St Lucia in Dire Need of a Sports Culture, says Ernest Hilaire!

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]e would be the first to acknowledge he’s never been an athlete, that he played only school cricket, and never imagined himself a Gary Sobers, let alone a Daren Sammy, even in his wildest imaginings. But to hear Ernest Hilaire debating in parliament the government’s resolution to borrow from the Bank of Saint Lucia EC$32.4 million to finance its National Sports Strategy Action Plan, an untainted first-time visitor to Planet Earth might easily have formed the impression the life of the South Castries MP was on the line last Tuesday, that he would live or die depending on the received sincerity of the words he spoke.

It’s not often I find myself singing in harmony with a bird   not of my feather. Countless times have I pleaded in vain with successive governments to invest in sport, convinced as I am that it is the panacea for our deprived nation’s deadliest afflictions: violent crime, an inability to deal effectively with schoolyard conflicts, poor health habits, bullying, a debilitating lack of self-confidence, inter alia. I was still competing successfully at the highest levels of professional bodybuilding when a contestant from a largely unknown territory shook the world by becoming the first person of color to capture the Miss Universe title. Her name was Jennifer Hosten, a young and beautiful radio announcer from Grenada. The year was 1970; the venue a then particularly racist London.

Suddenly it seemed almost every magazine I picked up featured a story about the Caribbean beauty queen who would forever be remembered as the first woman to fly over the Miss Universe color bar. In New York where I resided at the time, a smiling Ms Hosten featured in TV commercials, ubiquitous street posters and news clips, nearly all of them seductive invitations to “come visit Jennifer Hosten at her Spice Island home”—or something similarly irresistible.

What a great idea, I thought. As I say, I was at the time at the top of my own game. Already I’d collected major awards, both in the UK and in the United States. I had made guest appearances in some of the world’s leading cities. I was also one of only a handful of blacks to have appeared on the covers of magazines other than Jet and Ebony. I actually made the cover of a special issue of Harpers Bazaar (wish I’d saved that one!). I was, as they say, HOTT! So when I came home on a short vacation, with Ms Hosten still on my mind, I took with me several pictures that I passed on to the day’s chairman of the St. Lucia Tourist Board for promotional purposes. Unlike Miss Universe, my offer was free!

Several years later, by which time I had returned home to set up STAR Publishing, I had reason at a press conference to put some nepotism-related questions to the tourist board chairman earlier recalled. Suffice it to say, he determined my intentions were malicious. Pressured after the press meeting to explain, he finally blurted out: “You don’t like me because I didn’t use your pictures in our promotions!” Even now, so many years later, I find it hard to believe the long deceased tourist board chairman actually imagined he’d be doing me a personal favor if he used my pictures as Jennifer Hosten’s had been used by her island’s demonstrably not so petty tourism promoters. But I learned a lot from the recalled outburst, including that there’s a price to be paid for placing insecure square pegs in important positions. Thank goodness that since then some things have changed in Saint Lucia . . . albeit not all that much, as Ernest Hilaire recently underscored.

I will, for the purposes of this article, stay away from whatever politics may have framed his comments on the state of local sports. There’ll be time enough to consider what he said about consultants, suspect contracts and the spending of funds relative to last Tuesday’s NSSAP resolution—much of it colored to suit his party’s red agenda. Ah, but there can be no denying the Castries South MP’s confirmation of how laissez-faire has been the official attitude to sports, going back years. Hansard reveals the shocking number of MPs that during parliamentary sessions sought to convince young voters that they cared about “the development of sports in our country.” At every opportunity they cited sports grounds, changing rooms and lighting, either in need of urgent repair or, depending on the political season, recently repaired.

On Tuesday, with elections still in the distant uncertain future, Hilaire dug deep into the red meat of the matter at hand. He hinted that when it comes to sports at our schools little had changed over the years, that almost nothing had been done to encourage kids to devote more time to sporting activities than they do to, say, Internet porn. Or the Kardashians, which some might say is the same!

