Member-only story
Cricketphobia
An American Bigotry
I am seventeen years old. As with every Saturday in the summer, I meet my high school cricket club in Central Park to play pick-up cricket on a dusty patch of dirt and weeds near 86th St. and Central Park West. We’re a rag-tag group of semi-athletes from British, Portuguese, Jewish, Chinese, Hungarian, and South Asian heritage, but our real allegiance is to New York, where most of us were born. And we are its prime example, here in the city of endless opportunity and human flow, we’re a bunch of New York kids playing cricket.
Today, though, there is a hiccup. Some middle-aged volleyball players have set up next to the “field.” Typical New York, we think; people on top of people on top of people. It’s what makes this city so tough, but also so great.
Apparently not all New York residents feel this way.
I bowl a ball to the batsman, James, a sophomore and cricket neophyte who’s really taken to the sport I brought in as a freshman three years before. We play on the baseball team together too and he’s good. A lot of these guys are on the baseball team and they’ve adapted to cricket really well. They like both sports, enjoying the nuances of the two with mutual appreciation. For once, James misses. The tennis-ball I’ve wrapped in electrical tape skids low along the dust, and rolls right into the makeshift volleyball court ahead.
What came after that I have never forgotten but remains a haze of noise and fear. Shouting. Swearing. Epithets. Threats. All this from one short, stocky man in an American flag bandanna who clearly loved volleyball so much he was willing to scream “Fuck you” at a teenager in a park surrounded by children and families. I tried to mediate to no effect. Was it the stray ball that triggered a hurricane of fury or was it the fact that white, brown, and black kids were playing a sport he deemed foreign?
I’ll be honest, I don’t remember the man’s last words before we picked up and left completely shook, but I remember the words “terrorist” and “foreigner” being thrown around before a graceful, “fuck off with your croquet shit!”
He couldn’t even get the name right.
