This Tuesday evening, my siblings and I were talking about cricket. My father, who played cricket competitively for many years, is 99, and blind, but I believe he was enjoying the conversation. I remember one time he had told me that cricket was the greatest game ever invented.
Amongst the coconut trees and stumps and whatever on Spanish Caye, we children used to play a form of cricket — “bat and rickets.” 
 In the real cricket, the batsman seeks to hit the ball as hard as he can on the ground, in order to avoid the fielders and reach the four boundary. On rare occasions, an outstanding batsman will try to reach the six boundary, which must be done through the air. In the air, however, the batsman runs the risk of being caught, which ends his innings.
But at Spanish Caye there were so many obstacles on the ground that the way to score runs was through the air. As a child growing up, I often saw the Unity cricket team play, but did not understand how important the ground is, as opposed to the air, in the higher levels of the game. Call me dumb, if you wish.
About fifteen or twenty years ago, Test matches and high level cricket games began appearing on local cable television. I saw fabulous fast bowlers like Australia’s Glenn McGrath and the West Indies’ Courtenay Walsh and Curtly Ambrose. I watched such great batsmen as India’s Tendulkar and Dravid, and, of course, the incomparable Brian Lara of the West Indies. There was so much I learned about the game from these televised games. 
Then, cricket disappeared from local television. Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the correct places. But, a few months ago, mainstream ESPN and ESPN2 began televising cricket on cable channels I could watch. Recently, I’ve watched Test matches between England and the West Indies, between the West Indies and Bangladesh, and between England and India. To repeat, I’ve learned a lot.
A few days ago, a man from the Belize River Valley, Gliksten Bennett, called KREM Radio’s Morning Stew show and spoke at length about the history of cricket in Belize. I had never heard cricket’s history here discussed before, and I am grateful to Gliksten.
When I was a child growing up, cricket was still a big deal in Belize City, and it was very popular in the Belize River Valley. On some weekends, the Unity Cricket Club, to which my father belonged, would travel to villages like Burrell Boom and St. Paul’s Bank to play against teams from those villages. As a teenager of 16 or 17, I played on two different occasions for Unity in games in the two villages I mentioned. As I said, I really didn’t know the game. I also played for Unity, when they were short of players basically, in two games on the old Newtown Barracks and one on the MCC Grounds.
My parents’ second son, Nelson, was saying how involved he was in cricket with a championship cricket team named Milport. Since I never saw him play cricket competitively, I assume his glory years were during the 1965-1968 period when I was away studying in the United States.
There is a lot to discuss here, but what I want you to think about is how open spaces, such as fields suitable for cricket, have disappeared from Belize City, which had about eight teams when I was growing up. You can’t play cricket if you don’t have a field. In its original incarnation, the MCC Grounds was totally glorious. There is nothing like open spaces and green fields and fresh breezes from the Almighty.
When I wrote about Herman “Harmie” Brackett to honor him on his unbelievable 21 not out against the MCC team from England in 1960, he called me from California to express his thanks. By the by, he asked me if I remembered Steadman White, and of course I did. Steadman appeared one day from some island in the Caribbean and began playing for the Police cricket team. I have never seen a man hit cricket balls as far as Steadman White did. I know that he married a daughter of Rose Howard. Harmie told me Steadman and his family live in Florida. 
There are so many cricket stories I could tell you, and I’m sure Gliksten has his own. I will close with this one. The Chief Justice of British Honduras in the 1960s was a man named Sir Clifford de Lisle Inniss. I believe he was from Barbados. He was in his forties at least, probably even in his fifties, but he loved cricket so much he played actively with the Belize Club team, which was comprised of expatriates. I think Sir Clifford was considered a pretty good bat. 
Well, he developed the habit of drifting a little out of his stumps when a bowler would run by to deliver from the end where Sir Clifford was batting. Oliver “Racku” Craig, the butcher and very well-known sportsman, saw what was happening when he bowled from Sir Clifford’s end, and he decided to stump the Chief Justice, which, strictly speaking, was a legal thing to do. But, my sources said that Sir Clifford was very angry and considered Racku’s stumping of himself to be an act of indecency. 
So many memories flood my mind. I have to tell you how classic it was to watch the bowler called Preacher and the late, great C. F. S. Brown bowling for Sussex from opposite ends on the Garden. And, in my earlier years, Orlando “Rhamadin” Rhamdas and Clive Brackett (Harmie’s older brother) from opposite ends for a team from the Yarborough area whose name I can’t remember. (MYA?) 
Life was beautiful back then in little Belize. We were poor and had nothing of material consequence, but we had our games.
 Now this is my third closing of this essay. I have to pay the greatest of respect to our softball girls. Our girls were world class. Nostalgia, baby, a sure sign of age.
Bless up, Belizeans.