‘I DIDN’T WANT to do anything different,’ says Vivian Richards. ‘We had a blueprint. We knew exactly how to win and we had a formula. Clive had the patent. So all I wanted to do was to keep the engine running. It would have been nice for the moment of captaincy to come sooner, but more than that I was thankful for the opportunity. And when the time came for it to be handed over from me, I wanted to make sure that it was in the same condition I had found it. That the legacy which Clive had created was continued.’
Richards was the obvious choice to succeed Lloyd, but in the permanently fractured world of West Indian cricket selection his anointing was not a certainty. By the mid-1980s there were those who believed the off-spinner Roger Harper was the better man; some thought that the Jamaican wicket-keeper Jeff Dujon was the team’s most articulate tactician. Others preferred Malcolm Marshall. When Lloyd resigned after the World Cup defeat to India in 1983, he wanted Richards as his successor. The Antiguan had been Lloyd’s vice-captain for the past five years. As Richards himself wrote, ‘the captaincy rightfully belonged to me’. His view was that some board members persuaded Lloyd to carry on in order to keep him away from the job. This is why he says today, with a greybeard’s tact, that it would have been nice for the captaincy to have come sooner.
But Richards prevailed. Since the English summer of 1976 there had been no one in the team who seemed to represent the West Indies more potently than he did. The runs he made and the innings he built were at least as important to the West Indies’ success as any wickets taken by their bowlers. Many supporters felt he was making those runs for them all.
‘I never felt it was a burden,’ he says.
It was a responsibility. It was a duty. I had the skills to back me up, and it was that bigger thought that helped me to compete so hard. After all, I am a citizen of the West Indies, and it is a magnificent place, and this West Indies team is our one connection. I’m an Antiguan first, and that allows me to be a West Indian because Antiguans are tenacious, ambitious. We are good people. I’m happy to be part of the tree that spreads a little bit further. I was one of the guys who carried the baton and I accepted that responsibility because no one wants to be the one who drops the baton. I grew to understand the traditions of West Indies cricket, and I was happy to embrace them and to pass them on. And it helped me that the passion came through from the folks on the other side of the boundary fence.
Richards was what C. L. R. James called a ‘great super batsman’. This was not just a vague superlative description, but a role – a necessity if a team was to be a winning team. Such a man was needed in the top five along with a pair of fine openers. Super batsmen were rare, believed James, and they were defined not only by the runs they made but also by their quality of being undisturbed by any bowling or any crisis. Richards fitted this description quite early on in his career.
He scored only seven runs in his first two Test innings at the end of 1974 in India, possibly the hardest place on earth for a young batsman to make a debut. But he learned quickly against the sharp spin of Bedi, Prassana and Venkat, because in his second match in Delhi he scored 192 not out, hitting sixes that travelled 40 yards into the stands. He failed against Pakistan on the tour’s second leg, but his skill had been noted. More importantly, Clive Lloyd recognised a young man who possessed great mental strength, a quality not obvious to most of those in the Caribbean who thought Richards’s selection for the Test team had been a surprise and a gamble.
Yes, he had been a prince in Antigua for some years, but folk from the Leeward Islands were not expected to be great West Indian cricketers. Besides, there was a better batsman called Jim Allen from Montserrat, who was sure to make runs in big cricket before long. Yet Lloyd backed Richards, particularly towards the end of the dreadful 1975–76 tour to Australia, when he asked him to open the batting in the last two Tests. Lloyd knew that Richards had confidence and fortitude. He suspected that once he started to succeed he would become a great player in his own right – a ‘great super batsman’. He was right. In 1976, against Australia, India and England, Richards made scores of 44, 2, 30, 101, 50, 98, 142, 130, 20, 177, 23, 64, 232, 63, 4, 135, 66, 38 and 291. No man from any country had made more Test runs in a single year than Richards’s 1,710.
The decision to allow him to open the innings in Australia was of great importance to his development. Richards had made some brilliant contributions from the middle order, but there had been some disappointing scores too. You are not to worry about your place in the side, Lloyd told him, but I want you to try to bat up the top. ‘That responsibility came at the right time for me,’ recalled Richards. ‘The feeling that I did not have to hit every ball helped me to settle.’
Very rarely thereafter did Richards fail for long. And when he succeeded, it was often at moments when the West Indies had to do well. For instance, he excelled against Australia on the 1979–80 tour, when the West Indies won there for the first time. He was brilliant in the first season of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, when the side had cast themselves adrift of official cricket. His run total in the Super Tests was 200 more than any other batsman, and this was the hardest cricket any of them had played. Richards proved that he could make runs on any surface on all the cricket continents against any bowler. The manner of his scoring was extraordinary too. He didn’t collect runs; he thrashed them out in a way that didn’t just exasperate the opposition, but demoralised them. He scored at such a rate that his big totals often gave his bowlers time to take ten second-innings wickets to win a game.
This was not classical greatness, although his exaggerated (and occasionally ironic) forward defence was faultless. Rather, Richards was unorthodox power blended with beauty. The journalist and broadcaster Darcus Howe reminded viewers in his 1985 television documentary about Richards that ‘a mark of a great batsman is that he can create a shot all of his own. The flip through mid-wicket is Viv’s special offering.’ By turning his wrists further on what would otherwise be an on drive, Richards could flail a bowler by hitting straight balls for four or six over or through mid-wicket. This was Viv’s flip. It was a shot that displayed freedom from tradition and contempt for orthodoxy. Other men tried it and would be bowled or LBW because the blow required the front leg to be placed in line with the stumps and the bat swung across the line of the ball at speed. It worked for Richards because, as his father said, he had ‘eyes like a pigeon’. It was ‘all wrong’, wrote his Somerset teammate Vic Marks, ‘yet Richards made it seem the safest shot in the world’.
