Orville Taylor | After Champs what?

What a historic year for track and field in Jamaica. And my friends from the south side of North Street can this time be forgiven for thinking that Kingston College’s victory at the ISSA/Grace Kennedy Boys and Girls Championships (Champs), is the most significant event in this category.

After all, is it not a wonderful way to celebrate 100 years of existence with singularly the achievement which is most distinguished that institution?

But no! The inaugural and innovative Grand Slam Track left the blocks on Friday, beginning three days of spectacular performances.

Snubbed by some of our premier athletes, who perhaps understandably might have had commitments, a lot of top-tiered Americans and other internationals have turned up for the occasion.

Dubbed by retired American sprinter, Justin Gatlin, as the best place for the Grand Slam to start, coming on the heels of Champs, the crowds were of course much smaller, and as thin as a ‘bleachers’ skin.

To be completely fair, nothing fills the National Stadium like Champs, and the only direction to go, therefore, when you have a maximum capacity crowd; is down.

Yet in the aftermath of champs, I have to really ask the question: “What fills the stadium for Champs?” If it is for the love of track and field; doubtless, there would be so little space inside, that NASA would become irrelevant.

Myriad green, dark blue, and purple clad fans who came to worship on the altar of this bragging rights event.

We still have not made the connection between performances at Champs and the transition into other kinds of positive outcomes. And no! This is not about performances at the senior level, because in real terms given that 70 per cent of the Jamaican population is wired genetically for speed, only a small minority will ever make it to become a world-class athlete, or to be able to get on an Olympics or World Championship team.

The challenge is, what do the percentages look like regarding students, who might have viewed athletics to not just gain upward mobility, but have a solid financial profile for the rest of their lives.

The notebooks are littered with stories of prominent high school athletes, who, after Champs, disappeared like a $100 bill in a crackhead’s hand.

THANK

Not wishing to single out and thus shame any of those, I would prefer to quickly thank some of stars from yesteryear, who create legacies and footprints, which the current generation has zero clue about.

This generation of KC supporters have no idea about who is undisputed the greatest schoolboy athlete since champs began. True, we know that the best performing athlete, who was also a top scholar, was Norman Washington Manley, then a student of Jamaica College (JC). Manley is one of our most distinguished in the line of Rhodes Scholars.

One would never know that right behind him, in terms of achievement as an athlete, but ahead of him as an academic, is Prof Trevor Munroe who is an active 80-year-old today, still carries evidence of being one of the outstanding Champs athletes.

Amusingly, St George’s College celebrates a century of drought, having last won Champs in 1925.

Of course, the world knows that my hero is Bertland Cameron, who in the late 1970s had some epic battles with KC’s Ian Stapleton over the 400 metres.

Our first World Champions, I am still incredulous as to why there is no statue of him and none of CARICOM’s and Jamaica’s first female gold medallist, Deon Hemmings. Still alive and active, there is no reason for them to be forgotten.

But, it is not Bert. The current KC boys need to know about Trevor ‘TC’ Campbell, who was as hard to beat as a hard-boiled egg.

In another forum or column, I will elaborate. However, TC is the only athlete to hold records and unbeaten streaks from 100 to the mile. That is legendary.

True, KC and the other top track and field schools, Calabar and JC, do not need too much of the history lessons to massage their current good feeling. However, there is simply not enough respect being paid to those who made the present possible.

If KC legends like TC and our first world beaters can be obscured; just imagine those athletes from ‘non name brand’ schools.

Imported students

This thus brings me to the contentious issue of students who are imported into schools like the big three.

A persuasive argument surrounds moving a youth to a school where he can develop. After all, one can hardly disagree that Julien Alfred relocating to Jamaica to attend St Catherine High. Clearly. It cannot be inferred that is was for her to help the school win Champs.

On the other hand, there is a solid reasoning that a Jamaican student, like a Jermaine Gonzales, would have left Tacius Golding High in the catacombs of oblivion.

Similarly, legend Usain Bolt put William Knibb High on the map… Or did he? Ask about Michael Roach, who went to Clemson University as Michael Green, Commonwealth and World indoors silver medallist.

On his legacy, stood the young Bolt. This Champs saw another William Knibb athlete win the class one 200 metres, in Sanjay Seymore, who replicated Bolt’s victory of more than two decades earlier.

There is something to be said about simply helping the students from smaller programmers to grow where they are planted. Moreover, as my Georgian colleague Lascelves ‘Muggy’ Graham often laments, sometimes an athlete student displaces a bona fide student, who needs a high school place to self-actualise.

Asafa Powell attended Charlemont High and Kishane Thompson went to Garvey Maceo High.

Thanks for Champs, but track and field is more than an occasion for men in ill-fitting shirts, like ‘trouble tek them,’ trying to brag about something that they can barely remember.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.