Clyde Walcott

Book excerpt: An essential biography of a cricketing great, exploring his achievements as a player, manager and political activist. This ground-breaking biography of Sir Clyde Walcott explores the extraordinary life and achievements of a man who was both an important activist and one of the greatest cricketers of all time. In the 1950s Walcott was part of the legendary ‘three Ws’ batting triumvirate with Everton Weekes and Frank Worrell that helped give West Indies cricket a new identity distinct from its colonial past. After test cricket he became a prominent administrator and advocate of Black consciousness, managing the great West Indies teams that dominated the sport in the 1980s. A vocal supporter of using cricket to apply pressure to the South African apartheid regime, in 1992 he became chairman of the International Cricket Council – the first Black man in that influential role. Shining a light on Walcott’s largely ignored part in effecting change through the vehicle of cricket, this book also shows how he contributed to dramatic social transformation in Guyana as cricket and social organiser for the country’s sugar estates from 1954 to 1970, bringing about improvements in the living conditions and self-esteem of plantation workers while promoting the emergence of several world-class cricketers from a previously neglected corner of the Caribbean.