The World’s Second Most Popular Sport

Around lunchtime on a recent Thursday, Michael Chambers parked his S.U.V. in front of a squat red brick building on Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut, to wait for that day’s sole visitor to the Cricket Hall of Fame. Cricket: that’s the one with the flat bat and the red ball and breaks for tea and cucumber sandwiches. Entry to the Hall of Fame is free but only available by appointment, Chambers had explained on the phone. Finding this monument to the world’s second most popular sport can be tricky. Google Maps figures that it’s next to Armageddon Auto Custom and Smith’s Fire Extinguisher. In fact, it’s one floor up from the Harmony Beauty Salon and Dunn’s River Jamaican restaurant (tagline: “De Real Jamaican Way”). A small printed sign hangs in one of the windows on the second floor. The entrance is an unmarked maroon side door.

Of the many gifts that America has to offer the would-be immigrant—liberty, opportunity, security, the Choco Taco—it was cricket that attracted Chambers, who grew up in Jamaica. On a family vacation to Hartford when he was eighteen, he found himself roped into playing for the local team. “I played one game with them,” he said. “And I never went back home. I stayed here and played my cricket.” That was in 1968. Thirteen years later, by then a U.S. citizen, he had become American enough to believe that anything was possible. So he set up the Cricket Hall of Fame, which he billed as “the first in the world.”

Chambers, a large man wearing a blue-and-white floral-print shirt decorated with a “Jesus Loves Me” button, has spent years amassing a collection. Crammed into the hall’s two and a half rooms are framed certificates, news clippings, proclamations by Hartford’s mayor declaring “Cricket Hall of Fame Day,” mini cricket bats, VHS tapes of old matches, and flags from the United States, Jamaica, and the West Indian cricket team. “What you need is a place to house the stuff,” he said. A plan to acquire an elegant local building to use as a museum fell through.

At least Chambers is doing better than the Dubai-based International Cricket Council, the sport’s global governing body, which in 2009 launched its own hall of fame. “I.C.C. has not reached our standard yet,” Chambers said. “They don’t even have a building.” (That has not dissuaded cricketers from accepting the honor of being inducted into either hall of fame—Shivnarine Chanderpaul, a former West Indies batsman, was inducted into both last year.) In any case, Chambers said, “we are still the first in the world.”

The Hall of Fame was, he admitted, a way for him and his teammates to secure their own legacy. “We were at the bar, drinking. We were talking about what was going to happen when we got old,” he said. “Youngsters would see these old men and would say, ‘Who are these guys?’ ”

Over the years, the hall’s maroon walls have slowly filled up with the plaques that denote official induction. “You see all these plaques? One of those plaques is fifty bucks, easy,” Chambers said. Two of each are made, so that honorees can take one home. Since 1981, the annual ceremony, usually held in a local hotel ballroom, has honored about two hundred players, including such cricket greats as Vivian Richards, who helped the West Indies win two consecutive World Cups. Most honorees feel compelled to make the trip to the insurance capital of the world. Besides a plaque—and sporting immortality—inductees who are willing to part with a hundred and fifty dollars also receive a maroon jacket with a patch of the hall’s logo (a cricket pitch under a cloudy sky) sewn on by a tailor in Hartford. For another eleven hundred dollars, Hall of Famers can get a chunky ring, designed by a local jeweller named Audley McLean. All the money goes to fund the annual gala.

The dominance of maroon in the Cricket Hall of Fame is more than an aesthetic choice. It is the color of the West Indies team, whose players are drawn from ten independent countries and five dependencies, including the U.S. Virgin Islands. Hartford has a large Caribbean population; many islanders emigrated during the Second World War to fill labor shortages in the tobacco fields along the Connecticut River. “They brought the cricket with them,” Chambers said.

Nowadays, the local cricketers tend to be Indian and Pakistani immigrants. They brought something else along with their love of the game: “I noticed that the Pakistanis don’t like working with Indians,” Chambers said. “So I’m saying to them, ‘Come on, guys. You’re in America now. Get your show together.’ ” ♦