This is the farmer sowing the corn / that kept the cock that crowed in the morn...
Some people are born indispensable; other achieve indispensability and still others have indispensability thrust upon them.
There is no way to know for certain, beyond any reasonable doubt even, which category Jack Austin Warner falls into.
Who can say for sure, with little or no chance of successful contradiction, what were Uncle Jack's true intentions decades ago before he ended up on the business end of football?
Maybe the farmer sowing the corn intended to use the grain to feed the many cocks that crowed in the Caribbean morn, to make Caribbean football slowly, over time, the gem of the sporting world.
Maybe he did have aspirations to take an entire region, physically small enough to fit easily into most developed countries, and raise them to the pinnacle of the world's greatest sport.
Maybe he dreamed of making the little dots on the map loom so large as to be spoken of with awe by the sport's most ardent pundits and fans.
Maybe he believed that the names of little nations, once unheard of, could one day be ranked alongside soccer's perennial giants and that he would be able to sell that idea to football's grands seigneurs.
Maybe. Maybe. There is always a chance that it started that way. Maybe...
This is the farmer sowing the corn / that milked the cow with the crumpled horn...
But then again, maybe not.
Maybe the farmer sowing the corn had his eye from the outset on the maiden all forlorn. Not because he wanted, like the man all shaven and shorn, to kiss her but because she was the one whose job it was to milk the cow with the 'crumpled' horn.
My thesaurus lists 'crumpled' in the same group as 'crooked.' And although we might be getting our animals mixed up here, 'milk' occurs in the same verb list as 'fleece.'
So maybe our farmer connected the dots and saw a straight line between the cock that crowed in the morn and the cow to be milked with the crumpled horn. Maybe that was when the dream of putting Caribbean football not on the map but in his back pocket was born.
And then all thoughts of serving the people, serving the people, serving the people were gone.
Jack the Dreamer became Jack the Schemer, the combination of never-ending trips around the world, fancy offices and three-piece suits leading inevitably to a business meeting over a sumptuous continental breakfast in a five-star hotel in Sweden and an offer that simply could not be refused. Maybe...
This is the farmer sowing the corn / that married the man all shaven and shorn...
I imagine that a man of Uncle Jack's God-given gifts would not have baulked at offending public sentiment in pursuit of his goals. By any means necessary, he told the whole country when challenged as to why he oversold the stadium on 19 November 1989.
So both nimble and quick, Jack jumped over the candlestick and landed feet-first in FIFA. Fifa-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a corrupt man. Many corrupt men.
And soon, Jack Austin Warner was just another cog in the monster money-making machine that is football's umbrella organisation.
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