?Hugh Hen­der­son

"Let there be peace on earth and let it be­gin with me"-words of the beau­ti­ful song we sing in church when we ex­change the sign of peace. If on­ly 1.3 mil­lion T&T na­tion­als could make such a pledge and keep it, can you imag­ine how won­der­ful our lives would be? We are a na­tion of huge con­tra­dic­tions-every­thing is ei­ther a fete or an an­gry con­fronta­tion. We cel­e­brate for rub­bish rea­sons and ar­gue for same, the re­sult of­ten be­ing that many of us spend over­time fete­ing or ar­gu­ing and do not do the jobs we are paid to per­form such as pro­vid­ing first class cus­tomer ser­vice. This pro­duces a third se­ri­ous cul­ture neg­a­tive, name­ly not ac­cept­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, pass­ing on the blame and not giv­ing a damn along the way.

This ar­ti­cle may not win the Pop­u­lar­i­ty Award for the week but it may be time­ly to re­flect com­ments that come to me, for ex­am­ple: (a) many peo­ple are fed-up with what they per­ceive to be the slow to stop state of na­tion­al progress un­der just about every head­ing; (b) some Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ters are "in­vis­i­ble" and seem not to suf­fer any neg­a­tive con­se­quences like los­ing their port­fo­lios; (c) na­tion­al sport­ing bod­ies ap­pear to think that Gov­ern­ment must sup­port them 100 per cent and the days of help­ing them­selves to a mean­ing­ful de­gree have dis­ap­peared; (d) too much mon­ey is spent on "pop­u­lar" rather than "in­tel­lec­tu­al" or "pro­duc­tiv­i­ty" projects; (e) T&T is a "gim­mee" so­ci­ety plain and sim­ple and get­ting worse. I have re­layed a few com­mon mes­sages-with­out the ex­ple­tives!-now let the chips fall where they may.

Sport is a proven ve­hi­cle to mo­ti­vate and build a na­tion, the lat­est ex­am­ple be­ing the pub­lic sup­port and gen­uine hap­pi­ness over T&T's crick­eters win­ning the T-20 Caribbean Cham­pi­onship last week. I agree with Dwayne Bra­vo win­ning Man of the Match in the fi­nal and Kieron Pol­lard Man of the Se­ries, but in my mind, the crit­i­cal fac­tor along the vic­to­ry path is the per­son­al char­ac­ter­is­tics and val­ue sys­tems of most in­di­vid­u­als in the team. The vast ma­jor­i­ty were brought up to be hum­ble, mod­est, hard work­ing, com­mit­ted, un­selfish, cour­te­ous, re­spect­ful and ap­pre­cia­tive of their God giv­en tal­ent which they use to please 1.3 mil­lion of us. They do what they have to do to the best of their abil­i­ty, re­flect ob­jec­tive­ly when they fail and re­joice with pride when they win. These are "tal­ents" that can­not be mea­sured, are not on sale any­where, are in­tan­gi­ble and in­vis­i­ble-you ei­ther have them in suf­fi­cient sup­ply or you do not. In essence, T&T has a "gen­tle" team; their ad­mirable "brough­tup­sy" is ap­par­ent in their team spir­it. Over the years, Daren Gan­ga's lead­er­ship style re­flect­ed most of the above qual­i­ties and his sen­si­tiv­i­ty and abil­i­ty to "read" his team-mates were worth al­most more than the runs he scored.

When De­nesh Ramdin took over the cap­tain­cy, I was con­fi­dent that his lead­er­ship would prove a good im­i­ta­tion of Daren's style and he would put his own lead­er­ship stamp on the team to con­tin­ue the run of suc­cess. Two years ago at a sum­mer camp of Daren's Foun­da­tion, I lis­tened to De­nesh and Ravi Ram­paul ad­dress the 60 crick­et and foot­ball young­sters and knew in­stinc­tive­ly that they would both be pos­i­tive in­flu­ences in a group set­ting. Their choice of words, their en­cour­ag­ing tone of voice, their abil­i­ty to em­pathize nat­u­ral­ly with the lev­el of the young au­di­ence, their will­ing­ness to use their own per­son­al back­grounds to show how they were able to suc­ceed be­yond their dreams de­spite neg­a­tives, their open ap­pre­ci­a­tion for those who had helped them and their gen­tle, sen­si­tive ap­proach to deal­ing with ques­tions from the young­sters re­al­ly im­pressed me. Since leop­ards do not change their spots, my guess is that both guys bring this same ma­ture, sen­si­tive ap­proach and at­ti­tude to the na­tion­al team's dress­ing room.