The former England seamer Mike Selvey bowled Richards out for four in the Old Trafford Test of 1976. He also got his wicket – occasionally at greater cost – in some of the many Middlesex versus Somerset games they played against each other in the 1970s and 1980s. ‘There was a theatre to Viv’s batting at the beginning of an innings,’ he says.
It was a cleverly calculated theatrical performance – an act. Viv is the most destructive batsman there has ever been and unquestionably the scariest. A wicket would fall, and you think no one was walking out but you know who it’ll be. Viv would wait. Then he would saunter out. And the image of Viv coming out to bat is a very powerful one: the cap tipped exactly as it was, head just tilted slightly back, the patrician nose, the Viv swagger, possibly a light bit of windmilling with the arms. By the time he took his guard, you’re back at the start of your run, waiting. And he would use that time to intimidate you. He’d cud his chewing gum and he’d look at you. He’d then walk down the pitch and tap it, still looking at you. He’d bash the top of his bat handle with his palm, then he’d be ready.
It was, says Selvey, a clever way for Richards to assess his surroundings. ‘Now I’ve spoken to him about this, and he’s told me it was all an act. What he was doing was sniffing the air. As for the bowler, he told me that it didn’t matter if you were fast or slow, good or indifferent; if you didn’t bowl at him from the off with intent, like you really meant it, then he had already won. He’d be away from you. “I could smell fear,” he said to me.’
Richards also revealed to Selvey that as soon as possible he liked to feel the ball ‘sweet on the bat’.
‘And of course that was your only hope of getting him out – you had to go at him straight away because he liked to play shots from the start. That was what you had to keep in your mind in those first few overs. That was your chance. Of course there were days when the ball was sweet on the bat from the start, and for several hours afterwards …’
Richards’s weaknesses as a batsman were usually kept well hidden in Test matches but were known in the Caribbean. He enjoyed the privilege of course of never having to bat against West Indies bowlers in a Test match. He did, however, have to play against Barbados. From his debut in 1972 until his last game in 1991 Richards batted for the Combined Islands and later the Leeward Islands in the West Indian regional cricket tournament, the Shell Shield. Barbados, an island of fewer than 250,000 people in the 1970s and 1980s, probably had the strongest fast bowlers during that time: Vanburn Holder, Keith Boyce, Wayne Daniel, Joel Garner, Sylvester Clarke, Malcolm Marshall, Hartley Alleyne, Ezra Moseley and Franklyn Stephenson.
In 24 first-class innings against Barbados over 19 years, Richards made only 602 runs, an average of 27.36. His one century came in the 1976–77 season. Barbados dismissed him for 20 runs or fewer 14 times. Joel Garner got his wicket five times. Even the Master Blaster himself – the world’s greatest batsman – could not always master the best West Indian fast bowling.
For the West Indies, however, Richards’s batting thrilled in a way that no other man could achieve with such regularity. It especially thrilled West Indies supporters in England. He scored his biggest portion of Test runs there for them. The cricket academic Hilary Beckles believes that Richards ‘was sent in to do battle by villagers, not only those in Antigua, but all those from little places in this diaspora; people who have been hurling missiles at the Columbus project since it crashed into their history five hundred years and 10 million lives ago’.
Trevor Nelson, who saw him at the Oval in 1976, has a more demotic explanation. ‘Viv was the Malcolm X to Clive’s Martin Luther King. He was my hero. The swagger, the walk, no helmet. Watching him get to the crease was one of the great joys of sport in my lifetime.’
Richards tells his own story of the connection he had with the diaspora. He recalls strolling through London after a West Indies win.
One guy saw me walking down Kensington High Street. He was driving a bus. He stopped the bus with all the passengers on board and he shouted to them, ‘That’s the man who did that to you guys! That’s Vivian, man.’ And the traffic was backing up and the car horns went parp! People were tooting horns left, right and centre trying to get this bus out of the way, and this guy just sits there in his bus saying, ‘Hey, look. There’s the man who did this.’ This just goes to show you that sense of pride that they felt. He stopped the traffic because he was so emotionally fired up, because the people who represented them, one of the individuals was walking in the high street. That was a good indication of how some folks felt.
* * *
Vivian Richards captained the West Indies in a different way to Clive Lloyd. After all, they had different personalities and different challenges. When Lloyd took over from Rohan Kanhai in 1974 he inherited a young side with several unproven players. Lloyd was older than most of the team, a fact he used to his advantage. He was a captain whom the rest of the side looked up to, just as the players had looked up to Frank Worrell 15 years earlier. Lloyd trusted these young men to do well, and most of them did. They repaid his loyalty with runs and wickets. Richards was more like a general who had inherited a battle-hardened army. He had less need to create a team and a strategy, although he did need to find replacements for Michael Holding, Larry Gomes and Joel Garner within two seasons of taking charge.
Lloyd was a more sophisticated reader of people, whereas Richards, say some observers, was a more sophisticated reader of the game. Richards was more obviously combative on the field. He was also very aware of the effect his personality and reputation had on other players and the public. It would have been out of character for Lloyd to wear a gold neck chain with his initials hanging from it as Richards did. Richards urged his side on aggressively, and some of his players have said privately that they were intimidated by his temper. There is a story told in the Caribbean that during a one-day match in Australia Richards ordered a player named Richard Gabriel from the field because his performance was not up to standard, although Gabriel insists that he had to leave the game because of an injury to his leg.
‘The Antiguan psyche is very much more in-your-face,’ explains the Rastafarian elder King Frank-I, who was a young teacher at Antigua Grammar School in the 1960s when Vivian Richards was a pupil. He soon became a friend, mentor and sage to the cricketer. ‘Even when you look at our calypsos they are much more pedagogic – they preach to you. The Trinidadian calypsos based on simile or metaphor have a disguised message that is less direct. So it is that we see the Antiguans and their mentality. The African temperament. Head on. Direct.’
