Did the Javelin Drive a Stake Into Our Common Sense?

Sissymoriah is flummoxed about how it came to be that the 50^th anniversary celebrations of Trinidad and Tobago became wrapped around the feats and heroism of sportsmen. If this wasn't an Olympic year and Keshorn Walcott did not win that gold medal I don't know what nationals would be talking and singing about for the golden jubilee of nationhood. The hoopla around sports accomplishments in newspapers, local music, and the lips of politicians and nationals contrasts sharply with the Trinidad Guardian edition (August 31, 1962) marking the advent of independence where the top sub-head on the front cover read: "Another Schol Awarded." Back then scholarship was the most celebrated accomplishment of our land.

Pelt Sissymoriah with a cyber stone if you must but in a nation that was founded by a scholar on venerable intellectual precepts there never such over-talk about throwing, batting, running and dribbling as in the last decade. In any case, if the powers-that-be insist on instilling sports as the foundation for development they should at least make sure the list of sporting heroes is complete. Now, there is a stadium in Trinidad and Tobago that carries the name Jean Pierre Sporting Complex. Sissymoriah wants to know if Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar knows how the sporting complex got its name since it was missing from the list of sporting greats she heralded in her independence speech. Eugenia Theodosia 'Jean' Pierre, now deceased, was one of the world’s best netball players. Jean Pierre captained the Trinidad and Tobago netball squad that won the Netball World Championship in 1979, tied with Australia and New Zealand. Today Trinidad and Tobago ranks 3^rd. overall as one of the world’s “most winning” nations. Sissymoriah wants to know why in this euphoria over sports that Jean Pierre and other women in the winning squads are being ignored. Discrimination against women? Easy answer but the Prime Minister also left out  international boxing champion Claude Noel who won the World Boxing Association’s Lightweight title. Noel later self-destructed and went to jail for robbery. So the Prime Minister left out women and a bandit.

Sissymoriah feels it is time to move on from sports. Place at the center of the society, the great academicians, thinkers, cultural and political revolutionaries and innovators in science who have also occupied the “world stage.” More emphasis on Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, Elizabeth Nunez and other literary greats. Sissymoriah wants children to be told why the government banned Kwame Ture from his homeland. How about disseminating some knowledge about Henry Sylvester Williams, one of the founders of America’s Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s?  Shouldn’t the Prime Minister's list of notable citizens have included CLR James? How about Dr. Muriel Pettioni, Harlem’s mother of medicine! It is time to move to the fore of the national psyche Camille Alleyne, a modern-day Trinbagonian who is a pioneering NASA scientist. This is a model that African children need to see not Shaq, a basketballer, who with a payment in the millions dropped in T&T for a visit. Shaq went as a mentor for “projects” children but the enduring image is a photo of him lifting our Prime Minister in the air.

Speaking of millions, Sissymoriah has been trying not to comment on the obscene money that the government is pelting at a handful of calypso and soca artists, most of whom can wave and jump, perform aerobics and theatrics but can’t string 30 words together to make a verse. Good God, if money flows like water in T&T do create some academic prizes, install chairs for research and development, computers and smart boards in schools, literary prizes, and a few ARM-LENGTH funding bodies to nurture the scientific, literary and other academic sectors of society. Winning sports prizes are wonderful, particularly for tourism, and the athletes who rise to the top of their sports deserve to be commended as this takes an inordinate amount of discipline, skill and study. Glamorizing sports at the expense of all else, however, is not the foundation of a progressive society. The euphoria is fleeting at best because 33 years after a great sportswoman took center stage, her name has been forgotten even when it is enshrined on a stadium! You may say that Sissymoriah vex because she never won a single race in her lifetime but I’ll tell you one thing – Sissymoriah thinks outside the box.