Commonwealth of Cricket

EL RIO —  Every Sunday from April to October, 22 men in white flannel gather on a manicured strip of turf in the unlikely setting of El Rio High School to play a sport older than basketball, more mannered than baseball and harder to understand than British politics.

The sport is cricket, a bat and ball contest similar to baseball but with a long history and hallowed tradition that, to its adherents, transcends its status as a mere game.

With every crack of a ball against a willow bat, a hardy band of mainly British Commonwealth expatriates affirm their allegiance to a contest they are determined to preserve.

This is the last bastion of cricket in Ventura County, an outpost of the British Empire resisting an American culture that threatens to obliterate what the game’s devotees see as more than an anachronism.

“In Ventura County, we’re just hanging on,” acknowledges David Sentance, president of the county’s sole cricket team and marketing director for the USA Cricket Assn.

“We’re fighting prejudice all the time, really,” he adds. “Unless Americans play the sport, it’s not a sport.”

But that doesn’t stop the Victoria Cricket Club, which, on a warm October day, takes the field, or pitch, against Garden Grove-based British & Dominion Cricket Club.

The visitors, also mostly ex-pats, pile up the runs, presenting a daunting task to the home team. But the local cricketers are accustomed to challenges, not the least of which is explaining the complicated sport to any Americans who wander by, whose idea of sporting action is an explosion of home runs sandwiched between commercial breaks.

“You do run into the nationalistic thing about baseball,” Sentance said. “They don’t like that cricket should even be mentioned in the same breath. . . . When you talk to Americans about the cricket origins of baseball, they’re totally stunned.”

Common Roots

Baseball, despite its long tradition in the former colonies, is what the British would call a mere whippersnapper of a game compared to a sport that has more sticky wickets, googlies and other arcane jargon than you can throw a screwball at.

Both sports have common roots reaching back more than a century, said Sentance, a historian trained at Edinburgh University in Scotland and UCLA who is seeking a publisher for a book on the history of cricket in the U.S.

In fact, baseball evolved from teams originally founded to play cricket. The object in both games is to score runs during each team’s inning, although players in cricket run between two bases, or wickets, compared with baseball’s four.

Both cricket and baseball involve a hardball hurled, or bowled, at a bat-wielding player. In cricket, the bowler tries to throw the ball at the wicket, which consists of three 28-inch high wooden sticks (called stumps) with two 4 1/2-inch sticks (bails) connecting them. While in baseball the batter is out after three missed swings, in cricket the batsman can swing and miss repeatedly so long as the bowler does not hit the wicket.

*

Runs are scored in a similar manner to baseball. Six runs can be scored at a time if the batsman smashes a ball on the fly over a line 90 yards away from the pitch. As in baseball, batters are out if the ball is caught before it hits the ground. In cricket, there are 10 outs per inning, rather than the three in baseball.

Although baseball is usually confined to nine innings, a cricket game can last all day, or even five or six in the case of games between nations, known as Test matches.

“For Americans, if they think baseball is boring at 2 1/2 hours, they’ll never get this,” said Tom Van Dyke, 42, one of the few Americans on the Ventura County club, named after a Victoria Avenue pub where players once hung out and downed pints after matches. He discovered cricket four years ago while channel-surfing on his satellite dish.

“There’s no clock. It’s so easy to get excited and then you’re out. You can bat all day or you can bat one ball. But if you play it with love, everything good happens,” he said.

Game of Concentration

Indeed, cricket proponents see the measured sport as a test of mental discipline, one reason they say it is popular among white-collar workers.

“If you can concentrate for three hours [at bat] when everybody is trying to take a shot at you, it’s the same kind of concentration that you need to be a computer programmer,” Sentance said.

Despite cricket’s staid reputation, the sport is not for the timid, contend its fans.

Whereas baseball players get upset when a pitcher beans them, in cricket, a fast bowler often intentionally tries to hit the pad-protected legs of a cricket player. An LBW (leg before wicket, in which the ball strikes the leg pad of the batsman) is a legitimate method of getting an out in cricket.

For baseball lover Van Dyke, cricket takes the nuances of America’s favorite pastime to a higher level.

“It’s even more subtle--there’s a flow to the game and all of a sudden it starts making sense,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever play [baseball] again. I love this much better.”

To avid devotees, cricket is almost as much an expression of a fading moral code as a game. The vulgarity of tobacco-spitting baseball players and bellicose coaches who take umpires to task with epithets is just, well, not cricket.

