Hilaire - a cricketing Charles Atlas
In his column for Nation News , Tony Cozier looks back at Ernest Hilaire's three-year stint as CEO of the West Indies Cricket Board, and describes him as a man who never stopped short of taking painful and brutal decisions to repair the crisis in
Kanishkaa Balachandran
25-Feb-2013
In his column for Nation News, Tony Cozier looks back at Ernest Hilaire's three-year stint as CEO of the West Indies Cricket Board, and describes him as a man who never stopped short of taking painful and brutal decisions to repair the crisis in West Indies cricket. The contracts crisis and dealing with the WIPA were some of Hilaire's biggest challenges.
How Ernest Hilaire saw his task when he took over as West Indies Cricket Board chief executive in October 2009 reminded me of the celebrated bodybuilder Charles Atlas’ ads in the comic books of my schooldays (yes, it was that long ago). “Let me prove I can make you a new man,” was Atlas’ catchline over sketches involving a bony nerd, at the beach with his girl, having sand kicked in his face by a muscle-bound strongman. Predictably, the next panel showed the weakling transformed into “a new man” after a quick course from Atlas’ famous instruction manual and now, as “The Hero of the Beach”, getting his own back on his tormentor.
Kanishkaa Balachandran is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo