Cricket a common ground for immigrants

On Sundays, Jamaica native Errol Eccles goes to church, comes home to change into his spiffy whites, and heads off to play a cricket match for the next seven hours. It is this 46-year-old's true passion.

Cricket, that is.

"What the West Indian teams are working on here is more than just cricket — we're trying to leave a legacy of who we are in Houston," said a philosophical Eccles, a senior gas and oil refinery consultant and a Houston West Indies Cricket player on his days off. "We're making our voices heard with our play."

Unless there is rain, more than 300 men who hail from Australia, India, Pakistan, South Africa and the West Indies battle it out on any given weekend in Tom Bass Regional Park, flexing their national pride.

The men — virtually all immigrants — sport the obligatory white pants and shirts, blast dizzying pitches called googlies and top spinners to a batsman who runs between just two bases. To the untrained eye, it makes no sense at all. Yet in the last 20 years, this gentlemen's sport with very deep British colonial roots has blossomed in Houston just as Indians, Jamaicans and Pakistanis have settled here, laying down stakes, not to mention their wickets.

"The point is, there is a common culture among all these players and that is cricket," said Itty Abraham, professor of government and Asian studies at the University of Texas at Austin. "It doesn't matter where you come from."

The men make up the Houston Cricket League and its birth, rapid growth and success is intrinsically linked to H-1B visas and the influx of immigrants to this city.

"We had an influx of pretty skilled cricketers from South Africa, the West Indies, India and Pakistan," said Michael Greathead, a pioneering league member who moved to Houston in the 1980s when he opened up a copper-based alloy manufacturing business. He is from Zimbabwe. "The league is singularly due to immigration."

The numbers say it all. Census 2000 data show there were more than 15,500 West Indians in the Houston area, but in 2006 the Caribbean population grew to about 22,000. The jump was even more pronounced among Indians and Pakistanis. About 52,000 Indians and 11,000 Pakistanis were present in Houston in 2000. In 2006, there were 74,000 Indians and 16,000 Pakistanis, according to census data.

Building traditions

"Cricket for me is my childhood passion, it is like a religion in India," said Yogesh Patel, 59, who is the league's current president and who arrived in Houston in the 1970s. "Back home, I would never have gotten the flavor of the Caribbean culture, I would never have gotten a chance to play with South Africans. Here, this is all possible."

The league started back in 1986 among a group of British expats who worked for Chevron Corp., Greathead said. They played a friendly game of cricket behind St. Agnes Academy on Bellaire, he said.

In those days, there were about nine teams. Now, there are 20 clubs with various divisions that together field more than 30 teams. Everyone pays membership fees for uniforms. Each team must play 16 games, Patel said.

Legacy in jeopardy?

They outgrew St. Agnes and convinced the city to allow them to have five cricket fields in Tom Bass Regional Park in south Houston. The fields are maintained by the players, however a hot topic. The pitch, or the running strip between the two wickets, is usually patted down with a special clay for high-level international cricket matches, said Faisal Zaman, 34, of the Houston Cougars. But the players here have had to improvise they use Astro turf.

Most of the Houston Cricket League's teams are formed along ethnic and nationalistic lines. Bhakta India Cricket Club, for example, primarily consists of men with the last name "Bhakta" and they all hail from a region in India called Gujarat, said engineer Faisal Zaman, 34, who plays for the Cougars and hails from Karachi, Pakistan.

There are the Texas Olden Goldies: "We range in age from 50 to 70 years old," said M.J. Khan, 58, the Houston city councilman. "I'm one of the young guys on the team."

Age is not the only variance. The players also range in skill. Two members on the Memorial team, for example, play on the professional level for the U.S. national cricket team. They are engineer Sushil Nadkarni, 31, and accountant Niraj Shah, 25.

Locals who are following the sport fear for the league's future. Team members complain their children aren't playing the sport as much.

"All these 300 men are probably first generation and it's not going to be taken up by the next generation, it's not going to be adopted by the children," said Sharmila Rudrappa, a University of Texas sociology professor who specializes in South Asian immigration. "This cricket popularity is going to be quite dependent on new arrivals coming here all the time."

Source : http://www.chron.com/