Exactly what Jack Warner is proposing to do with football I have been advising Patrick Arnold to do with steelband. But Mr Arnold, for all his wholesome Tobagonianness is not as proactive as Mr Warner which, come to think of it, may account for the former being perceived as being the more wholesome of the two.
I was struck, however, by Mr Warner's assertion that "a national footballer must be found in Debe/Penal with the same ease as in San Fernando and Port of Spain", which is a coded way of saying (and why do we need codes even when we are voicing truisms?) that the national football team should boast Indos as well as Afros and, indeed "white boys" (and I (ha!) include Syrians in the line-up) to which I would add-all things being equal.
However, only some things are equal in that while there is no bar to Indos or, well, "Syros" being part of the playing football fraternity the game is not the game of choice for many in those communities (and one day, perhaps, sooner than we think we may find ourselves saying that with respect to "Afros" and cricket) for, I guess, historical, cultural and geographical reasons which is not to say that it should not be more so (as we may well find ourselves saying with respect to "Afros" and cricket given, well, the Centralisation of that game relative to the East-West Corridor).
But if we are to make the most of the maxim I first heard from the late Gerry Gomez, born and bred on the right (I almost wrote "white") side of the tracks, ie, that the first duty of any national organisation is to widen the base of representation (which showed how this man came to be looking beyond those tracks) then Mr Warner has to be supported in his drive to widen football's base of representation.
Even though I think I see where he is coming from I don't know that I cotton (ha! and double ha!) to football ever being seen as a game only for "strong, black men", this country having thrown up some strong white footballers in its time, the operative prerequisite being "strong" football, even at club level, not a game for weaklings which, given the sturdy specimens we continue to see, can hardly be a generalisation for Indos here unless, of course, you are one of those people given to puffing up your own misplaced pride by believing self-satisfying myths such as "Indians cyar wine", easily exposed as erroneous at any Aranjuez get-down, pundits at hand given (or so I imagine) to lower their gaze just as any priest similarly situated in Port of Spain.
Truth is, it doesn't fundamentally matter whether a national team has a racial mix or, indeed, whether it turns out to be monoethnic or not. What matters is that the team on show has to be the best possible team at the moment, the challenge being to have enduringly in place the infrastructure to win from the general population what is in truth and in fact the best possible team and that means selling the game to those parts of the population which, for whatever reason, has been traditionally content to sit on the sidelines.
I don't see how this can be but imperative when the country is as small as ours is but yet, at the same time, has all these vaunting sporting ambitions the need, past, present and future, always being to widen the pool without any ingrained notions about this particular ethnic group not being able to master that particular sport golf, nobody knowing how God (with all due deference to my humanist friends) distributes his gifts, the world's next great opera singer growing up in Calcutta for all I know.
None of this, I know, is anathema to most Trinbagonians whatever the singling out of "the white boy" in general in the secondary school soccer competitions and the "white boy" in particular on the national football team-interesting point here, one which I raised with my humanising colleague, B.C. Pires: singling out the "white boy" playing for St Anthony's (or whoever) and Birchall playing for the national team has to do with "race" but an act of racism. Well, I don't know, because it certainly is not a pejorative, Trinidad being, I have always found, a peculiar place in this respect not, mind you, that separatist voices do not continue to be heard the more they see they are losing ground.
Listen, for all my attempts at lofty observation here, let me confess that, to me, the most important thing about Mr Warner's football-spreading initiative is not its possible effect on the overall national football team, although there is undoubtedly that, but its effect on the communities, particularly the current killing fields which need to be kick-started into a new dispensation, a mix of sports, culture and native entrepreneurship being among the essentials but not whole and entire unto themselves alone, the creative mandate being to come up with collaborative "miracles", imagination boggling at the prospect of twinned communities responding to the national ethnic impulse which, I swear blind (correctly so, I hear the doubters saying), is to unite rather than to divide, whatever the indices that keep being misrepresented on either side of that very divide.
Continued tomorrow.