This Isn't Cricket...but It Is

Theirs was voluntary work, and it often seemed as if they expected the players to perform on the same basis. Cricketers were the worst-paid professionals in any major sport anywhere.

Enter Packer, a TV and publishing entrepreneur, smarting with anger because the elders had refused him permission to telecast an England/Australia series over his popular Channel Nine in Sydney. Packer, who had something of the reputation of a business desperado—he was known to his enemies as the Man in the Stocking Mask—decided there was just one thing for him to do. He would buy cricket.

It was a wildly successful notion. Most of the best pro players flocked to Packer's new World Series Cricket organization, paying little heed to threats of excommunication by the governing bodies of the sport, whose members came closer still to apoplexy when Packer dressed the players in uniforms of red, yellow and blue instead of the traditional white, played games under lights, used a white instead of a red ball and made other unspeakable commercial innovations.

For a time, international cricket was in chaos. There were two English sides, one official, one outlaw; two teams of West Indians; two representing Australia. And, mostly, the class players were with the pirates. The civil war went on for two years, ending in 1979 when Packer triumphantly accepted the now proffered TV rights and handed the players and the game back to the Old Guard. But things were never the same again. No penalties were imposed on the rebel pros and, what is more, they now knew their worth. Under Packer salaries went, if not sky-high—maybe a dozen or so of the top players now make $250,000 a year—high enough to make pure sportsmanship a little outmoded, especially when bonuses for wins and for man-of-the-match awards are on the line.

And no cricketers were as strongly influenced by the Packer revolution as those of the West Indies, the group of English-speaking Caribbean-island countries stretching from Jamaica down to Trinidad which turned down political union after independence came in the 1950s but which stayed together as a cricketing unit.

Their islands may be prettier than the South Bronx or North Philadelphia, but the fastest road out of poverty heads the same way in Antigua or Barbados as it does in the black enclaves of U.S. cities—via sport, which means cricket to West Indian kids. And, just as black players in America have come to dominate basketball, so Jamaicans, Trinidadians et al. have become the world's best cricketers, the culmination of a trend which began shortly after World War II.

On the eve of last month's England-West Indies game at Port of Spain, the trainer of the West Indies team, an Australian named Dennis Waight, threw a little light on what the cricket correspondent of the London Observer had to say in his preview of the match. "England's batsmen," wrote the Observer man, recalling a famous 1879 battle, "view the prospect [of playing the West Indies] with no more relish than the defenders of Rorke's Drift eyed the approaching Zulu hordes."

The horde, in fact, numbered four, the West Indian quartet of fast bowlers (as opposed to spin bowlers with slower, trickier pitches) who send the ball down at 90 mph and more, and of whom Waight said, "There's bigger money for them now. This is a tougher game. Their aggression comes up. They might not like the batsman, so they try to bounce a few around his head. And that ball is like a rock, and it hurts."

Nobody was denying that, least of all Geoff Boycott, England's most experienced batsman, who, like many cricketers nowadays, wears a hard helmet, a plexiglass visor and heavy padding under his clothing, along with the traditional leg pads and gloves.

"It's frightening," Boycott said, "and anyone who says anything else is stupid. Imagine standing on the central divider of a freeway and every few moments stepping into the fast lane. If the first three missiles don't get you, the fourth one will."