Trinidad and Tobago Bulletin Board
Homepage | Weblog | Trinbago Pan | Trinicenter | TriniView | Photo Gallery | Forums

View Trinidad and TobagoTriniSoca.comTriniView.comTrinbagoPan.com

Trinidad and Tobago News Forum

Growing in grace

by Keith Smith www.trinidadexpress.com

I have never allowed myself to be beguiled by the depiction of Dwight Yorke in the British press. All the reports about his alleged nightly cavorting with white women I always considered to be geared towards selling tabloids to the British public who, for whatever reason, racial in some pockets I am sure, found Dwight's supposed lifestyle to be grist for the gossip mill.

The truth is all of this was none of my business and, as a matter of fact, I didn't think Alex Ferguson should have made it his business either unless Dwight's late-night doings led to him turning up late for practice or regularly slinging shots overbar from 10 metres out, rum in the Tobagonian's head affecting his sense of range.

What I am getting at here is the sense that I have that there are elements among the international press who are not, necessarily, on the side of our men abroad, their own xenophobia disguised by a liberal mask, all these thinly disguised anti-Lara articles, for example, telling me that something about him-his cussedness, arrogance, sheer superiority-rubbing them in the raw.

Writing about West Indian cricket I have had occasion to be critical of Lara's behaviour but, only in the sense that people are entitled to be critical of my own behaviour or anybody else's, anyone of us not only capable of doing, but likely to do, stupidness from time to time, none of us being saints and predisposed to exemplary behaviour.

I really believe that before making a judgement on Bim or Bam you have not only to bring balance, there being negatives and positives in all of us, but to have to tip the scale in favour of the person being weighed, not least when it is somebody like Yorke or Lara, these two young Trinbagonians who got up, one Monday morning, and discovered that they were going to be judged by a new order, every beer lime, every carnival wine an occasion for public comment and, indeed, censure, as if they hadn't been born into and grown up in a culture that was lime and wine self.

If that hypocrisy is home-grown there is the kind emanating from outside, as well, Lara being subject to ultra-rigorous examination as if he was not simply a cricketer, admittedly a member of the master class, but a candidate for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations, so many in the media holding on to past transgressions as if they weren't seeing before them a man sincerely trying to remake himself whatever the complexities of the personality, a lifetime spent with the likes of Sparrow and Bertie Marshall and Peter Minshall enough to tell me that talent has its own stresses, not, come to think of it, that the likes of David Rudder, Pat Bishop, Earl Lovelace, Jit Samaroo and Lloyd Best do not seem to sail through life with easy equanimity, that "seem" there signifying that I can only talk about what I seem to see, few knowing until after the fact, for example, that George Best even now would be still doing his best to kill himself and that, beset by his private demons, Diego Maradona would bloat himself almost to death on what he perceives to be the good life.

Look, I cannot claim to know the mind of God but I have never cottoned on to this idea of a bad-john god just waiting to strike down hapless humans for sinful weaknesses, particularly the so-called sins of the flesh, not that one is not accountable, only that one gets time to redeem oneself, the real measure here being the ability to grow in grace and I don't know that we, human weaklings all, are not mandated to give our fellowmen the time and space to do as much, in the hope rather than the expectation that we will get as much from them, absolute judgements being anathema to me even as I hurl heart-felt abuse at wife killers and child molesters those acts being enough, to my mind, to put you beyond the pale of compassion.

So, as I was saying, I don't know that Lara's lifestyle should be any concern of mine unless, as he keeps proving to the contrary, nights of riotous living leads to a decline in his worth on the West Indies team. Which is a different thing to my having differences, for example, with a particular field placing or the choice of a particular bowler to bowl two of the last overs in a clutch situation, the caution always being that he is in the middle of the thing while I am lolling off, watching in my bedroom, judgement therefore having to be tempered by the fact either of not being there or of not having had to think the game though, something that Ricky Ponting, had he been less of a thoughtless man, might have considered before shooting off about record selfishness, there being something about Brian that sticks in more than one Australian's craw but that I'll crow about tomorrow.

Messages In This Thread

Growing in grace
Re: Growing in grace *LINK*
Trinidad and Tobago News

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Copyright © TrinidadandTobagoNews.com