Good shot, Mouse!" comes a voice from a small crowd of spectators under an awning at the edge of a softball field in suburban Atlanta. It's a semifinal playoff between the Tropical Sports Club and North Atlanta on a hot afternoon in early October, and a Tropical player has just lofted a ball over the fence. But this is a match, not a game; the player is a batsman, not a batter, and a ball whacked over a fence is a "six," not a home run. This may be a softball diamond, but the action on the field—sorry, the pitch—is cricket.
At one end of the awning, a large West Indian woman is barbecuing jerk chicken in an oil drum. There's spicy fish soup and Red Stripe beer. Reggae booms out of the back of a van. Between "balls"—pitches, in baseball—the men talk politics and reminisce about life back on the island of Jamaica.
"Yes, Mouse!" the crowd roars again, as the same batsman sends another ball skyward. For a moment, the ball hangs motionless against the blue sky, before landing with a thump on the awning above the barbecue, just missing the jerk chicken lady. "Stop trying to put out the fire, man!" she bellows to the players as the crowd erupts in laughter.
Cricket—now played by millions of people in 92 countries ranging from the Caribbean to Europe to Africa to South Asia—was once the national game of, yes, these United States. And one of the first outdoor sports to be played on these shores. An 1844 cricket match between teams from the United States and Canada was the first international sporting event in the modern world, predating the revival of the Olympic Games by more than 50 years.
In a diary he kept between 1709 and 1712, William Byrd, owner of the Virginia plantation Westover, noted, "I rose at 6 o'clock and read a chapter in Hebrew. About 10 o'clock Dr. Blair, and Major and Captain Harrison came to see us. After I had given them a glass of sack we played cricket. I ate boiled beef for my dinner. Then we played at shooting with arrows...and went to cricket again till dark."
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