Walsh begins life as a legend

April 29, 2001 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp — 29/04/2001

Nor­mal­ly a sports spon­sor will hire a team of cre­ative genius­es to con­jure up a good rea­son to make a cash award to a deserv­ing play­er. They may go so far as to cre­ate a ‘cat­e­go­ry’ of award for him to win, as Stan­dard Bank did with their ‘achieve­ment awards’ for play­ers reach­ing 100 wick­ets, 3000 runs and 100 caps etc…

Some­times, though, very occa­sion­al­ly, they just don’t both­er. There is no need. Court­ney Walsh fits into that last cat­e­go­ry. At every ground dur­ing the test series he was pre­sent­ed with an award by the local crick­et board, mak­ing five ‘local’ awards in total. There were three more from var­i­ous gov­ern­ments and the West Indies Crick­et Board mak­ing eight. Most involved the hand­ing over of cash.

Apart from the mon­ey, there were the titles. He is “Ambas­sador at Large” of Jamaica and sports per­son­al­i­ty of the year/decade on sev­er­al islands. The Antiguan gov­ern­ment even had to change their con­sti­tu­tion in order for a non-nation­al to receive the coun­try’s high­est. civ­il award along with Antiguan hero Curt­ly Ambrose.

So pity the poor spon­sors of the Test and one-day team in the Caribbean, Cable & Wire­less. By the time they came to hon­our the much-hon­oured Walsh there sim­ply was­n’t much left to say. So they didn’t!

At a func­tion to hon­our Walsh imme­di­ate­ly after the Test series a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant sim­ply hand­ed over a cheque for US$20,000 (R160,000) as “…a token of our appre­ci­a­tion for all you have done for crick­et.” Nice one!

But per­haps the most mov­ing trib­ute to the endur­ing, ever-pop­u­lar fast bowler was paid by Air Jamaica who man­aged to pro­duce giant bill­boards across the coun­try, seem­ing­ly with­in hours of his retire­ment, pay­ing their respects.

Life as a leg­end has well and tru­ly begun for Court­ney Walsh and as long as he is any­where near his beloved Jamaica, or any­where in the Caribbean for that mat­ter, the awards and trib­utes are like­ly to keep flow­ing. He may have signed a mil­lion auto­graphs already, but he has anoth­er mil­lion to go. At least.