Netherland. Joseph O’Neill
deep, as we’d say, borrowing the baseball term) and batting is turned into a gamble. As a result, fielding is distorted too, since the fielders are quickly removed from their infield positions – point, extra cover, midwicket and the others – to distant stations on the boundary, where they listlessly linger. It’s as if baseball were a game about home runs rather than base hits and its basemen were relocated to spots deep in the outfield. This degenerate version of the sport – bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it – inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison towards the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.
This is not to say that New York cricket is without charm. One summer afternoon years ago, I sat in a taxi with Rachel in the Bronx. We were making the trip to visit friends in Riverdale and were driving up Broadway, which I had no idea extended this far north.
‘Oh! Look, darling,’ Rachel said.
She was pointing down to our right. Scores of cricketers swarmed on a tract of open parkland. Seven or eight matches, eleven-a-side, were under way in a space that was strictly large enough for only three or four matches, so that the various playing areas, demarcated by red cones and footpaths and garbage barrels and foam cups, confusingly overlapped. Men in white from one game mingled with men in white from another, and a profusion of bowlers simultaneously whirled their arms in that windmill action of cricket bowlers, and multiple batsmen swung flat willow cudgels at once, and cricket balls chased by milky sprinters flew in every direction. Onlookers surrounded the grounds. Some sat beneath the trees that lined the park at Broadway; others, in the distance, where trees grew tall and dense at the edge of the common, gathered by picnic tables. Children milled, as it’s said. From our elevated vantage point the scene – Van Cortlandt Park on a Sunday – appeared as a cheerful pell-mell, and as we drove by Rachel said, ‘It looks like a Brueghel,’ and I smiled at her because she was exactly right, and as I remember I put my hand on her stomach. It was July 1999. She was seven months pregnant with our son.
The day I met Chuck was three years later. We, Staten Island, were playing a bunch of guys from St Kitts – Kittitians, as they’re called, as if they might all be followers of some esoterically technical profession. My own teammates variously originated from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. That summer of 2002, when out of loneliness I played after years of not playing, and in the summer that followed, I was the only white man I saw on the cricket fields of New York.
A while back, the parks department had put a rivalrous baseball diamond in the south-west corner of Walker Park. Cricketers were not licensed to take the field until the completion of any authorised softball game. (Softball, my teammates and I observed with a touch of snobbery, was a pastime that seemingly turned on hitting full tosses – the easiest balls a cricket batsman will ever receive – and taking soft, glove-assisted catches involving little of the skill and none of the nerve needed to catch the cricket ball’s red rock with bare hands.) The match against the Kittitians, due to start at one o’clock, did not begin until an hour later, when the softball players – ageing and overweight men much like ourselves, only white-skinned – at last shuffled away. The trouble started with this hold-up. The Kittitians brought a large number of followers, perhaps as many as forty, and the delay made them restless, and they began to entertain themselves with more abandon than was usual. A group formed round a Toyota parked on Delafield Place, at the northern border of the ground, the men flagrantly helping themselves to alcoholic drinks from a cooler, and shouting, and tapping keys against their beer bottles in rhythm to the soca that rattled insistently from the Toyota’s speakers. Fearful of complaints, our president, a blazer-wearing Bajan in his seventies named Calvin Pereira, approached the men and said with a smile, ‘Gentlemen, you are very welcome, but I must ask you to exercise discretion. We cannot have trouble with the parks department. Can I invite you to turn off the music and come join us inside the ground?’ The men gradually complied, but this incident, it was afterwards agreed, influenced the confrontation for which those present will always remember that afternoon.
Before the start of play, one of our team, Ramesh, drew us into a circle for a prayer. We huddled with arms round one another’s shoulders – nominally, three Hindus, three Christians, a Sikh and four Muslims. ‘Lord,’ said the Reverend Ramesh, as we called him, ‘we thank You for bringing us here today for this friendly game. We ask that You keep us safe and fit during the match today. We ask for clement weather. We ask for Your blessing upon this game, Lord.’ We broke up in a burst of clapping and took to the field.
The men from St Kitts batted for just over two hours. Throughout their innings their supporters maintained the usual hullabaloo of laughter and heckling and wisecracks from the field’s east boundary, where they congregated in the leaves’ shadows and drank rum out of paper cups and ate barbecued red snapper and chicken. ‘Beat the ball!’ they shouted, and ‘The man chucking!’ and, raising their arms into the scarecrow pose that signals a wide ball, ‘Wide, umpire, wide!’ Our turn came to bat. As the innings wore on and the game grew tighter and more and more rum was drunk, the musical din started up again from the Toyota, where men had gathered once again, and the shouting of the spectators grew more emotional. In this atmosphere, by no means rare for New York cricket, the proceedings on and off the field became more and more combative. At a certain moment the visitors fell prey to the suspicion, apparently never far from the mind of cricketers in that city, that a conspiracy to rob them of victory was afoot, and the appeals of the fielders (‘How’s that, umpire? Ump!’) assumed a bitter, disputatious character, and a fight nearly broke out between a fielder in the deep and an onlooker who had said something.
It did not surprise me, therefore, when I took my turn to bat, to receive three bouncers in a row, the last of which was too quick for me and whacked my helmet. There were angry shouts from my teammates – ‘Wha’ scene you on, boy?’ – and it was at this point that the umpire recognised his duty to intervene. He wore a panama hat and a white umpire’s coat that gave him the air of a man conducting an important laboratory experiment – which, in his own way, he was. ‘Play the game,’ Chuck Ramkissoon evenly told the bowler. ‘I’m warning you for the last time: one more bumper and you’re coming off.’
Apart from spitting at the ground, the bowler didn’t respond. He returned to his mark, ran in to bowl, and delivered another throat-ball. With roars and counter-roars of outrage coming from the boundary, Chuck approached the captain of the fielding team. ‘I warned the bowler,’ Chuck said, ‘and he disregarded the warning. He’s not bowling any more.’ The other fielders ran in and noisily surrounded Chuck. ‘What right you have? You never warn him.’ I made a move to get involved, but Umar, my Pakistani batting partner, held me back. ‘You stay here. It’s always the same with these people.’
Then, as the argument on and off the field continued – ‘You thiefing we, umpire! You thiefing we!’ – my eye was drawn to a figure walking slowly in the direction of the parked cars. I kept watching him because there was something mysterious about this person choosing to leave at such a moment of drama. He was in no hurry, it seemed. He slowly opened the door of a car, leaned in, reached around for a few moments, then stood up straight and shut the door. He appeared to be holding something in his hand as he strolled back into the ground. People started shouting and running. A woman screamed. My teammates, grouped on the boundary, set off in every direction, some into the tennis courts, others to hide behind trees. Now the man was ambling over somewhat uncertainly. It occurred to me he was very drunk. ‘No, Tino,’ somebody shouted.
‘Oh shit,’ Umar said, starting towards the baseball diamond. ‘Run, run.’
But, in some sense paralysed by this unreal dawdling gunman, I stayed where I was, tightly gripping my Gunn & Moore Maestro bat. The fielders, meanwhile, were backing away, hands half raised in panic and imploration. ‘Put it down, put it down, man,’ one of them said. ‘Tino! Tino!’ a voice shouted. ‘Come back, Tino!’
As for Chuck, he now stood alone. Except for me, that is. I stood a few yards away. This required no courage