Sir Hilary Beckles has insisted that he “admires” Chris Gayle as a cricketer and his reference to the former West Indies Test captain as a “don” was a reflection of public perception – not his personal view.
Under fire from the West Indies Players Association (WIPA) for remarks contained in a public lecture he gave in St Kitts earlier this week, the principal of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies said his discourse had been “unethically edited and its contents manipulated to achieve an unpleasant special purpose”.
At the lecture delivered at the University of the West Indies in St. Kitts, Sir Hilary said he had presented “an assessment of the public images that surround some of our former captains from Sir Frank Worrell to present.
“I stated clearly that ‘these are the images before us’. At no time did I say that I believe these images to be true,” Sir Hilary said in a statement issued yesterday.
“I insisted, however, as a social scientist that I have a duty to analyze these images, how they are constructed and how society reacts to them.
“I know that Sir Garry Sobers is not a king, Sir Vivian Richards a general, Brian Lara a prince or Chris Gayle a don because they are all fine professional cricketers whom I admire, but these metaphoric images are based on public observations and perception.”
As such, he said the aim of his references were to assess the impact of these images upon each generation.
“I consider Chris Gayle an amazing cricketer, whom I personally celebrate, but my lecture mentioned the public image that surrounds his leadership.”
He concluded: “It saddens me that this manipulation and abuse of my academic work to meet ends clearly not intended are obviously designed to distract from the task at hand – that is, diagnosing the crisis in West Indies cricket and developing policies to fix it; also, seeking to assess how we as West Indians will treat with the issue of our cricketers rejecting the West Indies cricket team.”
Although not making any direct reference to WIPA, Sir Hilary’s statement came in the wake of a stern rebuke by the Players Association, which has called for his resignation or expulsion as a director of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) for what it deemed as unfair references relating to the former West Indies captain.
In a letter to the WICB’s board of directors, WIPA recommended that Sir Hilary should have no further dealings with West Indies cricket, saying that the “organization and its members would find it difficult to have any confidence in a person who appears blatantly prejudiced against some of the players”. (CG)