In hard-fought contests over recreational space in the suburbs, a new player has begun hitting the ball out of the park–or, more to the point, whacking a “six.”
Cricket pitches, home to the quirky ballgame developed in 14th Century England, are popping up throughout Chicago’s suburbs, as south Asian immigrants bring their adopted sporting obsession to their adopted homes.
On Saturday, Hanover Park will open the region’s first cricket field equipped with lighting for night games. Glendale Heights built a cricket pitch several years ago, Hoffman Estates opened one in May, and Woodridge plans to see its first pitch bowled in 2003, giving the region a total of 10 dedicated fields.
Cricket fans and players hope the sight of men dressed in crisp white shirts and trousers, running between the wickets and tossing around terms like “googlies” will become as familiar to Americans as that stepchild of cricket, baseball. If not baseball, they hope the game will become as American as another import, soccer.
“In the next five years we want cricket on American television just like soccer,” said Atul Rai, secretary for the United States of America Cricket Association. “Soccer came up from a non-entity sport to be a mainstream sport. That’s what we want to achieve.”
Ultimately promoters like Rai envision cricket little leagues and summer camps, bringing what was once the quintessential British sport into the American mainstream.
Public officials, meanwhile, see this ultra-Anglo game as a chance to embrace the growing diversity of the suburbs.
“I’m still figuring the game out,” admitted Mike Bernard, superintendent of parks and recreation in Hanover Park. “We have a very diverse population in Hanover Park, made up of people of all different ethnicities. As part of our mission to serve residents, we’re reaching out to that part of the population.”
Indians have become the largest group of Asians in the Chicago area, according to the 2000 census. Many have settled in northwest Cook and DuPage Counties. Hanover Park now has about 2,200 Indians, but park officials say the new pitch will also serve players from neighboring villages, such as Schaumburg, which has more than 4,800 Indian immigrants; Hoffman Estates, with 3,200; and Mt. Prospect, with 3,100.
That has translated into a boom in cricket players, though the raw numbers of participants remain comparatively small.
“There’s been unbelievable growth,” said Tariq Ahmad, president of the Midwest Cricket Conference, which organizes semi-professional games for men in the Chicago area. “We’ve doubled. There were only 15 teams three years ago, and now we have 29.”
During the cricket season, which spans May through September, there are another dozen men’s teams playing casual games and tournaments.
Cricket is played with 11 men per team on an oval-shaped ground the size of two soccer fields. At the center lies a 66-foot long “pitch,” traditionally consisting of hardened turf, but more often paved with concrete and covered with a jute mat to approximate the right texture.
At each end of the pitch are three stakes, called wickets, driven into the ground with two more pieces of wood, called bails, lying on top of them. A batsman stands at one set of wickets, with a teammate at the opposite set. The pitcher, or bowler, runs onto the pitch and flings the hard, leather ball at high speeds, trying to bounce it past the batsman and into the bails for an out.
If the batsman hits the ball with his long, flat paddle, he runs to the other end of the pitch, swapping places with his teammate. Each swap is a score until a fielder can catch the ball and throw it back at the wickets before the batter gets there.
Long pooh-poohed for its genteel English image–the clothes, the mandatory tea-and-sandwich breaks, the polite applause, the hard-to-follow rules–cricket also taxed the American attention span, with games that can drag on for five days.
So the game was left to England and other former colonies, such as India, Pakistan, Australia, Sri Lanka, South Africa and the West Indies. Now it is immigrants from those countries who are giving cricket’s sophisticated strategies a second chance in the U.S.
“We believe cricket is not just a game, it’s a way of life,” said Hameed Zafer of Hoffman Estates. “My kids don’t know much about the game, and one of the reasons I play is to transfer it to my kids, so it will not die out with me.”
Today, there are about 30,000 active cricket players in some 600 established clubs throughout America and Canada. The avid fan base is estimated at about 200,000 in North America.
Cricketers are taking steps to improve the U.S. national cricket team, leagues in southern California have persuaded public schools to teach cricket as part of the phys-ed program, and in New York City, cricket fans are trying to find land for a $30 million cricket stadium.
Local players readily spend $1,200 per team on uniforms and equipment–importing them from South Asia, Australia or England–and shell out another $300 to $1,600 to participate in tournaments or the Midwest Conference. Lobbying a park district to build a cricket field also costs money–the Midwest Conference spent $5,000 to convince Hanover Park officials of the need for a new pitch.
Fierce national and ethnic loyalties, which have spilled out onto the cricket fields overseas and occasionally led to fights and riots, seem to fade away in the U.S. as immigrant cricketers band together. Teams here are mixed with people of different religious backgrounds and people from India play alongside those from rival Pakistan.
“Whatever our differences, we leave everything outside the field,” said Anil Kumar, 35, as he practiced in Glendale Heights on a recent day. “Once you’re on the same team, you don’t care about religion. You just want to play the game.”
But fighting over cricket fields is another story.
As soon as Iqbal Arshad and his Hoffman Estates Cricket Club interested the Hoffman Estates Park District in building a pitch, two other teams, including Zafer’s, entered the fray. The Hoffman Estates Cricket Club accused Zafer’s group, the Chicago Cricket Club, of not having enough Hoffman Estates residents. The Chicago club complained that the local team was unwilling to share.
The Midwest Conference eventually stepped in, resolving the dispute and scheduling games there for all three teams.
Both the Hanover Park and Hoffman Estates Park Districts have promised more fields if the game proves popular.
In the meantime, the Midwest league will start pursuing other park districts in Naperville, Schaumburg and Morton Grove, communities with large South Asian populations.
“When I think of the game moving into the suburbs, I get excited,” said the Midwest league’s Ahmad. “More and more people will come to see and because of that, we’ll get more interest.”