‘I would like to think I am a perfectionist,’ says Richards. ‘I believe that maybe one of the flaws is that because of the God-given ability and talent you have, you think everyone is blessed with the same things and sometimes you get a little hard on individuals who don’t quite accomplish or do the things as you expect them to, but this is all part of what it means to be competitive.’
‘Clive Lloyd was a great leader of men,’ says the veteran West Indian cricket journalist Tony Becca.
He understood the differences of island culture. He knew his cricket, but I don’t think he knew his cricket as much as Viv Richards did. Viv read the game exceptionally well and led by example. Tactically, he was better than Clive Lloyd. But he was an authoritarian. The fellers were a little bit afraid of him, particularly the younger ones. Whereas in Lloyd’s case they were largely just full of respect for him. If Lloyd went to a man and said, ‘Jump over that mountain,’ the guy would try his utmost just to please Clive. If Viv asked the same, the guy would do it because he’d be afraid of the consequences if he didn’t.
‘One was cool and calm, the other intense,’ says Tony Cozier.
In all the years that I was around the team I certainly didn’t hear Lloyd raise his voice very often. And that is unusual for West Indians. When we get excited we tend to raise our voices. But Richards was very different. He wouldn’t stand for foolishness in any way, particularly on the field. He would glare at players. And it was all very explicable because Richards knew that he had come in to succeed Lloyd, and if things went downhill all of a sudden, people would blame it on him. Then the fact that he was from a small island. All of his recent predecessors had been from the established cricket territories. Some would have noted that. So he had a very obvious need to keep the success going.
And he did. Unlike Lloyd, Vivian Richards never lost a series in his six years as captain of the West Indies, although his proportion of lost matches to victories was greater.
Desmond Haynes was captained by both Lloyd and Richards.
Clive was more like the father figure, Viv was more the sergeant major. Everything’s come natural to Viv so Viv feels it should come natural to everybody. He wasn’t the guy who’s gonna say, ‘Let’s wait until after the game and let’s have a chat about it,’ he’s gonna tell you exactly how he feel about you right there and then. Very frank. And he can use all the language as well, from good to bad – everything – but that was his style, you know. He was a guy who played with his heart and soul, and he wanted the best from everybody. He was a guy who didn’t want to lose. Playing to win was very, very important.
There was one more nuance between the two men. While both were motivated by the same historical concerns and the conviction that they were the equal of any man, Richards voiced his beliefs more stridently. ‘I believe very strongly in the black man asserting himself in this world,’ he would write in his autobiography, ‘and over the years I have leaned towards many movements that follow this basic cause.’
‘Viv’s coming into the game in this way represented the full flowering of Caribbean strength and identity,’ says King Frank-I.
Not only did he come from the small islands which had been kept out and seen as a lower class of Caribbean cricket, but he also came out of that black power sentiment and time. So he was a direct contradiction to the blue-eyed aristocratic leader that had been foisted on Caribbean people. To me he represented the apex of what Learie Constantine expressed when he said that our cricket could only feel its full impact when a black captain had been installed. I would take Learie’s impressions even further. I would suggest that the fullness of Caribbean-ness could only be expressed when the formerly discriminated Leewards were bought into the fold through Viv. Both Lloyd and Worrell would have been too diffident to express this in its full blackness and full African-ness.
The former editor of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack Matthew Engel has this interpretation:
In the 1960s, particularly in England and Australia, people had got to like the West Indies because they were fun. Then they became serious. There was another change when Viv took over from Clive, which had an effect on the press and possibly the public. Clive was perhaps more rooted in the old West Indies – approachable, essentially an entertainer, even though he presided over the strategy of great success via the four fast bowlers. Whereas Viv emphatically wasn’t approachable. There was what one might call at times a visceral enmity. No quarter was given. It wasn’t for show, it was for real. What one sensed was the anger. He was always an angry cricketer.
‘The message that I sent’, says Richards, ‘was that I would rather die out there. A lot of people took me seriously, and I was serious about it. A lot of them looked at it as a sport, but it was a step beyond sport, where there were a whole lot of things needed defending, rather than the cricket ball itself.’ Richards the Test cricketer played the game to represent his people. He played to prove that the creators of the game were no better than the people who had learned it from them. He was conscious of where he came from and from where his ancestors came. He couldn’t separate his past and his people’s heritage from his athleticism.
At the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games, when Richards was 16 years old, the USA sprinter Tommie Smith won the 200 metres final. His teammate John Carlos came third. When their medals were presented they each raised a fist on which they wore a black leather glove. It was a human rights salute, they said. It was also an overtly political statement by two black athletes which had a profound effect on the teenaged Richards.
‘I watched the American runners and I could identify with them, more than anything else, as a black person,’ he says. ‘I could identify myself with Tommie Smith. So you had people who you felt had the same beliefs as you. Fighting that same cause. People like Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver. These guys were part of a movement, the Black Panther Party. And while we were here in Antigua as young boys, we would try and associate ourselves with that particular side of things.’
When he is asked if it was only in retrospect that he painted his cricketing achievements with the wash of the pan-African cause, he denies it flatly.
No. This is something I’ve been thinking about since I was a little boy. I have always thought about African history. The Zulu Wars. Malcolm X got me fired up, the Black Panthers – all these things these guys were doing. And I remember realising what was going on in the southern United States in particular, what people had to put up with just to survive. I was pretty much motivated from an early age and was looking for the necessary stuff to help me in this area as an Afro-Caribbean person.
