"It was during this tournament we discovered that Warner was the fixer of things. Whenever there was a problem, Warner found a solution. He put his hands in the air to help for everything. Nothing was too much for him. When the questions were raised about the organising of the opening ceremony, Warner said he would look after it. They wanted to know about queens for the march past and outfits for them. Warner found the girls, founds sponsors for their outfits, got a place for them to dress, made sure they were there and knew what to do at the opening."
–John Alleyne, the late vice-president of the Trinidad Amateur Football Association in Zero to Hero, Jack Austin Warner.
It is clear, if you read the signals, that the UNC has no intention of selecting Jack Warner for the Chaguanas West seat to contest the upcoming by-election.It is also clear, that if you read the history, Warner has no chance of winning the seat as an independent and will join Patrick Manning, Basdeo Panday and Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj in the political cemetery.He will join the list of the politically dead but otherwise alive enough to haunt their eventual successors.
Even more than Manning, Panday or Maharaj, Warner has been so adept at myth-building, that he has created the illusion that not only can he defy the law of political gravity, that what goes up must come down, but that somehow, he has achieved incorruptibility through his delivery of unparalleled service to his constituents to make them cross party and ethnic lines. In that illusion, he has made the fatal mistake of "getting high off his own supply," as the results of the Chaguanas by-election are likely to prove.
Contrary to the myth, Warner has not been the most successful leader of T&T football, although one must concede that his tenure in football has been characterised by his personal success at the very expense of football and footballers.
In fact, when Warner took over T&T football on November 4, 1973, this country was the top footballing nation in the North and Central American region and was three weeks away from being cheated out of a place in the 1974 World Cup, at a time when Concacaf was entitled to a single World Cup spot in a 24-team final.
When, under Warner, T&T did eventually qualify for the World Cup final, it was through a half-chance created by Warner's advocacy for three-and-a-half spots for Concacaf in a 32-team final, with this country getting through as the fourth-strongest team in arguably one of the weakest federations.Of course, Warner is entitled to revisit history.
"You would remember that prior to 1996 Caribbean football teams were the butt of international ridicule. No one took us seriously. They laughed at us. They humiliated us on and off the field. Our teams were beaten 6-nil, 4-nil and 12-nil by Central American and North American countries," Warner said in his Pierre Road, Felicity address as he recalled his football career and the factors which led him to seek a US$6 million loan from FIFA for "CFU and Jack Warner."
The truth is, at the end of Warner's tenure, the T&T Football Federation was more bankrupt than he met it, despite it having made him a US-dollar multi-millionaire.T&T was no butt of international ridicule when Warner took over in November 1973.
This country had gone from defeating "a strong Argentina 1-0, drew with Mexico, and came from two goals down to beat Columbia 5-3," in the 1967 Pan American games tournament, before emerging as the top Concacaf football power heading into the 1974 World Cup. It took us 32 years, and seven failed attempts, to reach the point we were back in 1973.
At the end of the Warner era, almost 40 years later, T&T had been reduced to being beaten by Bermuda and was eliminated by Guyana in the preliminary stages of the 2014 World Cup.Under Eric James, the younger brother of CLR, on whose career Warner's was patterned, the pre-Warner football era was dominated by a benevolent dictatorship that set the course for Warner's approach to football and politics.
James, who unlike Warner, had left national politics to his brother, had risen to Concacaf vice-president and had made local football self-financing until he, like Warner, began to commingle his personal funds with those of the association. His demise came when he began to over-estimate his own indispensability.This is not to deny Warner's discipline, his aptitude for hard work and his ability to market himself, which is his true gift.
Just as James cultivated pliant journalists and banned hostile media from covering football, Warner has developed over the years his own media corps to chronicle his rise and disguise the issues which should have led, many years ago, to his downfall.
Warner, in Valentino Singh's biography Zero to Hero, is quoted as telling the meeting when James threatened to resign from football: "If today or tomorrow, Mr Eric James dies, are we going to fold up as an organisation or will we put our heads together and run the tournament?"One suspects the UNC is asking the same question about Warner and the government. And coming to the same answers he did about James.
Maxie Cuffie runs a media consultancy, Integrated Media Company Ltd, is an economics graduate of the UWI and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School as a Mason Fellow in Public Policy and Management.