Remembering Tony Becca
Fri, Mar 15, '19
From Michelle McDonald's Cricket Interviews
The news came to me via a WhatsApp from a Jamaican friend on Thursday February 28, 2019 at 8:57 a.m. Grenada time. “Mawnin. Heard that Tony Becca died,” she messaged. “Oh!” I replied in dismay, and immediately set about verifying the information, then sharing the unfortunate news with my family. Still in shock and disbelief, especially after reading about the details surrounding his death, I set about searching through my past email correspondence with Mr Becca, ‘the other Tony,’ to find content to pen this article.
I wish I didn’t have to be writing another remembrance at what seems like too soon after Tony Cozier departed this life. I wished too, that I could turn back time. You see, while the English and West Indian batsmen were scoring runs like crazy during the 4th One Day International in Grenada the day before his passing, I had thought to myself “I wonder if Mr Becca is watching?” Perhaps his article to have been published on Sunday March 3 would have been about that match http://www.cricketinterviews.com/grenada-thanks-chris-gayle/. For over 15 years, we’d periodically discuss West Indies cricket, particularly the state of performances at the regional and international cricket.
I had first met Mr Becca during my initial assignment for CaribbeanCricket.com in 2003 at Sabina Park. We did not speak much that year. Still a little daunted by being in the company of such great famous journalists like him and Tony Cozier, I had pretty much kept quiet, choosing to observe more than I spoke. This could also describe Mr Becca’s disposition in the press box over the years. In the early years of our association, he was still doing reports which required him to watch all of a match. On the contrary, I was in and out of the press box often.
The first recollection of me interviewing Mr Becca was in March 2005, after then President of the West Indies Cricket Board, Teddy Griffith announced during a broadcast that those players with Cable & Wireless contracts would not be eligible to play in the forthcoming series. I was required to get reactions from key people. Of course, Mr Becca was one of those who I sought an opinion from.
My assignments for CaribbeanCricket.com mostly required doing one-on-one interviews with players and other persons involved in West Indies cricket. It was therefore necessary for me to attend as many matches as possible, including those played during regional tournaments. In 2005, I decided to go to rural Jamaica on the weekends of March 11 and March 18 to cover matches to be played at the Alpart Sports Complex in St Elizabeth. Mr Becca also travelled down for those matches.
Most persons from Kingston stayed in Mandeville, about a 25-minute drive to Alpart. But I didn’t drive, so the quandary was how to get to the ground? Enter the kind Tony Becca for the first weekend. In response to my email to thank him for the ride that first weekend and mention that I would be back for the second weekend, he again offered to transport me. We would have interesting conversations on the journey and of course in the area reserved for media.
I had previously interviewed Tony Cozier in 2004, but somehow I hadn’t been able to muster up the courage to ask Mr Becca before 2005, after I had got to know him a little better. When you are a novice, you can’t help but think “suppose he thinks I am asking stupid questions?” He had guided many journalists during his time in media, so I shouldn’t have been hesitant. Just to be sure though, after Mr Becca had agreed to be interviewed, I drafted the questions and sent them to the website’s editor Ryan Naraine. I’d not done that previously. We discussed from what angle I would approach the interview and that it would include Mr Becca’s silence on the administration of West Indies cricket under Pat Rousseau, with whom he had a close relationship.
The interview at Melbourne Cricket Club in September 2005 went well into the night and covered a wide range of topics, including why he had not commented on the report submitted to then president Ken Gordon by the three-man commission of Justice Anthony Lucky, Gregory Georges and Avondale Thomas. The commission had been set up by Teddy Griffith to investigate the awarding of West Indies cricket sponsorship to telecommunications company Digicel in favour of Cable & Wireless. Becca’s response to the infamous ‘Lucky Report’ was carried in a separate article.
On his siding with past presidents, he explained that from his long experience as president of Melbourne Cricket Club, he was familiar with administration and knew the difficulties of running organisations such as the WICB. Another point which stayed with me was when he said “If I don’t have strong strong strong back up, if I’m not positive that what I’m going to write is true […..], I leave it alone.” Journalists have many “off the record” conversations which they could break to the public, if they wanted to sell newspapers. Tony Becca was not that kind of person. I made it a point to operate on a similar basis.
In between matches, Mr Becca and I continued to periodically check in on each other via email. In 2006, I had covered the India ODI matches in St Kitts and Trinidad. Mr Becca was set to have travelled for the Test Matches in Antigua, St Lucia and St Kitts in June. I had had reason to contact someone from Cable & Wireless regarding internet while in St Kitts. When I got to Trinidad, I sent her the following email. The last bracketed sentence was how I viewed Mr Becca.
Having not seen any match report from him for the Antigua Test, I emailed him to find out what happened. He shared a medical incident he had experienced and that he had been ordered not to travel. I continued to check in with him in the coming months and he with me. I was chuffed to get an email from him in July 2006 saying in part “I read your interview with Ricky Skerritt and it was very good – as usual.” THE Tony Becca reads my articles! What a validation of my journalistic skill, I thought.
Thankfully, Mr Becca was able to travel for World Cup matches in 2007. One could not have imagined Tony Becca NOT covering this huge undertaking. He came to Grenada, which gave me a chance to return the hospitality he had shown me. Along with my friend Eilean Mackay-Prendergast who was working with Cricket World Cup, the three of us enjoyed a delightful evening at the luxurious Spice Island Beach Resort where I worked. (Yes, this writing thing is just a hobby).
He had decided to retire fully after the 2007 World Cup so no longer travelled to matches outside of Jamaica. Since then, Mr Becca started watching cricket often from the Sabina Park box my father and his friends own. I would go there for lunch and sometimes stayed a short time after. Mr Becca always, always, always, greeted me fondly and made time to come over and chat with me. The last time I saw him was July 2018 during the 2nd Test against Bangladesh. One day, he asked me about Reggie Scarlett, who was a Jamaican past WICB employee living in Grenada. I had promised to find out when I went back. I never did.
Mr Becca’s life had had its share of tragedies, the most significant being the death of one of his daughters in a car accident in 1988. That, along with other incidents, changed his outlook on life. In our 2005 interview, he had said he pledged that “nothing in life is going to worry me because you can be here today and gone tomorrow […]. I don’t make things worry me in life again.”
I had started to write this tribute a few days after Mr Becca’s passing. Then I paused it for about 10 days because, with each email correspondence or journal entry about him which I read, the sense of loss was too much for me to handle. For the first few nights as I went to sleep, I was overcome with emotion as I thought about Mr Becca’s last days, hours and minutes. I woke in the early hours one morning, around the same time recorded as his time of passing. In the still of that morning, I imagined him lying in bed at Andrews Memorial, a hospital where I was once a patient. I wondered if he had felt pain and anguish, or if he had slipped away peacefully.
The cause of death was “cardiac arrest” and the explanation would suggest it was sudden. No warning. No time to say goodbye to his loved ones, including his wife. I became angry and thought it unfair that someone so genteel and quiet should be taken by something I perceived as violent. And reading over this article now, a day before the thanksgiving service on March 16, I can’t see through my tears. Pardon any typos please!
During the time his funeral will be taking place, I will pause my usual activities to pay my respects from a distance. I will remember how he usually ended his emails to me: “Take care of yourself and God bless.”
I hope you are getting your cup of black coffee in Heaven, while discussing the forthcoming Cricket West Indies presidential elections with Tony Cozier and other cricket pundits gone before you. At least you got to see West Indies win the Test series against England. May God bless you too Mr Becca…….and thank you!
