Edited by Hilary Beckles, a professor of Social and Economic History at the University of the West Indies, A Spirit of Dominance consists of eleven articles by academics and journalists on various aspects of cricket. The academics are more erudite and the journalists are more interesting.
Published "in honour of Viv Richards on the 21st anniversary of his Test debut", the outstanding element of this book is the cricketing history it offers. The rise of the West Indies cricket team to Test status, the role of cricket in the anti-apartheid campaign, and the genesis of the Packer World Series are all dealt with. More abstract topics like "Cricket as a performing art" and "Pan-Africanism and West Indies cricket" are also covered.
This is where the irritating aspect comes in. Of all groups of people who write for a living, academics are generally viewed as having the most dismal standards of prose. The essays by scholars in this books show why. From editor Beckles's pedantically self-conscious phrasing ("...those like myself whom God had blessed with an adequate quantum of melanin...") to the UWI's deputy vice chancellor Rex Nettleford's convoluted sentence structures ("It was ownership of one's mind that suggested alternatives to the denigrated self in circumstances where chatteldom denied humanity to the vast majority"), cricket's broad back is almost broken by a turgid style entirely unsuited to the topic.
Of course, since CLR James wrote Beyond a Boundary, cricketing intellectuals have felt constrained to adopt James's thesis of cricket as both metaphor and political instrument. But James never eschewed logic and clear writing in presenting his argument. On the other hand, nearly all the academics seem stuck in 1970 ideologies. Beckles, writing about cricket as a cultural device, seems blissfully ignorant of the theories of sport and culture offered by evolutionary psychology. He also manages, astonishingly, to fulsomely praise the late and unlamented Forbes Burnham as an anti-racist in an essay about anti-apartheid titled The Unkindest Cut. Nettleford writes about cricket as dance but, if he has a clue about the relationship between biology and aesthetics, hides it well. Lecturer and politician Tim Hector, although clear and eloquent, suffers from hyperbole. He writes about pan-Africanism and cricket, but avoids mentioning that the pan-African project largely failed. And he even quotes Hegel's monism as though monism makes sense.
But, if the standard of intellectualising on cricket is not too impressive, the standard of cricket writing with an intellectual bent is very high indeed. Especially outstanding is former manager of the W.I. cricket team KHL Marshall's essay on the professionalization of regional cricket. Besides the wonderful history about the Packer period, Marshall lets the game speak for itself. Without being either polemical or didactic, his essay is its own commentary on the culture and even psychology of West Indians and Caribbean society. Where he intellectualizes, he makes his point more effectively in one sentence where a professional academic would say less in a dozen pages. Consider: "Sport has been the vehicle of personal advance for as number of oppressed groups in societies all over the world, because the premise of sport is that everyone is subject to the same rules, everyone starts at the same line, and is timed with the same stopwatch."
Similarly, although this book is dedicated to Viv, only journalist Vaneisa Baksh's essay conveys a real sense of the man. History lecturer KeithSandiford's essay on how the W.I. team attained Test status will fascinate the cricket fan with a liking for statistics. Literature professor Gordon Rohlehr's essay on CLR James's Beyond a Boundary is nicely written and makes some interesting points about a book often viewed uncritically. On the whole, then, Spirit of Dominance is a nice blend of cricket history, character portraits of outstanding West Indian cricketers, cultural ideology and regional politics.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh