I was once the top junior (Under-16) basketball player in Barbados. Fortunately, I had a specific set of gifts that ensured that at the ages of 14 to 15 years old, I was going to be leaps and bounds above my competition. The only guy I rated as better was Jeremy Gill, the famed Clapham Bull point guard of similar age who was way more technically sound than I had ever been or ever would have been. I, however, was blessed with a 44-inch vertical leap, had NBA-level fitness and quickness so I could run an entire game at full speed, and I was an exceptional mid-range shooter, meaning that I couldn’t hit a three consistently to save my life but was extremely useful otherwise.
What I considered my best asset, though, was the ability, on the court, to see a person for who they really were. This is a small part of what we call in the sport: court awareness. It implies that though you can see plays developing in front of you, even from the defence’s point of view, you make the best choice based not just on what was available but more so on who is or will be available. Certainly, you needed to understand the people you were playing with.
This is why I always knew that whenever I played against Coleridge and Parry, for example, their then-coach would always send a physically stronger person to guard me with the specific instruction to rough me up. To be honest, I never heard him say it, but you could see it in the coach’s eyes when he made the call to slow me down in the second quarter of our matchups. Those defenders never had the speed to keep up for long, though. Some remain lifelong acquaintances. The same thing went for Harrison College and Foundation.
We won the Under-16 championship and knockouts that year without losing a single game. That is an indisputable fact. I won all of the MVP awards and was the top forward then. Those are also indisputable facts.
Believe it or not, some of the attributes from that time in my life would come to good use as I got on in age and professional experience. For example, I tailor my public speaking style based on audience. I’m also more willing now to accept seeing people for who they really are off the court, and without malice or bad repute. Translating these skills into the real world, a recent argument I had in a WhatsApp group about basketball ended up with me putting those into practice, which in turn inspired today’s article.
During one of our very riveting disputes about the most recent Olympic Men’s 100 meters finals, a colleague and I got into it individually. To me, we were arguing about two completely different things, and I found the argument circular and redundant. I held the view that people will use statistics to justify a call for Noah Lyles to have lost. But I had accepted that he did indeed win. The colleague argued, however, that no one CAN make that argument and it was irresponsible of me to even suggest it. So I was ridiculed for even thinking my suspicion was probable.
It didn’t take more than two days after for someone else to use statistics to prove my point. However, when I realised who I was debating, I concluded that it was my fault because I should not have expected that particular person to even think through my point of view. The thing is, they are quite capable of doing so. But my experience with them throughout my basketball life suggested they would react that way. Sadly, this is also an indisputable fact that I ignored.
Economists are commonly met by persons, learned or otherwise, with the contention that what comes out of our mouths must be taken with a pinch of salt. “Economists never agree with each other,” they say. It rubs me wrong given that since economics is a study of human behaviour displayed through economic interactions, it is rather complex. Fundamentally, how could any two economists really say the exact same thing when the underlying belief of most schools of thought is that people are rational? I know that psychologists cannot definitively agree on rationality, so I could never understand why economists take so much flak. That is, until recently, when I figured that maybe I should start improving on meeting people where they’re at mentally and educationally. It is tougher than you think, and most professionals prefer not to do so because that in itself is rather complex. There are too many personalities to account for.
So I decided that, for now, I’ll make a few bold statements and predictions that disregard the notion of rationality in the people I am talking about. Let history be the only determinant. In fact, let’s not even give thought to likely innovation or that history itself may be flawed. It seems like people are comforted by this. So in fewer than 300 words, I’m now able to better explain what I’ve spent the last 14 years trying to do publicly.
Fact numero uno is that prices will always rise, especially if there is available credit and interest to be paid. It doesn’t matter how those dynamics interplay because if I explain further, you may very well rubbish that even though the premise is true. Accept also that inflation is imported into Barbados because we import almost every consumable item or otherwise. However, the fact that the government believes in ensuring fairer access to all public resources for those who can’t afford it, we will always have a higher-than-normal tax burden. It’s not going to change once we all believe that our children deserve a decent education and that we all deserve public healthcare. That’s historical and indisputable.
Tourism, for all its recently highlighted misgivings towards the industry’s employees, is and will remain our “number one” industry for some time. This is inextricably linked to the fact that we import almost everything, and we need foreign currency to do so. Tourism is by far the largest earner of US Dollars, especially since we were unsuccessful in protecting the competitiveness of our international business sector.
Another fact is that we are not as developed a nation as we think we deserve to be. Barbados is a small country with very limited and inefficient resources. Inherently, it is wrong to compare the country to cities in larger places. The availability of resources covers inefficiency in those places, so there is plenty of wastage. Nothing will change here in Barbados unless we are efficient and/or have a resource that is plentiful and is highly demanded. History shows this as indisputable especially when Barbados became the first 24 hour economy on the back of its world-renowned and prominent colonial sugar industry. It took time to build out resources then as well.
Politically, there is one indisputable fact. The DLP cannot win the next general election, especially given what unfolded last week with those expulsions. This is indisputable and beyond reproach as a fact. Good luck to them.