When I add what I know of the be­hav­iour­al pat­terns and per­son­al back­grounds of Adri­an Barath, Dar­ren Bra­vo, Justin Guillen, Sher­win Gan­ga, Sunil Nar­ine and Kevon Coop­er to name some, T&T is in good hands for the next year at least. Com­pare the above team pro­file with how Ja­maican all-rounder An­dre Rus­sell is re­port­ed to have de­scribed the lack of sup­port and co­op­er­a­tion among the Ja­maica team (with the ever-sullen Mar­lon Samuels prob­a­bly a good ex­am­ple) which gave T&T an im­me­di­ate ad­van­tage be­fore the first ball was bowled. For good mea­sure, add what An­tho­ny Mar­tin thought of the Lee­wards team he had the mis­for­tune to cap­tain. About two min­utes af­ter the 2010 World Cup end­ed, I sug­gest­ed as po­lite­ly as I could that ma­jor plans for qual­i­fy­ing for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil be scrapped and the ma­jor fo­cus should be on de­vel­op­ing the team for 2018.

One did not have to be a ge­nius to bet heav­i­ly on T&T not qual­i­fy­ing for 2014.

In the same vein, when I heard of the Fin­land team com­ing here to play two games, I ex­pressed the opin­ion to any­one who would lis­ten, that both games should be against the Un­der-23 for de­vel­op­men­tal rea­sons since the so-called "se­nior" team had nowhere to go-at least in my opin­ion. I like to think that by beat­ing the Finns 1-0, the Un­der-23's are now ex­tra- mo­ti­vat­ed and will put more ef­fort and com­mit­ment in­to their prac­tice ses­sions to achieve fur­ther suc­cess and per­son­al goals. In­ci­den­tal­ly, I watched a re­cent foot­ball in­ter­view with Clint Mar­celle, founder of CM Acad­e­my and to me he made a lot of sense. Did any lo­cal foot­ball "jefe" hap­pen to lis­ten to Clint's in­ter­view on Chan­nel 14? It is worth look­ing at. Last Sat­ur­day at races I had a sur­prise vis­it from Dr. Rolph de Gannes who was a well-known vet "down south" in the 50s and 60s be­fore ac­cept­ing the of­fer to be Head Vet at the fa­mous Wind­fields Farm in Cana­da, home of the great North­ern Dancer. Rolph was the guest speak­er at the 2010 Jet­sam Awards func­tion, and his son Greg-al­so a vet-has made many vis­its to as­sist lo­cal vets at San­ta Rosa Park.

When my fam­i­ly moved to Cana­da in 1973, we paid sev­er­al vis­its to Wind­fields and en­joyed the hos­pi­tal­i­ty of Rolph and his love­ly wife Sheila. Un­for­tu­nate­ly I nev­er ac­tu­al­ly saw North­ern Dancer as he had al­ready been moved to Wind­fields in Mary­land, but I did pat the head of his dam Na­tal­ma, and al­so ad­mired an­oth­er top stal­lion, Vice Re­gent. Imag­ine the plea­sure of liv­ing at im­pec­ca­bly man­i­cured Wind­fields, sit­ting on your pa­tio and watch­ing count­less ex­pen­sive year­lings gal­lop­ing up and down the pas­tures in front of you. That is "hap­pi­ness" in my eyes! Rolph looks very well and still gets up at 5 am to help Greg in his prac­tice. I think they de­liv­er more than 100 foals a year at the var­i­ous farms. Rafa Nadal beat Roger Fed­er­er in a very good but not quite su­perb four set semi­fi­nal at Aus­tralia Open. It was yet an­oth­er con­test be­tween the street-fight­er and the bal­let dancer. Nadal's post match in­ter­view il­lus­trat­ed "class" at it's best and demon­strat­ed how to win with grace and charm. Fed­er­er showed how to lose with dig­ni­ty. Sev­er­al times I have sug­gest­ed that all our na­tion­al teams should be forced to watch any match played by Nadal to ap­pre­ci­ate what is meant by "giv­ing your all every minute of a game" and "play­ing each point with 100 per cent en­er­gy, in­ten­si­ty, pride and fight." Thanks Rafa for yet an­oth­er great ex­am­ple of how to con­duct your­self both on and off the court.