earth or Mars.
But just when this Jubilee business seemed most pointless and predictable, along comes Jamaica's top five to revive one of the biggest flashpoints in West Indies cricket. Announced this week, Jamaica's five are Michael Holding, Jeffrey Dujon, George Headley, Courtney Walsh and Lawrence Rowe. It is this last name on the list that has proven contentious. Scotia Bank asked voters to go beyond performance and take into account leadership, personality, character and impact on the public. Having a rebel cricketer turn up among the five greatest ever is a turn-up for the books.
About twenty years ago, in two separate tours, Lawrence Rowe led a West Indies XI to apartheid South Africa. To the outrage of blacks in the Caribbean and abroad, our cricketers broke ranks with the international sporting community. Traveling as honorary whites, they played tour matches and unofficial tests. It was the ultimate coup for the separatists.
Black sportsmen were freely coming to play in a country that was being pilloried internationally...so could apartheid really be that bad?
In the Caribbean, the arguments for and against were emotional, passionate and specious. We were told that cricketers had a right to go to feed their families, although players like Rowe and Croft were under lucrative contracts with English counties and, let's face it, unlikely to starve. On the other hand, we were made to believe that the rebel cricketers were unscrupulous sell-outs without realizing how much the Board took for granted that the players shared their political convictions and were immune to the large sums of money being doled out.
When the dust settled, the rebel tours undermined West Indies cricket, robbing the game of players like Franklyn Stevenson, Ezra Moseley, Sylvester Clarke and Richard Austin, all of whom still had much to give.
The details of what happened on those tours, even twenty years on, are frustratingly vague. In a recent radio interview after his honouring, Rowe didn't speak about the South Africa experience out of fear that people would claim he was just trying to justify his position. Yet it is this silence that denies West Indians the chance to appreciate the complexity of the rebel tours. What's worse there's sometimes a revisionism that emanates from the rebel players, the idea that they went to "inspire black youths in the township." This much we know: the rebels went for money, but it is equally true that their presence in South Africa didn't elicit uniform disgust.
For although South Africa had succeeded in getting a black team to break the ban, it shattered the myth of racial superiority to have blacks defeat them on the cricket field. And doubtlessly there were black South Africans inspired by what they saw the rebel West Indians achieving.
There's a story about an irate local calling Rowe, not to lambaste him for taking "blood money", but to complain about the team's loss to a province after they'd won the Test series. He was adamant that the rebels should not slip up, not even in one match. At 75 years of age, West Indies cricket should be grown up enough to do more than sift through its gods. It ought to be ready to revisit the most painful event of its past. After all, part of what is special about West Indies cricket is the double whammy of slavery and colonialism its players have had to negotiate which is why Rowe's inclusion on the "all-time list" is so important.
He reminds us, as we whittle down the greats, that this task of being a West Indies cricketer hasn't always been black and white.
* This column was first published in the Barbados Advocate newspaper.