He went where few local parliamentarians had gone before, officially confirming that Saint Lucia does not have a sports culture. In our political environment it was a bold statement, and not only because it pointed accusatory fingers at successive administrations—including those led by Kenny Anthony, who had been prime minister for fifteen years. At the risk of being heckled, Hilaire reminded his colleagues that he had been a moving force in the establishment of the Beausejour Cricket Grounds (renamed for Daren Sammy) and a Cricket World Cup director. The unstated suggestion was that he, unlike others at the horse-shoe table, was speaking from experience. By his telling in parliament, he has always had “a passion for youth and for sports and would have difficulty voting against anything likely to advance local sport.”

He suggested on Tuesday that a government MP had by his own words undervalued the importance of community playing fields. While Soufriere deserved a “mini-stadium,” Hilaire admitted, “the small fields throughout the country should not be abandoned.” He acknowledged that today’s young folk are disinclined to undertake long distances to a playing field with so many distractions at their fingertips.   Pointless expecting young Ciceron residents to take a bus to the Vigie playing field or Mindoo Phillip Park, he said—unless your live bait is Buju Banton. Hilaire also reminded fellow MPs that sports had become gender neutral. No longer was there such a thing as women’s sport. Everyone now played the same games, regardless of gender!

“What is the objective of sports in our country?” he asked. “Is it to produce elite athletes capable of winning world medals and world championships? Or do we simply want to encourage healthy lifestyles? Do we have a plan? If we’re going to spend $30 million dollars on sports, what are we expecting from our investment? It’s fine to have programs, but to what avail? I believe one of our biggest hindrances in Saint Lucia is the absence of a sports culture!”

He said he’d had the honor to work in sports throughout the region, and had experienced firsthand the public reaction to sports in our sister territories. He said Saint Lucia’s sports culture is “very under-developed”—an understatement. We need to work hard at developing one, he said. “We should start with the matter of participation. We have to get every child in every school in Saint Lucia to participate in sports, unless he or she has a certifiable reason not to. We have to provide them with incentives, not only for competition purposes but also for the sake of their health.” He revisited his time as a permanent secretary for youth and sports, “when we had our sporting school finals and we’d look around the field and ask: ‘Where are the parents? Who’s there for football, netball and so on?’ We must create a sports culture and we should begin with participation.”

Just when I thought he’d bypassed the heart of the problem, he said: “We need to make sports exciting to the kids at school. Not so long ago everyone on our women’s cricket team was offered scholarships to study overseas . . . the easiest way to earn scholarships is through sport.” He was hinting at the possible contributions sports can deliver to our tourism coffers, when he came to the end of his allotted time. Long after he had taken his seat I was tossing around in my head the fact that sports had taken my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger from Nowheresville, Austria to Hollywood and the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento. And not as a visitor. Sports had made world famous a shy young Babonneau resident named Lavern Spencer. Let’s not even begin with the Daren Sammy story . . . Before him there was the   kid from Barbados who had batted and bowled his way to a knighthood at the hand of the Queen of England: Sir Garfield Sobers.

Speaking for myself, sport afforded me the opportunity to accomplish every dream I’d ever dreamed. And yes, that includes exchanging a few bon mots with Her Majesty. I quite likely would not be a writer today (a nightmarish notion!) had I never laid back on a certain Laborie beach fantasizing at age ten about being Mr. Universe! Pointless denying it, on Tuesday Ernest Hilaire triggered a sensitive spot in my memory box. Hopefully the words he spoke on the occasion will have similar impact on his House colleagues, also misnamed “our decision makers,” and on . . .I hesitate to mention parents and their offspring, knowing as I do that no kid cares anymore what today passes for parliamentary debate. Not even on the presumed special days when they’ve been allowed to skip classes so as to serve as a captive audience for politicians carrying on like, well, politicians!