A fan of the flame
In these brawling cricket days, there is a voice whose absence has become too loud for me to bear in silence. What has overtaken the centre has nothing to do with reason as egos get enmeshed in unseemly battle. The unseemliness of it lies in its nature, not its necessity – change never comes without a struggle. But change cannot be sustained without a philosophical pin to hold it, and that needs thought.That is why I miss Tim Hector; miss the intelligence, the logic, the care and the erudition he brought to West Indian society.
Tim had very special qualities because he not only had the intellectual capacity to see the big picture, but he could pan in and out of it with ease, so he was equally familiar with minutiae. His was a powerful mind that was able to see connections – the history, the culture, the economy, the search for identity – and could trace them so clearly that there could be no erasing the mental maps he drew.
Tim was a brilliant writer, so his words strode off the page, purposeful and direct but glistening with a grace that penetrated the mind and made you stop: stop, reflect, and think entirely new thoughts.
What would Tim have made of this state of affairs if he were alive today? The question kept returning, and already imagining his response, I fell to reading again some of the Fan the Flame columns he published for all those years in the Outlet.
Tim would have tried to place the upheavals in its dialectic context; would have looked at how a society and its institutions grapple for ways to cope with a swiftly shifting world; would have outlined the rights and responsibilities of parties, and he would have moved in closely to analyse the nature of the tangling beasts; but most of all he would have kept his eye on the cricket ball that seems to be spinning so wildly out of control.
A few days ago I read one of his pieces written in February 2000 as a 3 800+-word column styled as a letter to Patrick Rousseau, then WICB President. It is a diamond of insight, and I only wish I had revisited it before writing of analyses that had gone before this Governance Committee's formation, because this precedes even the CARICOM-UWI conference.
Tim covered many issues, but he also made it clear how little control the board really has overall; hear him:
It is commonly felt that the WICB, which you head, presides over West Indies cricket. Most people accept that as a truism. Some of the brightest sons of the region have even written learnedly and well that West Indies cricket 'should be returned to the people'. It were as though the WICB, made up of elected representatives from each of the territories, were some kind of un-democratic, antiquated institution which somehow has usurped cricket from the people. To my mind, our economies have long been usurped by the alien other, but not our cricket. I suspect someone is putting cart before horse; that is, placing credible fiction before reality.Tim's voice can still be heard, but how I wish it were live.
The truth is, the West Indies Cricket Board, whether it is called WICB or as of old, West Indies Cricket Board of Control, does NOT control cricket in the West Indies. But it should. Therein lies the rub and the hub of the problem.
Let me make myself abundantly clear, Mr President. The WICBC or WICB did not and does not now control cricket in Antigua, in Nevis, in Jamaica, in Barbados, in Guyana, in Trinidad and Tobago, or in the Windwards. The WICB cannot and does not have its policies carried out in any of the territories. Therefore the West Indies cricket nation, the only time we are a nation, has no national policy on cricket or for cricket."