By the early 1980s Richards was probably the most attractive and recognisable cricketer in the world. It was at this time that he began wearing sweatbands on the field in red, gold and green, the colours of Rastafari. ‘It was how I related to Africa,’ he says. ‘For us as people Africa is the starting point. Red meant the blood that was shed, yellow for the gold that was taken away, the green for Mother Nature and the greenery of African land itself. Then there was another colour, the black. Now you had the black, yellow, green and red. The black for the black folks in that part of the world. That is my representation of those particular colours and what it meant to me.’
Richards was not a Rastafarian, but he sympathised with some of the values of its followers. The movement had begun in Jamaica in the 1930s. It promoted a return to Africa, specifically Ethiopia, where Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari) was emperor. Rastafarians were nonconformists and regarded with much suspicion in colonial Jamaica. Some of them were beaten and imprisoned. They were seen as a threat to order and a bad example to the masses, but they gathered and survived in rural areas and the poorest neighbourhoods of Kingston. It was from such ghettos that reggae music would be first developed 30 years later.
‘Some of us were still lingering, one foot in, one foot out, as to who we were as people,’ reflects Richards. ‘Rastafari sent out that message in terms of appearance, their ideology, basic thoughts on your lifestyle rather than anyone imposing how you should live. You know they had that side of things covered, and I respect that. So wearing that band itself had so many meanings to me.’
Richards was not only influenced by the politics of black liberation, but by music. He listened to the reggae of Dennis Brown, the ska and rock steady of Toots and the Maytals and the calypso-soca blend of Byron Lee and the Dragonaires.
I liked all of this stuff. And then when I played in the Shell Shield I went to Jamaica for the first time. I was already listening to the Wailers, Gregory Isaacs, Burning Spear, Culture. Coming from a small island, it was always one of my dreams to see them. A little later I had the honour of going to the studio to physically stand there while Bob Marley was recording. I would go to Hope Road, where Bob used to live. I knew Bunny Wailer from the band – I knew him best. But to meet Bob, Bunny and the other Wailers was the same sort of feeling that I guess other people may have got from meeting Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones.
While he was playing for Somerset in 1975, Richards made a point of taking a night off to get to London to see Bob Marley on the Natty Dread tour at the Lyceum. When he went on cricket tours he took Marley’s tapes with him, calling them his ‘consciousness stuff’. In the BMW that he drove in Antigua Richards had a picture of Haile Selassie on the steering wheel and one of Bob Marley in the window.
‘You know Bob Marley’s “Get up, Stand up”. All these tunes were totally inspiring stuff. You could call it your battlefield music, you know. He sang about the rights of human beings. When you heard those lyrics, it was like a poem that you recited on so many occasions. When you leave your hotel with your headphones on and then you walk onto the field.’
Richards starts to sing.
‘I feel so strong when you get those lyrics, and it’s totally embedded in your mind. You feel very, very powerful. Knowing that there’s someone out there who feels the same way that you do. Bob did a magnificent job, and I like to think I did OK with my bat.’
‘This music, these black ideologies, were now permeating West Indian society,’ explains Clem Seecharan.
They shaped attitudes, perceptions and behaviour when these men and women were at an impressionable age. These were major shifts in perspectives in the region. The whole cultural, political, ideological frame of reference had changed. And whether or not these cricketers were directly conscious of it or not, they were products of this more radical framework. The cricket was now infused with something that was more radically black-American than a continuation of a British tradition. And as for Viv, I would say that all of this would have been powerfully aided by the music he was listening to. I would say that was the lightning rod.
In England there was a slightly different cultural reading of Bob Marley from many of the younger West Indies’ supporters.
‘Every black household would have a Bob Marley album,’ says Trevor Nelson,
but by 1976 we were starting to make our own music, and where I lived in Hackney it was a hotbed for a new style of reggae called lovers’ rock. Most of the singers were second-generation British West Indians, and many of them were women. It went hand in hand with the little blues parties that went on. Black people didn’t go up the West End to go to clubs, they had parties in houses – a shebeen – and the music played almost exclusively was lovers’ rock. So Bob Marley was for radio, for the overall picture. Within a few years there was a tendency to think that he’d gone from the community a bit because he was so global, a little over-produced, but I wouldn’t call him a sell-out.
‘We thought Bob was a sell-out,’ says Paul Gilroy. ‘I don’t buy him as the avatar of the rebel outlook, and I don’t see him as the most important of the musical stars. British West Indians didn’t need large doses of Bob Marley to come to our political senses in the summer of 1976. Certainly in London, someone like Dennis Bovell, who was involved with the sound systems and lovers’ rock, was much more part of the moment.’
* * *
‘A lot of people see Bob Marley with a ball and thinks that Bob Marley only know how to play soccer,’ says Bunny Wailer. ‘But Bob also knows how to play cricket. Bob was really a good cricketer. He used to bowl some great balls.’
Bunny had known Bob Marley since they were both young boys. In the late 1950s Marley and his mother moved into his family house in the ghetto of Trench Town in Kingston. A few blocks away lived Peter Tosh. Together, the three neighbours would form the most famous reggae band in the world, Bob Marley and the Wailers.
‘Yes. Bob bowled the off-spinner, he bowled the leg-spinner, he bowled the googly, he bowled the Chinaman. And he had one that, you know, he called it the magic one; he didn’t even give it a proper name. That one is strange. Because somehow he used that one to get the batsman whether he’s getting caught or leg before or clean bowled, but when he bowls the magic one then he gets the result.’
