My identity in American cricket

People often ask me why I show up to cover cricket matches wearing a kangaroo skin Outback hat. I typically respond, “Well, I know it’s really hard to pick me out of the crowd, so I just try to make it easier for people to find me by wearing something that’s easy to identify.” The joke is that it’s easy to find me not because of the hat but because I’m almost always the only white person at the ground.

Cricket in America is a game that is extremely diverse in one sense, and not at all in another. The game is played all across the country by tens of thousands of people with South Asian and West Indian heritage. Both groups are typically underrepresented in baseball, basketball, American football and ice hockey. One of the only professional athletes of South Asian origin playing in a major professional sports league in the USA is Manny Malhotra of the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks, and he’s actually Canadian.

Conversely, in American amateur cricket, there is practically zero representation among the country’s ethnic majority. Opponents are often shocked upon seeing me stride to the crease. After the fielding side breaks their huddle at the fall of the previous wicket, I’ll hear a few players giggling to each other while blurting out some variation of, “Dekho! Dekho! Voh gora hai!” as if they’ve never seen one before. But in reality, they probably haven’t, at least not at a match in America.

As a reporter, getting to meet and interact with so many people in the South Asian and West Indian communities is enlightening. As a player, not getting many opportunities to play because of the parochial nature of these groups is downright frustrating. Occasionally though, that frustration can turn to a source of amusement for myself and my friends, both in and out of the cricket community.

In 2009, I went through a season in which I was only selected to play in four matches for my then club, which was completely comprised of Indians. In the first game I played for them, I took five wickets bowling offspin, but only managed to bowl a total of two overs in the other three games. Two months later, I got the message that I wasn’t wanted when a weekend came around in which only 10 players made themselves available, including myself, but the club captain called up two injured players and cajoled them into playing so that he wouldn’t have to pick me. I found this quite curious because when I had first appeared, the players had all seemed ecstatic that they finally had their first American-born member, even though they’d been around for about 10 years.

So in the spring of 2010, I started to search for a new club. I wrote several emails to clubs and also scanned message boards for teams looking for new players when I finally got a response. The guy who called me up said that he didn’t have any room in his team, even though his ad said he was looking for players, but that he knew someone who was in need of a few guys. He put me in touch with someone named Imran and I was invited to come to an indoor practice session.

I showed up to meet Imran, or Uncle as he was known to everyone else. He was a fairly nice guy in his 50s with absolutely no athletic talent to speak of, but was intent on organizing a team for himself. I went through the practice session with him and a few other players. He thought I was good enough to open the batting for his newly formed club and wanted me to join. I asked him what the team’s name was so I could find it on the league website and get registered. “Wolfpack,” said Imran.

I liked the sound of that. We were gonna be big, bad and ravenous on the pitch. I went home relieved that I finally had a spot locked up for the season. However, my eagerness morphed into confusion by the time I went home and logged onto the league website when I noticed there was no such team as “Wolfpack.” Ah… but there was a Wolfpak.

It was only a matter of time before I was going through déjà vu. Generally speaking, when a club is named in some way to pay homage to a group’s ancestral roots, the only people welcomed into the club come from those same roots. I knew I was probably only in the team because Imran was struggling to find 11 Pakistani guys. There was no other way to explain why I and Adrian Gordon, who was going to debut for USA in just a few weeks, were the only two non-Pakistani guys on the roster.

I played in the first two games of the season for Wolfpak. I scored 18 in the first one, good enough to be the second top-scorer as we were absolutely slaughtered. In the second match, I was gone LBW for 2 on a dubious decision. As a left-hand batsman, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the first and last time I’ll be given out facing a left-arm medium-pacer bowling around the wicket.

It allowed me to sit down for two hours, chilling with my girlfriend while hearing conversations in Urdu and Punjabi taking place around us. Toward the end of the innings, one of the players got up and made a speech, introducing me to the rest of the team.

“From now on,” he declared, “we’re all going to speak English so that we can make Peter here start to feel like a part of the group.” It only took 15 seconds after he sat down for everyone to break out into their mother tongues again. My girlfriend, whose family is of Punjabi origin, then became quite popular as the players discovered they could talk to her in Punjabi instead of talking to me in English. She couldn’t stop laughing about it on the ride home.

The next few weeks I spent on the road, including a trip to Florida to cover The Pearls Cup Twenty20 series between New Zealand and Sri Lanka. When I came back to New Jersey, I told Imran I was free to play. He said, “I’ll call you when I need you,” which turned out to be never. The gora experiment had been scrapped by the Wolfpak.