 Cricketers from Colgate
The first time I took an American friend to a cricket match, the guest was extremely bored. Almost dozing off even as the two teams unfurled an array of priceless cricket skills, my friend Peter could hardly suppress a yawn. Delicate leg glances and late cuts, lofted on drives, fierce cuts and pulls, leg breaks, googlies and flippers, all of them left him unimpressed. Then, half way into the match, Peter suddenly came to life. “Looks like we’re going to have some action at long last,” he woke up and stated, as he sighted a helmeted batsman walk in at the fall of a wicket. Protective headgear was still a novelty those days, certainly in club cricket. Peter excitedly waited for some blood and gore but the tall, well-built bowler with the long run-up was no more than military medium pace, and our knight in armour lasted precisely three deliveries before playing all over a yorker length ball. Peter duly went back to sleep.
I knew that the Madras team in the Ranji Trophy once included an American, Frederick Fales Richardson, that the well-known cricket writer Mike Marqusee too was a true-blood Yank, until one fine morning he was dropped on his head and became a passionate lover of the strange English game. But my friend Peter was the last of a long line of Americans I tried in vain to convert into cricket lovers. That is the reason why I did not take my brother Sivaramakrishnan seriously when he announced a year ago that he was initiating a young American student from Colgate University, USA, into the mysteries of the willow game.
But Siva does not easily take no for an answer and eventually persuaded me to meet Chris Burns, the young baseballer-turned-cricketer, who was picking up the nuances of cricket so rapidly. Meeting Chris at Siva’s home last year, I was pleasantly surprised at how well-informed about cricket the young scholar from
Prof Bill Skelton’s
group of students visiting Sudharani Raghupathy’s Shree Bharatalaya, Chennai, on an Indian studies
programme.
Keen to explore the local scene going beyond the classroom, Burns was fascinated by cricket, the game every Indian seemed to be playing. His enquiries led him via Skelton and Raghupathy to my brother, who was at the time supervising the cricket coaching programme at Vidya Mandir, Mylapore. Siva and coach ‘Bond’ Venkatasubramaniam, an explosive wicketkeeper batsman of yesteryear, soon took the young American under their wing.
Within a matter of months, Chris Burns, became a useful medium pace bowler, with boundless energy and enthusiasm. When he went back to Colgate University, he started
Colgate Cricket Club
after hardselling the game to his American peers, and earning the support of the President’s office. A matting pitch in the middle of the school is his proud achievement and the school now boasts some 20 cricket enthusiasts battling for a place in the eleven that takes part in a local league.
Until this season, Chris, now 22, was the only Anglo-Saxon American cricketer he knew, but two more from Will
Skelton’s group visiting India
have joined him.
Simon Bresler, 20, from Mamaroneck, New York, a theatre student, who has spent the last four months in Chennai learning Batik, Tamizh, therukoothu, kalaripayattu and
yoga, took enthusiastically to wicket keeping, though at present somewhat hampered by a hernia.
Another young student, Paul Yannopoulos, 20, from Long Island, New York, a student of religion and philosophy, learning kalari, Hindu tradition and Vedanta at Chennai, is the other convert to cricket. For someone who first played cricket four months ago, Paul has made decent progress as a medium pace bowler. He actually lands a few deliveries within the playing area every over! Anyone who thinks that’s a joke has never played a game in his life, certainly not cricket. Chris Burns has now moved to Mumbai, where he spent some time under the care of renowned coach Vasu Paranjpe, to whom Sivaramakrishnan introduced him. He plans to try his hand at cricket writing, as an unpaid apprentice, if need be.
Chris, Simon and Paul came to India on a mission to absorb Indian culture. They could very well have confined their efforts to studying the arts and philosophy within the confines of the classroom and the rarefied atmosphere of the classical music and dance concert circuit. Instead, they chose to go out and mix with the common people and embrace India’s greatest unifying force - cricket. They go back the richer for it, and who knows, they may one day lead a cricket revolution in their homeland.
V Ramnarayan
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