In the shadow of the Washington Monument, within sight of the White House, unfamiliar, even un-American, things, are happening.
A man in fine white cottons throws a ball to another, who hits it with an oddly wide bat.
Other men, dressed in the same way, catch the ball and throw it through the air.
No, this isn’t baseball. It’s cricket, the sport that helped give birth to America’s national sport, and it’s on the march through the nation’s capital and beyond.
Cricket, one of the most popular sports in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Jamaica, is hardly on the radar screen for most Americans — unless they take a stroll in the heart of their nation’s capital, where on any given Sunday morning, they will find one team after another using the fields along the Mall and elsewhere.
”It’s growing very much, very much indeed,” said Idris Ahmad, a native Pakistani, age 50, a hotel manager from Montgomery Village in Maryland. He plays for the Priors from Philadelphia and, as an elder team member, also gives advice to his fellow team-mates.
”I have been living here for the last 30 years and I’ve never been to any American sports game,” said Ahmad.
Some of his teammates are even from India, Pakistan’s bitter political rival over the small country of Kashmir. But that hardly affects relations among the teammates.
”Yes, Pakistan and India are big rivals,” he said, laughing.
Cricket, in fact, is a British sport whose roots trace back to the 12th century. It was transplanted to all of the British colonies in the 19th and 20th century and now, ironically, has come to another former colony, the upstart United States.
In many cities like Washington, Philadelphia or New York, there are already well-established leagues of players from Commonwealth countries — most of them now, also, independent from mother Britain — and from elsewhere who share the enthusiasm for the aristocratic-looking sport.
The neatly-dressed Jamaicans, Indians, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Afghans meet on weekends to play their games, which can often last for hours.
Ahmad’s team, the Priors, played the Washington Hunters on Sunday, a regular game in the Washington Cricket League.
The players set up their field on grass just a ball’s throw away from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial along the famous Tidal Basin. Most of them were dark skinned, but an occasional European-American joins in the fray.
For the immigrants from Commonwealth-countries, a fine game of cricket can heal homesickness. The players bring their own food — and of course tea, which no cricket game goes without.
The cricket chums chat with each other, about home and other things. According to Ahmad, the immigrants pass the cricket tradition on to their children.
The sight of such a British thing happening on the Mall brought a British tourist couple to a sudden stop.
”That’s the last thing we expected to see,” the British man said.
They were astounded, on their first day of a trip to the United States, to see the most British of all sports.
Karl Atkinson (54) who grew up in Jamaica, observed, tongue-in-cheek, that in Jamaica, ”cricket is more important than women”.
The man, who served in the United States military, including in Vietnam, and has US citizenship, recalled that New York had 50 cricket teams when he lived there some years ago.
Atkinson today loves to watch the televised games of the West Indies’ team, which includes Jamaica, as it plays the other top world teams from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and Great Britain.
Suddenly a car stopped and a middle-aged man approached the playground, smiling. The athletic man introduced himself as Commander Nigel Sutton, a test pilot in the US Navy — and he seemed eager to play.
”If there is a team in Maryland, I’ll definitely play. I grew up on this stuff,” he said.
The 42-year-old, who coincidentally was also born in Jamaica, said he hasn’t played in 15 years.
His girlfriend, Mina Guli from Australia, swooned over Australia’s cricket hero, Steve Waugh, and instantly sparked a discussion about cricket stars around the world.
For an outsider, there was no chance to follow the gist. – Sapa-DPA