Vivian Richards’s fame in the late 1970s coincided with that of the Wailers. They sought each other out. ‘When he comes to Jamaica to play cricket he always find himself in the company of the Wailers,’ remembers Bunny. ‘We would go for him at the hotel and take him into the communities of the ghetto, where he finds more relaxation. He gets some real soul food and the people around him are warm and receptive and loving and kind to him, making him feel at home. The people are excited because Viv Richards is in the community. Everybody wants to get a talk; everybody can get a touch. Because he’s their star, you know what I mean?’
Bunny Wailer also suggests that it was Richards’s connection to the band and to the people he met in Jamaica that inspired him to wear the red, green and gold sweatband.
He was a kind of character that really had some kind of respect for his roots. And when he came among us Rastafarians he really took to listening and adopting the ways and customs. He wore that armband – which sometimes was not appropriate to the authorities – but him being the person he is, a strong character, he stands up for what he believes in. He didn’t back down in establishing that he was Rastarised. So bless up Viv Rich. Every time, big up Viv Rich, great cricketer, great individual. He’s a leader for African people overall, so big time respect to Vivian Richards, the champion of cricket.
* * *
Not everybody has been so enthusiastic about Richards’s identification with pan-Africanism and Rastafari. In 1984, when Richards wore his sweatband throughout the blackwash series, David Frith was the editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly, a magazine he had created in 1979. Previously Frith had been editor of The Cricketer magazine. He was a respected journalist whose upbringing in both England and Australia had given him a deep understanding of the cricket played in both countries.
Frith used to adore the West Indians. He’d first seen them from high up in the Sheridan Stand at Sydney on the 1951–52 tour. Frank Worrell coming out to bat in his maroon cap with his immaculate white shirtsleeves folded halfway up the forearm was one of the most enchanting visions of the young Frith’s life. But by 1984 his view of West Indian cricket had altered. Their image was so different.
‘I was watching them in England and I was watching them in the Caribbean, and it seemed that cricket had been transformed into something really ugly,’ he says. The principal reason was the four fast bowlers around which the West Indian strategy revolved. ‘The summer game, it had become something else. It had lost its romance, it had lost its sportsmanship, it had lost its lovely edge; it was now a place where people got frightened.’
At the beginning of the 1984 tour Vivian Richards had made one of the most breathtaking scores of recent years. At Old Trafford in the first one-day international against England his side had made little more than a hundred by lunch and lost seven wickets. England sat down to eat with the applause of the crowd fresh in their ears; their bowlers thought the game was won. But Richards was still there. At 166 for 9 Michael Holding joined him at the wicket. Last man in. Richards made 93 runs during that stand while Holding scored 12. Richards ended up with 189 not out.
‘Viv didn’t say much, but his body language shouted loud,’ recalls Derek Pringle, who had to bowl against him that afternoon. ‘You knew you were up against someone who intended to do you maximum harm. It’s like that exchange in Apocalypse Now when they tell Martin Sheen to terminate Kurtz’s command with extreme prejudice. That was Viv. He was a batsman who wanted to hurt you with extreme prejudice.’
‘When Viv walked out with his Rasta sweatband what did people think it meant?’ asks Paul Gilroy.
I would read Viv’s hundred that day as an extraordinary act of insubordination. All of us who saw it were gleeful. And this was not a glee that resonated only with ‘muggers and layabouts’, the people who were being criminalised so actively due to the encroachment of the police into their lives. This was not just about politically minded individuals reading the game at a distance. It was one of those moments of solidarity and enthusiasm and appreciation recognised by the crowd as the spectacle was unfolding.
The rest of the West Indian team made 73 runs between them that day in a total of 272. In reply England made all of 168, less than Richards had scored by himself. ‘Any of us will be lucky if we see anything quite like it in our lifetime,’ wrote Matthew Engel from the press box.
A few days later David Frith met Vivian Richards at a function. ‘He was feeling pretty good,’ recalls Frith,
and that’s the evening that I asked him about the Rastafarian wristband and asked if it should be used in a Test match. He got quite agitated and he was talking about what I thought were all sorts of quite unrelated matters like the slave trade. And he said, ‘Dave, don’t you know your history, man?’ And I said, ‘I know what you’re going on about, but why are you attacking me in this way? I’ve got no ancestry involved in the slave trade and I think it’s irrelevant.’ And then I realised that this is one of his forces of motivation and that nothing I could say would dissuade him from carrying this conviction and that perhaps if you made 8,000 runs, 4,000 came from this fury at what had happened to some of his people a long time ago.
David Gower played five Test series against the West Indies and captained England in two of them.
If you’ve got a region like the Caribbean, it doesn’t take much to work out that there was a lot of history going back to the slave-trade days that you can’t just ignore. It goes down through the generations. Now, if you are you are an international sportsman from Antigua or Jamaica or Trinidad, you want to establish your own sense of pride in your nation. You might not be thinking about the history of the region when you are walking out to bat or marking out your run-up, but it’s there. They will look into these things, analyse these things and encourage others to think about these things. It would be far too naive to suggest that the political history of the Caribbean means nothing to the cricket – it’s a driving force. Pride in one’s nationality, pride, dare I say, in one’s colour, pride in oneself. These are all driving forces.
‘All of a sudden I could remember a guy by the name of David Frith or whatever and he confronted me one night,’ remembers Richards. ‘And he said, “What do those colours red, gold and green that I wear on the cricket field mean?” And before I could answer he was telling me. He said it was a black power symbol. So I am saying, “In my opinion, it’s not.” We had a big argument about the whole stuff.’
Frith believes that any aggression felt by international cricketers on the field should end in a drink with the opposition in the bar.