Cricket includes regular tea breaks, and a sense of decorum and sportsmanship is emphasized. A player who is bowled out in cricket is expected to walk away without awaiting the umpire’s call.

*

“It’s an art form,” said 73-year-old Clifford Severn, a Newbury Park resident who has played cricket in Southern California since he arrived in 1933 from his native London. “The spirit of cricket is that, first of all, you respect the other person. . . . It teaches you to be a gentleman and gentlewoman. It’s one of the nicer things in life.”

In Ventura County, it is also one of the rarer things.

Severn, who almost single-handedly founded the game in Ventura County when he moved from Los Angeles in 1967, still tends a now-unused Camarillo cricket field, in the hope it will be played on again.

A Bermuda grass pitch that cost $2,000 to install at a Ventura middle school, and which was proposed as a site earlier this year for a major international competition that never occurred, is being trampled by soccer players.

Further undermining cricket’s tenuous foothold in the county, only a handful of the club’s players actually reside in the area. The rest, lured by coastal breezes, smogless skies and a loyalty to the local games, drive up to 200 miles to take part.

*

“Loyalty is sort of important,” said George Charnock, a Valencia endocrinologist who emigrated from Liverpool in 1967. “It’s one of the things that’s missing from life. . . . We feel we’re Victoria cricket players and we want to keep it that way.”

The players are from almost a dozen countries that were part of the British Empire.

They include Dillon Griffith, a 66-year-old wicketkeeper (equivalent to a catcher in baseball) who grew up playing cricket between coconut palms on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. He found a home with the Victoria club when his previous team deemed him too old to play after 27 years.

There’s Wasim Mirza, 38, a chain-smoking cardiologist from West Los Angeles and an accomplished batsman who once played for the Pakistan under-21 team.

And there is computer systems consultant Glen Green, 33, originally from Perth, Australia, and a Camarillo resident for two months, who was house-hunting when he stumbled across the local cricket team holding a practice.

Many immigrants are pleasantly taken aback to discover a cultural touchstone in the land of Mickey Mouse and Mickey Mantle.

“I didn’t expect to play cricket in America,” said 27-year-old Joel Medikondu, a native of India who now lives in Ventura. “I was very excited when I saw Americans play cricket.”

There are an estimated 1,000 cricketers in Southern California, which because of its climate and ethnic diversity is considered the heart of the sport in this country.

*

Even Microsoft sponsors a team for its immigrant computer programmers, although no one expects the sport to ever equal its 1854 zenith, when the U.S. had about 10,000 cricket players.

But that’s not for want of trying by its die-hard followers in Ventura County.

Last year Sentance organized a team consisting of seven homeless men he took on a tour of England. Disney just purchased the film rights to the story, he said.

Severn, who remembers playing cricket as a boy at the Hollywood Cricket Club with such luminaries as the swashbuckling Errol Flynn and the erudite David Niven, makes periodic efforts to introduce the game into Ventura County schools.

Indeed, the local team hopes to try again this fall, possibly with a form of the game called Kwik Kricket that is played on asphalt using plastic bats and balls. Through renowned former professional Malcolm Nash, the Southern California Cricket Assn. has successfully brought the game to children in South-Central Los Angeles.

Any Age, Any Speed

“Cricket is one of those sports you can play at any age,” said Severn. “In my case it keeps me healthy. . . . You can play it as fast as you like and you can play it at the speed you like. It’s pretty amazing.”

Severn and other longtime cricket enthusiasts realize that the future health of the game is not dependent on its popularity among converted emigres, but American youngsters.

That is why team members proudly point to 15-year-old Oliver Baker, the team’s youngest player, who began playing the sport just a few months ago.

“You’re always active. There’s always something to do,” said Baker, who also plays baseball for Harvard-Westlake High School. “It contrasts with baseball, where you can stand around for the whole game. . . . It’s a lot more tiring than baseball, too.”

Baker played a critical role as the last batsman in the match against the Garden Grove 11. First, he blasted a four (a ball that carries beyond the 90-yard boundary, but not on the fly) to bring the Victoria team within two runs of its opponents.

*

But on the next bowl the still-exuberant Baker hit the equivalent of a fly ball that was caught--a lesson in the unforgiving nature of the sport.

“He had tears in his eyes,” Sentance said. “But he certainly knew what cricket was all about when he came out.”