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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Letters From |
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United States |
Bowling (New) Yorkers
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| The long innings of the Staten Island Cricket Club |
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DW GIBSON FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Clarence Modeste is president of the oldest continuously running cricket club in the United States.
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N A RECENT SUNDAY MORNING, Troy Danilo
grabbed his bat and headed out to his
stepfather’s blue Honda. The 17-year-old
emerged from his house with his slender
frame draped in several layers: various
coloured T-shirts; a baseball-style hat, covered
by a bright blue hooded sweatshirt; and lastly, a white,
long-sleeve T-shirt, barely tugged down |
over the bulk beneath. The calendar said it was mid-April, early spring, but the earth wasn’t in agreement. The wind was cold and unkind. The sun was gone, stolen by a grey sky, scattering fat raindrops. This was not cricket weather. But Danilo was determined, and there was a friendly match just minutes from his front door.
It was his first day playing for the Staten Island Cricket
Club at Walker Field, a mere 25-minute ferry ride from the
southern tip of Manhattan. A batsman originally from Australia,
Danilo used to suit up regularly with friends back in
Sydney. But when his family immigrated to the US six years
ago, he discovered none of his new classmates knew about
the game.
Though the United States played host to history’s first-ever
international cricket match, a 23-run loss to Canada in
1844, and the first overseas tour (a British visit in 1859), by
the end of the 19th century, baseball had all but vanquished
wickets from the American landscape. Today the game enjoys
isolated pockets of popularity, mostly in immigrant
communities throughout the country. Among these cloisters
of action-starved batsmen and bowlers, cricket not only
survives but thrives.
The Staten Island Cricket Club is no exception. Troy Danilo
joined a roster of fellow immigrants: Majid Arab from
Peshawar, Pakistan, who runs a bagel shop and gas station;
Prashanth Nandavanam, a financial services consultant from
Bengaluru; Joseph O’Neill from Cork, Ireland. O’Neill, a
London-based lawyer turned New York City novelist, wrote
The New York Times bestseller Netherland, which features a
Trinidadian immigrant and his quixotic pursuit: building a
cricket stadium in New York City.
The majority of the club’s players come from four countries:
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Trinidad and Tobago. Many now live and work on Staten Island—one of New
York City’s five boroughs—which possesses a distinctly
suburban feel, particularly by comparison with the bright
nights and tall buildings of neighbouring Manhattan. Since
some players only stay for a brief while—many moving to
other cities for work—there is a fairly consistent rotation of
active club members.
Clarence Modeste, the club’s president, is the first point
of contact for every new player, including Troy Danilo. “He
was really open to me,” Danilo said. “I felt like I was one of
the teammates on my first day. I thought, this is the right
place to be…it felt like home again.”
Soon after Modeste introduced Danilo around, everyone
took the field, racing against the darkening sky. The opposing
team, King’s Bench Walk Cricket Club of England, had come
a long way. Everyone was determined to get this one in: they
had waited all winter, and now it was time for cricket.
As the action got under way, Walker Field managed to
absorb the early drizzle. The park is wrapped in a leaning
chain-link fence, surrounded on all sides by middle-class
homes and cars crammed into every last parking spot along
the sidewalks. A bit drowned out by the modern world, the
park unassumingly holds significant history: The Staten Island
Cricket Club has occupied the mat-covered pitch since
1885. The club itself dates back to 1872, making it the oldest
continuously running cricket club in the US.
“Just about all the cricket in this country is played on mats
and it’s played as limited overs,” Modeste said. Twenty20 is the standard format in the United States, but on the soggy
afternoon of Troy Danilo’s debut, the players were willing to
settle for as many overs as the weather would allow. While
Danilo opted for a motley uniform, most of the players put
on whites, which were soon browned and grass-stained and
mostly soaking wet.
Fielding alongside Danilo was Keerthi Bala, who is originally
from Hyderabad. Bala, 28, moved to New York with
his family in 1996. Like Danilo, Bala immediately discovered
cricket was hard to come by—no sight of the game, no talk
of the game, no general knowledge of the game among his
classmates. “There are so many other sports in the US to pick
from,” Bala said. “To find cricket players is extremely hard.”
Always searching for cricketers, Bala eventually stumbled
onto occasional games of tape ball. And three years ago, he
was invited to meet some of the players from the Staten Island
Cricket Club. “I showed up,” Bala recalled, “and they
said, ‘you look like you can play—do you want to play a
game?’ I happened to play good that day, fortunately.”
Bala, like most members of the club, kept an admirably
sleepless schedule during the recent World Cup. “I was waking
up at three or four o’clock in morning,” he said, and watching
the matches on his computer. Despite the early hour, Bala’s family—his mother, father and older brother—gathered at
his house to eat breakfast and watch the action together.
The Staten Island club’s face-off against King’s Bench
Walk, however, lacked the glorious resolution of India’s
World Cup campaign: the match was called between innings
as the skies opened up and a downpour soaked the
field. Everyone was forced into an adjacent Tudor-style
building, where the teams sat in an erstwhile classroom
with walls covered in brightly coloured Easter eggs cut out
of big sheets of butcher paper. The effervescent decorations
were somehow congruous with the grass-stained, grown
men talking about their favourite game. Hospitality overshadowed
the lousy weather.
Club secretary Rajadurai Bavanandan set out some Sri
Lankan sandwiches provided by his wife, and warm tea
was served while Joseph O’Neill braved the elements to
fetch beer.
Clarence Modeste offered a few remarks, thanking the
visitors for making the trip to play at the start of the cricket
season. “There is always weather and it’s one of those things
we learn to live with. Don’t we?” The blunt question was
softened by an infectious smile.
It is hard not to be taken by Modeste’s calm, bright demeanour.
He welcomes everyone to Walker Park with immediate
warmth, and he’s been doing so since he joined the
club in 1961. Originally a strong bowler, he admits that age—
he’s 81 now—and a few injuries have slowed him down over
the years. “I do a lot of cricket umpiring these days,” he said.
As club president, Modeste’s duties include everything
from arranging matches—both friendly and league—to looking
after the field. “We do the work on the pitch ourselves,”
he said, laughing as he added: “The city doesn’t know how
to fix a cricket field.”
“It’s not so easy to lead a team for so many years,” said
Keerthi Bala. “And he does it perfectly.”
But the effort is ongoing, and maintaining an enduring
tradition won’t be easy. “Here the game has been played
mostly by adults.” Modeste said, adding that he doesn’t
think this bodes well for the future. Though cricket in the
US can be sustained by a constant replenishment of immigrants,
Modeste argues that the game can really only begin
to grow when it is embraced by a new generation of young
players brought up in the culture of cricket.
Just last year, Modeste formed a committee to organise a
youth league. “We’ve been thinking for some time that the
future of the game lies in having young people attracted to
it—just as we ourselves were as children,” he said. In its first
year of operation, the league signed up 17 participants—both
boys and girls—between the ages of five and 17.
Many of the club members, like Keerthi Bala, agree with
Modeste: cricket has the potential to grow in the US, if given
the chance. “There has to be some kind of influence for
people to want to play the game,” said Bala.
For the Staten Island Cricket Club, the influence is Clarence
Modeste. “You have the kind of sense that he’s going to
be there,” said Bala. “He’s like a father to all of us.”
DW Gibson serves as executive director of the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony in Hudson, New York. He is also the co-founder and co-director of Sangam House, a writers’ residency program in India.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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John H. Tucker
1 June 2011
07:08 AM
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I could feel the drizzle and rush of history sweep me in the face as I strolled through this story. Kudos to the author, who gives yet another example for why NYC is such a rich and wonderful melting pot of cultures.
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