"It is a personal decision. I will not be entertaining questions on it."
Those were the words of Colin Murray on Friday when he summoned the media to The Normandie for the privilege of hearing him withdraw his bid for the presidency of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation. Given that the reporters present failed to challenge that outrageous statement, he should have saved everyone the hassle of getting there and simply sent a statement via e-mail or fax.
It is outrageous of my former Queen's Park Cricket Club captain to make a decision that is obviously of some importance in the local sporting news context, refuse to explain why he made that decision and inform the weak-kneed gathering that no-one is to question him on it. Yet he throws out certain comments that not only confirm that there is more in the mortar than just the pestle, but infers that the man set to be elected unopposed on Sunday – Raymond Tim Kee – may have something to do with the toxic, politically-tainted brew that is in the mortar.
Hear Colin:
"I am very hopeful that he (Tim Kee) does not play politics with our football. During the election, and I'm going to say it very openly, I have heard people being promised things. People have been promised assignments from coaching to administratively and other things. I really hope that Raymond is not playing that game."
Still, no-one with a microphone or a recorder or a pen and notepad in attendance thought it appropriate to challenge all those hints and inferences. People being promised things by whom if not Tim Kee? Anansi? Tantie Merle? Were they expecting to get free cases of Carib and additional invitations to the brewery's media lime for their spineless compliance with the dictates of the marketing man?
Hold on. Colin, whose vow of selective silence flies in the face of his role as a sports broadcaster known for his forthright views on national football, not to mention Trinidad and Tobago and West Indies cricket, wasn't finished:
"I also hope that he does not exclude the people from the North Zone because they supported me, because, I tell you what, he will have to exclude a lot of people. Because he would have been in for a real shock…and trust me on that."
Well, skipper, yours is a threat that rings resoundingly hollow because you chose to bow out before the bell tolled. If, as you were insisting, Tim Kee would have been shocked by the support for you, why not go through with the process and be recorded as valiant and dignified in defeat? Why not show, by staying the course even to what would obviously have been a disappointing end, that you were prepared to stand up for all of those people in the North Zone and elsewhere who you claim supported you?
I'm actually trying to work out which is the more disheartening: a personality of some public standing insisting on having everything his own way or else he picks up his marbles and goes home, or media people cowed into silence by the supposed status and prominence of the said personality.
It really takes us all back to issues of transparency and accountability. People claim to want to make a difference – to breathe life into a corrupt, dysfunctional, rotten structure – yet want to do so only on their terms, which means they are no different from the ones they are seeking to replace.
Not that any of this should be interpreted in any way to be an endorsement of Raymond Tim Kee. Now that Murray has taken his marbles and gone home, the soon-to-be TTFF boss can now drop the charade that he represents a fundamental departure from the Jack Warner-Oliver Camps hierarchy of the past 20 years, of which he was an integral part as a vice-president.
During his tenure in the executive, coaches were ostracised, players were blacklisted and on the very infrequent occasion when he could have been tracked down for a reaction, the response was invariably a brusque "no comment." And we're expected to believe that a fundamental transformation has taken place over the past three years and that this isn't about kissing up to the right people to get the big wuk? Not even Barack Obama can pull that one off.
Ultimately, the issue is not about the puppet master attaching his strings to Tim Kee, Murray or some other willing stooge. It's about the health of football in Trinidad and Tobago. It's about the tens of thousands of boys and girls who enjoy the game on Sunday mornings throughout this country and about providing the opportunity for at least some of them to develop into the best they can be in the sport for their own sake and, by extension, for the honour and glory of the red, white and black.
Yet listening to all the behind-the-scenes scrambling ahead of Sunday's now non-event of an election, it appears to be nothing more than the repositioning of snouts in the trough. This phenomenon is not unique to football of course, as evidenced by the many familiar faces in downtown Port of Spain last Friday afternoon jostling for prominence in the pigsty of national politics.
Still, many of us cling to the hope that, if not for ourselves or our children but the generation that follows them, we can fundamentally change the rules of the game...any game. The problem is: where are the game-changers?