Of course. The party would be attended by a raucous collection of Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Brits, Australians and Zimbabweans. Yet while it was taking place in America, no Americans would be there–not because of any ethnic or national discrimination or Iraq war pique. No, call it willful ignorance. Americans have about as much use for cricket as Eskimos for sun hats.
If ever America gets around to deciding on an official national sport, you can be pretty sure it won’t be cricket. Most Americans appear to believe that the term applies to either a noisy insect or a brand of cigarette lighter. So the fact that elsewhere in the civilized world grown men dress up like poor relations of the Great Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching their bats invariably mystifies my American friends. And the notion that anyone would watch a game that could take five days and still not ensure a result provokes widespread disbelief. “You mean people actually pay to watch this?” exclaimed one American I tried to interest in the game. “It’s about as exciting as watching paint dry!”
I sighed, much as a chess player might when encountering someone who considers checkers to be the best board game there is. Ever since Abner Doubleday, in the mid-19th century, introduced a simplified version of the elemental sport in which bat contends with ball, Americans have been lost to the more refined challenges–and pleasures–of cricket. Baseball is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus. The basic idea may be the same, but the former is easier, quicker, more straightforward–and requires a much shorter attention span.
In a concession to the pace of life in our increasingly Americanized world, one-day cricket was born in the 1970s. Yet while the World Cup features one-day games rather than five-day “test matches,” that hasn’t made it any more popular in the United States. To be a cricket fan in America while the World Cup is going on is akin to being a wine enthusiast marooned at a tee-totalers’ convention the day the Beaujolais Nouveau is uncorked. Sitting in New York, you could as well be in Timbuktu for all the awareness people around you have of what’s happening. A billion people may be on tenterhooks around the world for the results of each match, but the august New York Times, which likes to think of itself as a world-class newspaper, doesn’t even report the scores.
In earlier days, cricket fans in the United States built their schedules around trying to catch the static-ridden numbers squawked on the BBC World Service twice a day, though the erratic quality of the short-wave reception meant that you were sometimes more frustrated after hearing the broadcasts. Today there’s the Internet–and more. Though none of the 103 channels on my Manhattan cable-TV service offers a glimpse of cricket, suburbanites with satellite dishes can buy a World Cup package hawked by Indian-American television entrepreneurs. And the striking increase in the number of immigrants here from the South Asian Subcontinent has prompted a unique phenomenon–fringe movie theaters normally de-voted to Bollywood blockbusters are screening World Cup cricket matches instead. The atmosphere during an India-Pakistan game, a habitue of previous screenings tells me, can be compared only to that in a Brazil-Argentina World Cup football encounter. Despite soundproofing, the fans’ hollers can be heard in the street.
So the cricketing cause may not be hopeless in America. Just as the growth in the Hispanic population made soccer a mainstream sport, the enthusiasm of South Asians and West Indians might yet spill over to their American neighbors. I once persuaded an American vice consul from the U.S. Embassy in Singapore to join a game of cricket there. After half an hour’s instruction with the aid of a video of cricket highlights, he coped tolerably, though he kept dropping his bat after each swing and racing off to parts unknown. He was terrific in the field, though, once taking a steepling catch and shrugging off the congratulations. “I dunno what the fuss is about,” he said. “It was just a fly ball.”
One can always find an American analogy for even the most noble of sporting pursuits. “Why,” I suggested to a Yankee friend, “cricket’s just another case of hit and run.” “Sure,” he replied. “And there’s a law against that.”
