OSWALD BROWN WRITES
WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 27, 2019 — Ricardo P. Deveaux recently posted an historic sports photo on his Facebook page that he obviously found among the sports memorabilia of his father, Edward “Shark” Deveaux, who is unquestionably one of the most knowledgeable sport historians in The Bahamas.
In the caption that accompanied the “Throwback Thursday” photo, Ricardo noted: “I am taking it back to the good ole days of Basketball when The Kentucky Colonels was the BEST Basketball Team in the league. I would like to thank my dad Edward Deveaux who took his sons to experience good sportsmanship at its best.”
What makes the photo all-the-more historic is the fact that it includes the late Roman Catholic Priest Rev. Father Marcian Peters, the founder of St. Bernard’s Sporting Club, which helped to nurture the development of many, many young Bahamians in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s not only in sports, but also in life generally to become responsible, law-abiding human beings.
I am speaking from personal experience. I owe a great deal of gratitude to Father Marcian Peters for steering my life in the right direction during my teenage years from a rocky road strewn with marginal criminal activities to a highway towards being a relatively “responsible” young man. It helped, of course, that grew up in a very strict Roman Catholic family at Stanyard Creek, Andros.
When my family moved to Nassau in 1952 to a homestead established through Paul Meeres Corner (now Fleming Street) by my late uncle, Clarence Elliott Sr., before he relocated to New York in the 1940s, the fast-pace and bright lights of the “big city” initially steered me in the wrong direction, and if it were not for Father Marcian and various other committed Roman Catholic priests – like Father Cornelius Orsendorf, who was the priest in charge of Our Lady’s Church on Deveaux Street that became our parish church when we moved from Stanyard Creek — my life’s journey certainly would have been different from what I consider today to be a pretty good life so far.
Father Marcian’s intervention in my life when I joined St. Bernard’s Sporting Club in the mid-1950s was undeniably a major factor in turning my life around during my teenage years when I routinely did some things that could have resulted in me ending up in Reform School – the “Formatery, as we called it at the time – a “correctional institution” for bad boys.
Although I was a speedy runner, I was never all that great in any of the sports I played, no matter how hard I tried. However, I was fairly good in both baseball and basketball, and I gave 110 percent effort in an attempt to develop my skills in both sports, in which some of my close friends excelled.
The late Preston Stuart, Jr., with whom I developed a very close friendship at Southern Junior shortly after I moved to Nassau and later at Southern Senior, was a “natural” in virtually every sport he played, especially baseball, basketball and cricket.
The late Leo Dean, another close and dear friend that I first met at Southern Junior, was also an excellent baseball and cricket player, but he did not possess superior basketball skills. And to this day, childhood contemporaries at Southern Junior and Southern Senior will support my contention that the late Glen Cooper was not only an excellent basketball player, but was arguably one of the best shortstops on St. Bernard’s baseball team.
Then there was John “Money” Green, who was also a very good basketball player – albeit prone to committing rough fouls – but he also excelled in baseball as a catcher and went on to establish himself as one of the best catchers in the history of the Bahamas Baseball Association (BBA).
St. Bernard’s Sporting Club developed so many good basketball players that in the early 1960s it entered both an “A” and a “B” in the highly competitive Bahamas Amateur Basketball Association (BABA) annual league games played at the Priory Court on the grounds of St. Francis Xavier Cathedral on West Street Hill.
The “A” team included outstanding basketball players like Charles Williams, Lou Adderley, Godfrey “Pro” Pinder, Leonard “Skinny” Archer, James “Jimmy” Coakley, Prince “Heads” McIntosh, Orlando McKenzie, and Everette Archer, who was one of the most prolific scorers in the league. Meanwhile, my teammates on St. Bernard’s “B” team included Preston Stuart, Jr., Leo Dean, John Green and several others whose names the passage of time has shamefully erased from my memory.
St. Bernard’s also annually entered extremely good teams in the Bahamas Baseball Association (BBA) annual league games after baseball became a popular participatory sport in The Bahamas in the aftermath of Andre Rodgers becoming the first Bahamian to sign a professional baseball contract and made it to the Major League in 1957.
Prior to that, cricket was the most popular sport in The Bahamas; indeed, it was because of the natural skills he developed as a cricket player that Andre attracted the attention of a Major League baseball scout and was invited to a “tryout.”
At the height of cricket’s popularity in the country, St. Bernard’s Sporting Club over the years annually fielded one of the most talented cricket teams in the country for games played generally on Sundays. All of the “Cricket Clubs” had an army of female supporters and on any given Sunday afternoon at parks where games were being played, well dressed – with white being the colour of preference – female supporters would turn out in huge numbers to support their respective teams.
With the passage of time and the ascendancy of baseball and basketball as extremely popular sports in The Bahamas, in no small measure because of The Bahamas’ close geographic proximity to the United States, the popularity of cricket in the country declined considerably, to the extent that today the vast majority of its fans in The Bahamas migrated to this country from one of the sister Caribbean nations to the South with a similar British colonial history as The Bahamas.
St. Bernard’s Sporting Club also developed some extremely good female sports performers. Indeed, one of the most outstanding Bahamian female sports icons, Cynthia Moxey — better known these days as Cynthia “Mother” Pratt — developed her natural abilities as a member of St. Bernard’s Sporting Club. Of course, “Mother” Pratt excelled in virtually every sport in which she participated.
So, it was therefore natural that when I saw the photo of Father Marcian with a Kentucky Colonels basketball team posted by Ricardo Deveaux, an avalanche of pleasant memories of my years as a member of St. Bernard’s Sporting Club flooded my mind. Most of the members on the team in that photo were previously members of St. Bernard’s basketball team.
Given all the problems that exist in The Bahamas today, with far too many young men — and increasingly more young women — headed in the wrong direction in their youthful lives, a modern-day Father Marcian Peters and an organization like St. Bernard’s Sporting Club surely could certainly help to turn their lives around.