For me that should be the limit of aggression in Test cricket, but now we are in very serious times and all sorts of things are motivating people – religious belief and racial conviction – and most of all these resentments. And I think it’s rather sad if you need a resentment like that to fire you up. You should glory in the gift that you’ve been given. I mean, he was a born athlete, Viv Richards. He surely could have gone out there and done just as well and retained his cool. I wish he didn’t get angry so often because I believed in him. But after that evening I was left quite worried, I thought, Well, he’s talking to young kids, and if he preaches that sort of stuff, the world’s not going to be a very peaceful place. He’s a very influential man. And still is. So that was a cardinal moment. It changed my life really; it opened my eyes. I realised some cricketers are fired up by the most amazing drives of force from unexpected places.
* * *
Richards led his team to seven wins in their first nine Test matches under his captaincy. He had not dropped the baton and he had kept the engine running. England arrived in the Caribbean at the beginning of 1986 to face the West Indies for the first time since the blackwash humiliation of 1984. They were in for further punishment. By the time the sides reached Antigua for the final Test, the score was four–nil to the West Indies. On the fourth day of the game, in front of people who had known him since he was a child, Richards battered the fastest hundred that Test cricket had seen. After reaching his century in 56 balls, he declared in order to allow his team enough time to bowl England out for the tenth time in the series. Five–nil again. A second blackwash. The Test match score in the 1980s between the two sides now stood at thirteen–nil to the West Indies.
‘Infancy has matured into manhood,’ wrote Adlai Carrott on the sports page of Antigua’s radical newspaper Outlet, ‘and West Indies cricket reigns supreme with no worthy rival in sight. It is our golden age that we now enjoy and the English, ancient masters of the game, can find no counter on the field of play.’
The subjugation of England, in particular the method of victory, displeased others. Writing during the series, David Frith warned that ‘the escalation of their fast bowlers has reached a murderous crescendo which shrieks remorselessly throughout the innings. The thrilling and permissively dangerous one-to-one joust has been replaced by a protracted gang mugging.’ The chivalry and variety of the past had disappeared, believed Frith, to be replaced by something modern and sinister. ‘In the streets, bars and fields of Barbados and Jamaica there are hordes of six-footers who rejoice in their strength and agility, get their “fix” by propelling a ball fast and eliciting admiration, and eye the advantages that cricket can bring with the same eagerness that impelled the unemployed in the Depression to don boxing gloves.’
The metaphor of a criminal inner-city youth now terrorising the cricket field was rejected outright by Adlai Carrott. ‘Now in the age of West Indian dominance, their excuses range from the petty to the ridiculous. “Too many life-threatening bouncers,” they scream, so we West Indians are to spare a thought for David Gower’s men as they “face physical danger alien to cricket’s birth right”. Of course they have forgotten Typhoon Tyson, fearsome Trueman, who made Easton McMorris spit blood on the Sabina Park pitch after a consistent battering. Of course too, we did not complain and say, “It isn’t cricket.”’ Never mind the English reporters, Carrott continued. Since their team cannot attain greatness, they revenge themselves by railing at West Indian excellence. ‘As our cricket advances towards perfection, the spate of English press criticism advances with equal pace. In no sport has one nation so dominated another. In no other sport has one nation ruled so supremely for so long. Therein lies the motive for the slander and distortions of the English press.’
Fast bowling was very intimidating, says Clem Seecharan.
It was dangerous. To see these big black men – not one but four – I’m sure consciously or subconsciously that image would have been very intimidating. And you need to remember at that time in England, the 1980s, there was a political activism, militancy, parts of which Viv Richards clearly identified with. Now to some people that whole package would seem very threatening: ‘The black power brigade are here, man.’ Worse than that, they’re at Lord’s, watching cricket, playing cricket. These men had now appropriated something that wasn’t theirs to take. What you must understand is that people such as Clyde Walcott and Frank Worrell were black Englishmen. Of course they were proud of their background, but they were totally within the British colonial frame of reference: the education, the Church, the values which had been very congruent with values held by people in England.
* * *
After the second blackwash came Test matches in Pakistan, New Zealand and India, where the West Indies could not be beaten. New bowlers were introduced such as Patrick Patterson and Kenny Benjamin. Others who had first proved themselves in Clive Lloyd’s time, such as Courtney Walsh, became better and better. The batsman Carl Hooper from Guyana made his debut against India at Mumbai in 1987; he would play another 101 Tests. Holding and Garner had now retired, but Curtly Ambrose from Antigua looked as if he could be as good a fast bowler as either of them. Against England in 1988 the score was just four–nil (the first Test was drawn) as the English endured a chaotic summer by combining a spanking from the West Indies with fielding four different captains. West Indies seventeen, England nil.
Yet with more success came more criticism. After Curtly Ambrose broke the jaw of the bowler Geoff Lawson at Perth in December 1988 a reporter wrote in the Australian, ‘I will not concede that a cricket regime of black brutality, brinkmanship and boorishness which is destroying a beautiful game does credit to anybody. Not to those who perpetrate it, not to those who retaliate and especially not to those administrators too weak-kneed to put an end to it – those who would rather wait for a fatality before scuttling from the bar to the committee room.’
Tony Cozier covered that tour as a West Indian broadcaster and journalist. He had already formed the view that the ‘defamation’ of the team had become more strident and vitriolic with each West Indian triumph. In 1986 he had written in the West Indies Cricket Annual that there had been an ‘orchestrated campaign of unwarranted slander’ against West Indies cricket, its press and its administrators. To try to discredit the record of the modern West Indian sides, he said, the critics dwelt on alleged time-wasting (the slow over rate) and intimidatory bowling. Cozier was also certain that the repeated calls to change the laws of the game were aimed at countering the West Indian bowling strategy.
