Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

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 recognized 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 anymore.” 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 grounds. 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 toward the baseball diamond. “Run, run.”

But, in some sense paralyzed 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 on my part, because I felt nothing. I experienced the occasion as a kind of emptiness.

The man stopped ten feet from Chuck. He held the gun limply. He looked at me, then back at Chuck. He was speechless and sweating. He was trying, as Chuck would afterward relate, to understand the logic of his situation.

The three of us stood there for what seemed a long time. A container ship silently went through the back gardens of the houses on Delafield Place.

Chuck took a step forward. “Leave the field of play, sir,” he said firmly. He extended his palm toward the clubhouse, an usher’s gesture. “Leave immediately please. You are interfering with play. Captain,” Chuck said loudly, turning to the Kittitian captain, who was a little distance away, “please escort this gentleman from the field.”

The captain tentatively came forward. “I coming now, Tino,” he called out. “Right behind you. No foolishness, now.”

“Don’t worry,” Tino muttered. He looked overcome by exhaustion. He dropped the gun and left the field slowly, shaking his head. After a short break, play resumed. Nobody saw any reason to call the cops.

When the match ended, both teams came together by the old clubhouse and shared Coors Lights and whiskey Cokes and Chinese takeout and talked gravely about what had taken place. Somebody called for quiet, and Chuck Ramkissoon stepped forward into the center of the gathering.

“We have an expression in the English language,” he said, as silence began to establish itself among the players. “The expression is ‘not cricket.’ When we disapprove of something, we say ‘It’s not cricket.’ We do not say ‘It’s not baseball.’ Or ‘It’s not football.’ We say ‘It’s not cricket.’ This is a tribute to the game we play, and it’s a tribute to us.” By now, all chatter had ceased. We stood around the speaker, solemnly staring at our feet. “But with this tribute comes a responsibility. Look here,” Chuck said, pointing at the club crest on a Staten Island player’s shirt. “LUDE LUDUM INSIGNIA SECUNDARIA, it says here. Now I do not know Latin, but I’m told it means, and I’m sure you’ll correct me, Mr. President, if I’m wrong”—Chuck nodded at our club president—“it means, ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s only a game.’ Now, games are important. They test us. They teach us comradeship. They’re fun. But cricket, more than any other sport, is, I want to say”—Chuck paused for effect—“a lesson in civility. We all know this; I do not need to say more about it.” A few heads were nodding. “Something else. We are playing this game in the United States. This is a difficult environment for us. We play where we can, wherever they let us. Here at Walker Park, we’re lucky; we have locker-room facilities, which we share with strangers and passersby. Most other places we must find a tree or bush.” One or two listeners exchanged looks. “Just today,” Chuck continued, “we started late because the baseball players have first right to play on this field. And now, when we have finished the game, we must take our drinks in brown paper bags. It doesn’t matter that we have played here, at Walker Park, every year for over a hundred years. It doesn’t matter that this ground was built as a cricket ground. Is there one good cricket facility in this city? No. Not one. It doesn’t matter that we have more than one hundred and fifty clubs playing in the New York area. It doesn’t matter that cricket is the biggest, fasting-growing bat-and-ball game in the world. None of it matters. In this country, we’re nowhere. We’re a joke. Cricket? How funny. So we play as a matter of indulgence. And if we step out of line, believe me, this indulgence disappears. What this means,” Chuck said, raising his voice as murmurs and cracks and chuckles began to run through his audience, “what this means is, we have an extra responsibility to play the game right. We have to prove ourselves. We have to let our hosts see that these strange-looking guys are up to something worthwhile. I say ‘see.’ I don’t know why I use that word. Every summer the parks of this city are taken over by hundreds of cricketers but somehow nobody notices. It’s like we’re invisible. Now that’s nothing new, for those of us who are black or brown. As for those who are not”—Chuck acknowledged my presence with a smile—“you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I say that I sometimes tell people, You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country? Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.” People laughed, mostly out of embarrassment. One of my teammates extended his fist to me, and I gave it a soft punch. “But we don’t mind, right, just so long as we can play? Just leave us alone, and we’ll make do. Right? But I say we must take a more positive attitude. I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country. Cricket has a long history in the United States, actually. Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man. I won’t go into that now,” Chuck said quickly, because a frankly competing hubbub had broken out among the players. “Let us just be thankful that it all ended well, and that cricket was the winner today.”