A Caribbean man to the end
Any astute fan who listened to Tony Cozier back in the good old days of radio cricket commentary knows he transcended the game that defined his beloved West Indies.
Between deliveries, Cozier offered tidbits of Caribbean culture which included his years living in Trinidad and listening to the commentary of calypso legend Lord Kitchener.
Cozier, who died Wednesday at age 75 in his native Barbados, was the quintessential Caribbean man. He made no apology for hailing the region’s giants: CL R James, VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Bob Marley, Mighty Sparrow.
In the 1990s when the West Indies Cricket Board named Trinidadian David Rudder’s Rally Round The West Indies as the regional team’s official song, Cozier was among the first to endorse the move.
Prior, cricket fans associated the Windies with Soul Limbo, a song by American soul band Booker T And The MGs.
Rudder told the Sunday Observer that he and Cozier had a passion for all things West Indian.
“We shared the very same fears, anxiety and still everlasting hope for these islands that could still throw up a Lara, and this game that still defines us,” said Rudder. “I believe that we both understood the symbiosis between the game and the music. George Headley and Kitchener, Garfield Sobers and Sparrow, and so on. We lamented the decline in our society and its grand metaphor, cricket.”
Tony Cozier’s father, Jimmy, was also a journalist; he reported on the historic 1950 West Indies tour of England. The Windies beat their ‘colonial masters’ for the first time in that country, a feat immortalised by Kitchener and his compatriot Lord Beginner in the song Victory Calypso.
Tony Cozier witnessed just about every victory during the West Indies’ glory years of the 1980s. He also saw their precipitous decline during the last 15 years.
There was also a cultural transformation. The party vibe of soca and dancehall replaced the social commentary of calypso and reggae. West Indians favour the frenzy of T20 than traditional Test cricket.
Never averse to change, Tony Cozier rolled with the changes. Once it had a Caribbean flavour, he was happy.