At a meeting of the International Cricket Conference in 1982 a proposal to shorten the run-ups of fast bowlers had been outvoted, but there were regular petitions to restrict the number of bouncers a bowler could send down in one over. By the middle of 1991 delegations to the ICC had succeeded in persuading the organisation to allow only one bouncer per over in Test cricket. Three years later this ruling was relaxed to allow two per over. None of this had much effect on the way the West Indies played their cricket. The authors of the 1995 study on fast bowling Real Quick worked out that while the one-bouncer rule was in operation Richards’s side played 15 Tests, won eight and lost two.
‘There will always be obstacles in your way wherever you go’ says Richards today. ‘I felt that the changes to the laws of the game – reducing the numbers of bouncers – were targeted at the West Indies because we had a pretty fine line-up of fast bowlers both in quality and quantity. And I guess there were a few journalists who would have been pissed off about this bowling that was “designed to kill” and all that sort of stuff.’
The former England bowler Mike Selvey believes that there was something in the West Indies’ psyche that was rather bemused by all of the criticism. ‘Because actually this was the way they had always played their cricket – on club grounds, in the Shell Shield, in Test matches. They bounced each other, they hooked each other, they took it on – that’s what they did. Culturally, they weren’t doing anything to others that they hadn’t done to themselves. It may have been at odds with the Corinthian spirit, but that’s how it was.’
After he became a television commentator, Michael Holding was once seen shaking with laughter while watching the England all-rounder Chris Lewis prepare for an innings in the West Indies by repeatedly ducking balls thrown at his head by his teammate Robin Smith. When he was asked why he found it so funny, Holding said that if this had been a local club game, the batsman would not have been practising ducking fast bowling, but practising smashing each ball into the neighbouring parish.
The relationship between the ‘West Indian brand’ and how it has tested the philosophy of conservatism has long been of interest to Hilary Beckles.
The English have come from a very long tradition of political and social evolution, and there’s a strong belief that some of the finest years of English culture are from the past. When you are evolving from a colonial context, your desire is to get as far away from the past as possible. You look back and you see the worst expression of the human journey. You see slavery, genocide, brutality, you see the oppression of the human spirit, the denial of human rights, so you look back and you say, ‘Our agenda as a new culture is to get as far away from the past as possible.’ The aim is to go aggressively into the future.
‘What people didn’t like, and I’m prepared to say that I believe they were envious, is that our boys stayed together for so long,’ says Clive Lloyd.
They won matches and then came back four years later and won some more. These fellows who had been writing about cricket for years didn’t like that the old order had changed. They found that threatening. Sport is not always played to the same system; things change. Some cricket writers looked at us and they knew that a certain kind of West Indies cricketer had died for good. They didn’t like it. We were getting mammoth scores, we were bowling well, we fielded well. We paid attention to detail and were very fit. People were not accustomed to that. Some people took that hard and couldn’t understand that here was a set of people who had put something special together. If you were born after 1975, you wouldn’t have seen the West Indies lose in a real way until you were in your 20s.
* * *
Richards dealt easily with attacks on his team from outside the Caribbean: he just kept winning Test matches. But in 1990 he was criticised from within the Caribbean because of remarks he had made about the racial composition of the Test side. In an interview given to the Antiguan newspaper Outlet it was reported that Richards had said, ‘the West Indies cricket team … is the only sporting team of African descent that has been able to win repeatedly against all international opposition, bringing joy and recognition to our people’.
Many people of Indian heritage living in the Caribbean said they were insulted. For some, Richards’s words confirmed their belief that the exclusion of Indian players from the West Indies side was deliberate.
There had been a strong Indo-Caribbean culture in the West Indies for 150 years. Indians are the largest single ethnic group in Guyana and Trinidad. Alvin Kallicharran’s family had been in Guyana for three generations, and Sonny Ramadhin’s family had lived in Trinidad for at least as long. Both their fathers had been cane cutters, descendants of people who had left India since the 1830s to work on plantations after the abolition of slavery. Between 1838 and 1917 nearly 250,000 indentured labourers were brought to British Guiana from India. A further 150,000 went to Trinidad. There had been racial animosity between Indians and Africans in the Caribbean almost since their arrival; within a century this would become apparent in West Indian cricket.
Indo-Caribbean cricket fans had cheered for India when they played in the Caribbean since the 1950s, even though there were Indians in the West Indies side. In 1950 Sonny Ramadhin was the first Indo-Caribbean Test cricketer. Then came the batsmen Rohan Kanhai and Joe Solomon. But when India beat Clive Lloyd’s West Indies in Trinidad in April 1976, local people ran onto the field to slap the backs of the Indian batsmen.
‘It was not simply about ethnicity,’ says Hilary Beckles.
It’s much more than that. I believe that the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad felt that they were given a raw deal by the black governments in the Caribbean. Forbes Burnham was in government in Guyana; Eric Williams was in government in Trinidad. These people felt that when the nation states of the Caribbean were built in the independence period, they were built as black states. These people had been in the region for some time, yet they thought that they were not treated as equally and as fairly as they deserved. One way to express their discontent of living with inequity was to forge links with the motherland and to support India.
The last great contribution to West Indian cricket from an Indo-Caribbean player had come from Alvin Kallicharran, who hadn’t played Test cricket since 1981. Shiv Chanderpaul, who would be the next great Indo-Caribbean batsman, wouldn’t make his Test debut until 1994. It seems that for many years there was no Indo-West Indian good enough to force his way into Lloyd’s or Richards’s best Test sides.
‘I don’t blame Vivian Richards for the comment he made and for which many Indians took umbrage,’ says Clem Seecharan, whose book From Ranji to Rohan is a study of cricket and Indian identity in Guyana.
There was no Indian in the team at the time. The cricket was black cricket. It was very political. Don’t forget that Viv himself had refused vast sums of money to play cricket in apartheid South Africa; I think his statement has to be seen in the light of this principled stance. That said, Viv doesn’t come from Guyana where ethnic insecurities between Africans and Indians are deeply rooted.
