Tribute to Lloyd Best
Lloyd Best as sportsman
Dennis Pantin

Lloyd Best’ life functions can be interpreted to be all derivative of his core pre-occupations: dreamer and visionary. From this perspective Lloyd can be seen to have exploited his roles as economist, academic, lecturer, publicist and politician to give effect to this long cast of eye.

Both his core pre-occupations and functional roles deserve critical, dispassionate appraisal: a story for another day and time. There also is, of course, a private, personal Lloyd. Today, I wish to reflect on Lloyd as sportsman: a role for which he is deservedly less known for reasons I will explore below.

To state that Lloyd is a cricket fanatic would be to engage in under-statement. He proudly displays a picture from the british newspapers of the 1950s of himself first in line awaiting the opening of the gates at Lords or some other such hallowed cricket grounds for an England-West Indies test match.

It is in this context that one has to locate a cricket match organized between national Tapia and an affiliated group from Corosal in South Trinidad in the 1970s: cricket politics you may term it.

On paper, Tapia has a formidable team. In addition to Lloyd, other players included Baldwin Mootoo (later a member of the T&T and West Indies cricket boards) and Winthrop Wiltshire who at this time –and perhaps even today- routinely donned white flannels for cricket games across the country.

After nine players were pulled together the Tapia team remained two short. Two confirmed voopers, who will remain nameless, were reluctantly press-ganged to make up numbers.

Corosal won the toss, elected to bat and quickly knocked up a century. Enter Tapia. As you can imagine these Tapia cricket connoisseurs could not simply go the wicket and bat. There was a repeated show and dance of taking guard while the pitch was gently prodded with a studied care that would have put the 3 Ws to shame. Corosal’ field settings were examined with apparently seasoned eyes.

Unfortunately, this ritual was being repeated at a very quick pace as wicket after wicket fell with embarrassing speed: Lloyd as cricket fanatic/commentator did not quite translate into runs!

Soon, it was down to the pick-up final two. Without so much as a glance at the field setting - and certainly without taking any guard- they vooped and blocked Tapia out of total annihilation, though not to victory.

And then there was the time that as under-graduates students in the class of 1970 we discovered an unused table tennis board locked away in the backrooms of the Faculty of Engineering. Access required some agility since it involved climbing and glidding through several barriers.

Somehow Lloyd found out about our daily trips to take ‘a sweat’ and joined a group which included Albert Vincent, Anthony Bartholomew, Terry Farrell and, I think, Keith Smith, myself and others.

One board: many players and limited time: culturally this meant spending time waiting on the existing game to end and also trying to stay on as the winning player. Lloyd had plenty of talk and was not a bad player but the former greatly exceeded the latter!

At the end of the day the conclusion was clear: Keep your day job Lloyd: as dreamer and visionary.