The Test cricket back at Kensington this Holy Week(end) should bring to mind the devilish treatment we West Indians meted out to the greatest batsman we ever produced, and make us hang our collective head in shame; not even Kieron "Six Machine" Pollard hits a knee-high, full toss less savagely than the West Indies smashed Brian Lara for most of his career. But if there is a single day that stands in infamy in West Indian cricket history, it is the day Brian Lara was forced to announce his retirement, during the 2007 Cricket World Cup we hosted. What could have been our best moment we contrived to render as our worst. Even the final umpiring debacle that had Sri Lanka and Australia come out for three unnecessary overs groping in the dark was a joke, compared to our deliberate, ugly rejection of our own beauty, as represented by BC Lara. Like everybody else in the press box at the time, I had heard the rumours. I had even been told that one high-level functionary of the West Indies Cricket Board who was instrumental in Lara's removal had achieved his position by declaring, at his formal job interview, "Everything wrong with West Indian cricket in two words: 'Brian Lara'." (Had he been given three words, he surely would have said, "Brian Firetrucking Lara.")
Last month, Sachin Tendulkar scored his 100th first class century. Sachin has passed most of Brian's records because, unlike Brian, his country did not chuck him out ten years early. And, had Brian continued batting, Sachin would have found it close to impossible to break his records, because Brian would have kept on extending them.
Indeed, with the seven more years he's had than Brian, Sachin has not threatened the three records Brian Lara will hold until long after everyone reading this is dead: the highest single-innings Test and first class scores, and the amassing of first class century-scores in the single, double, treble, quadruple and quintuple figures. Any other cricketing nation would have fallen over themselves to keep a talent like Lara available to us for as long as possible; we conspired to force him to fall on his own sword. We buried the Prince of Port-of-Spain in a pauper's grave at Kensington. But he wasn't the first person to achieve excellence that the rest of us, shown up in our mediocrity, felt compelled to punish; he wasn't even the first firetrucking cricketer. Pick a great name out of a WI cricket cap-Viv, Dessie, even Sir Gary-and you'll find almost as many illustrations of the great being forced to bend knee and touch forelock before the petty. It won't stop with Chris Gayle, either (though nothing I say here is meant to excuse a betrayal of ourselves, even of our crap cricket board; I'd love to see Chris back-but he'd have to do the right thing, first). What the life-and unnecessary cricketing murder-of Brian Lara shows is how much we hate ourselves in these sad, broken parts. In these former slave societies, the one thing we cannot abide is the free individual. And Brian Lara was nothing if not a free individual. In his freedom, and, worse, in his excellence, or his constant striving for it, he revealed us to ourselves; and we could not stand that. Now I'm not defending any lapse in discipline Brian Lara may have shown, or any excesses properly (or even improperly) attributable to youth or unlearned eagerness. I'm not making excuses for Brian Lara personally. (Nor do I think such a thing even arises: at the level at which Brian Lara operated-that of the hugely gifted artist, responsible only to his gift-there is no harsher critic than the individual himself: Brian knew exactly when he let himself, us and cricket down; and he paid a higher price than most of us ever will for his own personal growth, and for the right to continue toiling in the vineyard that he chose.)
Our treatment of Brian Lara reveals us as a people so insecure about ourselves, as individuals, and as a nation (the West Indies, the only nation we could possibly constitute) that we would destroy the greatest manifestation of our beauty rather than seek to lift ourselves out of the mire and aspire to imitate it. Anywhere else in the world, Brian Lara would have been a solution; in the West Indies, we made him the cause of all our problems. Everyone from New Zealand to Canada must have looked on with a mixture of disbelief, puzzlement and appreciation; if Jamaica had forced Bob Marley out of the recording studio, it could not have been as harmful or as hurtful to us, as a people. We were more comfortable with an old, accustomed ugliness than a possible new beauty.
The fault was ours. But the punishment was his. On Easter weekend, when Christians celebrate what they take to be the resurrection, a couple thousand years ago, of a Jewish carpenter they apparently genuinely believe to be the manifestation of God, it might be helpful to think about the hellish treatment we gave to our own cricketing Messiah. And it might be especially helpful to confess that, when we were done crucifying him, Brian Lara never rose again; we did a better job on Brian than the Romans did on Jesus. If Christ was God's scapegoat, Lara was ours. We never believed in Brian Lara because, to do so we would have had to believe in ourselves. And, to do that, we would have had to love ourselves; easier, by far, to hate one man than love six million. Even if Brian Lara had risen from the cricketing dead, we never would have known. There was never going to be a West Indian willing to roll away the boulder from Brian Lara's grave. Because we were all part of the avalanche of pebbles that buried him.
BC Pires is on his hands and knees-inspecting the wicket. E-mail your boxes to him at bc@caribsurf.com. A portion of this column appeared before.