There was violence and racial killings in the early 1960s. These insecurities festered and were aggravated by the regime of Forbes Burnham, who rigged every election between 1968 and the mid-1980s. So at the time Viv made this statement Indians in Guyana rightly felt disenfranchised. I doubt that Clive Lloyd, who is Guyanese himself of course, and is sensitive to the ethnic insecurities in that country, would have said anything similar.
Professor Seecharan’s conclusion is that the Indian contribution to the development of Guyanese and Trinidadian cricket had been significant, but in Test cricket it was rather patchy and uneven.
No Indian fast bowler had made the Test team. In an area so crucial to the rise and dominance of West Indies cricket no contribution at all! Again, you would have thought that of the numerous Indo-West Indian spinners who have played for Guyana and Trinidad over the decades, a few would have established themselves in the Test team. But none replicated the example of Sonny Ramadhin in the 1950s. And apart from three batsmen of distinction – Kanhai, Solomon and Kallicharran – there was no other Indo-West Indian cricketer who had achieved at the highest level. This is incontestable.
* * *
By 1991 Vivian Richards had decided to end his Test career. He was 39 and had been playing international cricket for more than 16 years. He had led the side in 12 series since 1985 and never lost. The side he brought to England in 1991 was a good one. Gordon Greenidge had retired after the home victory against Australia earlier in the year, but from the 1984 blackwash tour there was Desmond Haynes, Richards himself, Gus Logie, Richie Richardson, Jeff Dujon and Malcolm Marshall. The latest version of the bowling attack was impressive: Marshall, Walsh, Ambrose and Patterson.
Impressive, but again not universally welcome. The June 1991 editorial in Wisden Cricket Monthly anticipated what it called an unappetising tour. ‘Another invasion is upon us by a West Indies team which is the most fearsome, the most successful, and the most unpopular in the world. Their game is founded on vengeance and violence and is fringed by arrogance.’ Richards led a team, wrote David Frith, which had become embroiled in one sour series after another.
Their supporters will insist that bitterness arises from the fact that West Indies have been so steadily victorious. That may be close to the truth, but there is a vital additional factor to be identified, and that is that these matches have long since become manifestations of the racial tensions that exist in the world outside the cricket-ground gates. Just when the cricketers of both sides should be teaching ordinary folk how to co-exist and enjoy honourable sports combat, a damaging counter-image emerges.
Frith was tired of what he called the ‘monotony and brutality’ of slow over rates and unremitting bouncers. He professed himself to be a cricket lover who was justified in articulating his dislike of that kind of cricket.
‘Mr Frith sounds a very embittered man to me,’ said Vivian Richards at the time.
‘I stated that in my view,’ says Frith, ‘the West Indian game was now based on violence, and when that was questioned I said, “Well four, five, six bouncers an over is violent cricket.” There’s no getting away from it. As for arrogance, Clive Lloyd said to me later, “We’ve got reason to be arrogant; we are beating the world,” so I was right on that count too.’
David Frith says that his strong criticisms of the West Indies and their bowling tactics came from a single concern. The reason he was close to despair was that he loved the game and saw it being traduced. ‘I care for cricket,’ he insists,
and any accusation that there is a racist motive for this … [the 1991 editorial] any accusation that this is a racist attack, is despicable, and I refute it. But it’s very easy for people to hop on this racism bandwagon. I am sick to death of it; it’s just become the scourge of our age. They got me wrong. I used to like those blokes and dine with them and be accepted by them. However, in 1991 – I suppose I had to expect it – Gordon Greenidge – he was a former friend – walked straight past me.
The previous spring, when England had narrowly lost in the West Indies, Wisden Cricket Monthly had had a heavy mailbag full of post about the West Indies’ play. The editor selected five of the letters for publication. The first called for the immediate sacking of the manager Clive Lloyd and the captain, Vivian Richards. Three other letters were headed ‘Murder’, ‘Moral Winners’ and ‘Unsavoury’. The fifth letter was entitled ‘Voodoo?’ and was from a reader in Cheshire. ‘Until we can breed 7-foot monsters willing to break bones and shatter faces, we cannot compete against these threatening West Indians. Even the umpires seem to be scared that the devilish-looking Richards might put a voodoo sign on them!’
* * *
The 1991 series between England and the West Indies was drawn. It was the first time that the West Indies had not defeated the English in England since 1969. The four series under Richards’s captaincy had finished five–nil, four–nil, two–one and two all. England were getting closer. Perhaps the potency of the West Indies was being diluted?
At the Oval, where he’d beaten the ball and the England bowlers into a dusty submission in 1976 and seen the England captain grovel on all fours in front of British West Indian supporters, Vivian Richards played his last Test match innings. He hit back-foot cover drives off David Lawrence, an England fast bowler whose parents had come to the West Country from Jamaica. He pulled Phillip DeFreitas – an England fast bowler born in Dominica – for four through mid-wicket. He square-cut Chris Lewis – an England fast bowler born in Guyana – to the boundary. After he had made 60 from them, he was caught off Lawrence at mid-on.
He walked back to the dressing room and was given a hell of an ovation. He took his famous maroon cap off his now-bald head and raised it with his bat to the crowd. But because he was Vivian Richards, his fury at playing a false shot preoccupied him.
It was over. Someone special was crossing beyond a boundary. Such men deserve to be remembered in verse. This time the calypsonian King Short Shirt sang it best.
No bowler holds a terror for Vivian Richards.
Not Thomson not Lillee, not Bedi nor Chandrasekhar.
A perfect coordination of body and mind.
That brother is really dynamite.
I tell you, pace or spin he ain’t give a France what you’re bowling him,
Fast or slowly, you’re going back to the boundary.