OUR TOP ATHLETES NEED TO RAISE THEIR GAME

Congratulations to Veronica Campbell Brown and Christopher Gayle for being honoured as the RJR Foundation’s Sportswoman and Sportsman of the Year 2010 respectively. Both were outstanding during 2010 and while there were many close contenders for Sportsman of the Year, it could be argued that any one of the main contenders would have been an appropriate winner.

That aside, there are some things about our top athletes that continue to raise concern about their overall development. Listening to the presentations made by some of our athletes and hearing them speak in public over the years, it boggles the mind wondering why the handlers of these super athletes and the athletes themselves continue to fail to speak well.

Speaking well does not mean speaking with an accent – whether US or UK or European – but effectively speaking English, the international language of business. Many well-meaning and open-minded Jamaicans cringe when they hear our athletes speak publicly. They are so far removed from the language they may have well be speaking Russian.

Most of our top athletes – Usain Bolt (even though his delivery has improved in recent years), Asafa Powell, Veronica Campbell Brown, and Chris Gayle – still display a level of discomfort when speaking publicly. Bolt’s international appeal has seen him make many but non-speaking appearances in internationally aired commercials, so too VCB, perhaps our most loved female athlete; and in certain parts of the Caribbean, Chris Gayle is mockingly called ‘Picasso’ not only because he speaks poorly but because of his penchant for using the cliche’ “going back to the drawing board’ when doing interviews about an inevitable West Indies loss.

This is not the case for all of Jamaica’s athletes, however. Brigette Foster-Hylton is relatively quite articulate, Sherone Simpson too as well as Shelly Ann Fraser, Alia Atkinson, Kaliese Spencer, Trecia Smith, Maurice Smith, Michael Frater, Maurice Wignall, and Isa Phillips and several others. The thing is most of these afore-mentioned athletes – relative to our biggest stars – are not interviewed that often.

There are those who will ask ‘so what’ because that is what we do these days. Many of us fail to understand that the inability to speak well robs many of our top athletes of opportunities that could make them even richer than before. But for all the resources these athletes have at their disposal it doesn’t seem as if there is any will to improve themselves to match their elevated statuses.

What they must remember is that after they have retired they still have to exist within the public domain if they are to continue to capitalize on their remarkable careers. Speaking engagements are just another avenue of making sure those bank accounts remain fat during retirement. Athletes like Michael Johnson can shed light on how beneficial those engagements can be and the opportunities that they lead to.

There is no time like the present for some of our athletes to do better to improve themselves. It is not sufficient to only be able to run fast or excel at whatever skill they have been blessed with. Most of these athletes have become brands in their own right, but a brand is only as strong as it has the ability to transcend boundaries. One of the best tools with which to transcend social, ethnic and economic boundaries is proficient use of  a universal tongue that allows many more than 2.5 million people to understand the messages they are trying to send.