Measure for measure.
By: Keith Smith (Express).Speculating idly about sports as men sometimes do (am I being sexist here?) the talk turned to the greatest Trinbagonian sportsman since 1976, the cut-off year chosen simply because it was the year in which Hasely Crawford took a short cut (according to one calypsonian) to 100-metre gold in Montreal, Canada.
That, indeed, was an historic time (10.06), Trinidad and Tobago's first and only Olympic gold medal and that, qualified Crawford for being among the greatest-but the greatest? Perhaps, I should make it clear that it was not one of those rambunctious or rumbunctious Trinidadian arguments, all heat and no light, with men talking in gang and the discussion going nowhere.
No, far from it. It was a civilised chat easy on a Sunday morning only it was Wednesday night after we had heard of Ato Boldon's bagging of yet another medal, making it eight (four "Olympics'' - one silver, three bronze (one of only three men in the whole of Olympic history with four Olympic sprint medals), four "Worlds'' (making him the most medalled (sorry, English teachers, but some of these "Americanisms'' do flow trippingly from the tongue) of our surprisingly many, for such a small country, world class athletes)).
How does eight non-gold international medals, we pondered, stack up against one gold? Does that one world-beating dash stand in a class of its own, given the unexpectedness (to all, with the single exception, perhaps of then Express sports writer, Mervyn Wells) of the victory and the fact that the Olympic sprint is the blue ribbon athletic event of the whole wide world?
Or is there a bigger case to be made for consistency, medal after medal on a continuum, the Boldon boy bringing us to our collective feet not once but time and time again even if he never pulled off that one golden feat that given his other, well, lesser successes, would have ended the best ever sportsman argument right there and then-at least as far as athletics was concerned.
Because, as you'd imagine, looming large in the lavway were the cricket exploits of one Brian Charles Lara (and, yes, Steve, after years of being just plain "Brian Lara'' that "Charles'' there was, well, middled by the media to give a certain weightiness to the name in the wake of the majestic manner of the making of all those runs) and you'd think that all things considered his record run would have then and there ended the discussion as to who is the greatest Trinbagonian sportsman ever.
Except that in considering all things you'd have to consider just how many countries on the planet play cricket as against how many, well, attack athletics. Or to personalise the match-up, when Crawford and Boldon were running they were running against the best athletes culled from a far larger portion of the world than Brian whose batting was against how many really-five, six, seven, eight countries.
So just on the "maths'' alone, you'd think. Ato and Hasely would be put ahead of Brian "Charles''...Only, you'd be thinking wrong because you have to weigh a man's achievements, I think, in the company of his peers and, besides, you'd have to put in the mix, I also think, what we value (Earl Lovelace first put this notion to me) and of all sports cricket is what we value most, which means that, perhaps, just perhaps, Brian's countrymen value his batting accolades more than those gained in, say. athletics and, just to keep up with recent trends, football.
In the end, though, all this kinda speculation is kinda meaningless. I mean, who would want to diminish George Bovell's winning of our sole Olympic swim medal (against all odds again) and I don't know that, with a gun at my head, I'd be able to say that I would trade the wonder of Brian's batting for the creative wizardry I've seen from, say, "Gally'' Cummings with a football at his feet. Or De Leon. Or Steve David. Or Russell Latapy.
Or, coming to think of it, looking back past 1976, the likes of Ralph Legall who, incredibly, was a maestro of so many sports that the thought comes what would he not have been had he concentrated on just one and had he been born at a different time and, indeed, in a different place?
So we talked, as sporting men would, about all these things, the names, well, tripping from the tongue-MacDonald Bailey, Learie Constantine, Edwin Roberts, Sonny Ramadhin, Alvin Corneal, Hugh "Black Panther'' Sealey and Pat Gomez and Lincoln Phillips and Clive Burnett and Jean Mouttet (my long-standing friends, were you to meet them, would tell you I have this annoying habit of going on about goalkeepers), Manny Ramjohn, Rodney Wilkes, Andy Ganteaume, Roger Gibbon (possibly the greatest rider ever on an inadequate bike), so many sportsmen in this tiny land who made and keep making statements big and small, giving generations all this room to walk the talk and, so satisfyingly, to talk the sweetest talk.
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_opinion?id=122896340
