The game of cricket has taken hold in Texas’ largest city, as the culture of competitive sports meets the growing South Asian population.
WHY WE ARE HERE
We explore how America defines itself, one place at a time. A cricket complex on the outskirts of Houston hosts youth and professional players, reflecting the growing popularity of the sport in a changing city.
J. David Goodman and Meridith Kohut watched cricket in Prairie View, Texas, and attended the first Major League Cricket draft in Houston.
Drive northwest out of Houston, and as the cow pastures wrestle back into the flat expanse from the tentacled sprawl of the city, something rises along the road, suddenly, probably, many, many crickets.
Head south to find small cricket stadiums nestled in the suburbs, or west to find fields springing up in county parks.
The game of cricket — a bat-ball-and-wicket contest of patience and athleticism born in Britain and barely understood by most Americans — has surprisingly taken hold in the land of Friday night football. The growing population of South Asian immigrants around Houston and Dallas imported their favorite sport to their adopted home, where it grew amid a Lone Star culture of competition in all things, especially that in sports.
Cricket’s rapid rise in Houston has attracted international attention and helped Texas become the launching pad for the sport’s first American professional league, Major League Cricket, whose inaugural season began Thursday outside Dallas. .
“One of the lesser-known things about Houston is the diversity of the population from many cricket-playing countries,” said Tim Cork, a deputy consul general at the British consulate in Houston. “There are Indians, Pakistanis, obviously a lot of Brits here, Australian accents everywhere you go.”
The number of people of Indian heritage in Texas has doubled in the past decade to half a million, according to estimates from the Census Bureau’s annual survey, including 73,000 in Harris County, which includes Houston, and 64,000 in suburban Fort Bend. County.
“When I came to this country, the only sport I knew was cricket,” said KP George, the county judge in Fort Bend, who immigrated to the US from India in 1993. When he was elected in 2018, none of county parks are said to have cricket fields. Now there are seven, and each one is reserved for play months in advance.
“There’s a huge demand,” he said. “We are working on some more fields.”
The speed at which the sport has grown in Houston has surprised even those who strive to do so.
Houston played host to the player draft for the new professional league in March at the Johnson Space Center, one of the city’s biggest tourist sites. On the fields in northwest Houston, the league’s newly minted teams came together this month for training camps.
“We always thought we would take it slowly,” said Mangesh Chaudhari, 38, an owner of the Prairie View Cricket Complex who, since 2018, has been overseeing the task of flattening a swath of farmland around 50 miles northwest of the city in six. oval cricket fields. “Suddenly the cricket rang out.”
The location, along a major highway in Prairie View, Texas, offers both the right type of clay soil for the grass pitch where cricketers bowl and bat, and free advertising to passing cars. on US Route 290.
The project, conceived and financed by a Houston entrepreneur, Tanweer Ahmed, was a Field-of-Dreams gamble that if they built it, people would come. It worked better and faster than they expected, Mr. Chaudhari said, adding that the complex is still under construction. For example, there are still no lights or permanent toilets.
One weekday in June, dozens of vehicles poured into the cricket complex. Young players arrived from Atlanta and Dallas for a youth tournament, carrying large bags of bats and pads in the heat.
“Good luck, boys! Good luck! Play hard!” Golam Nowsher, 61, yelled at his teenage players from the Houston area as they were on the field.
Mr. moved. Nowsher from Bangladesh, where he became a star player, and coaches young cricketers around Houston. He watched his team play at the start of the nearly five-hour match, chatting about cricket and racing with the players, who crowded the bleachers under a small shade square.
“Who are the male AI students?” he asked.
“I’m studying computer science,” said one player.
“I thought you were going to be a doctor?” Answered by Mr. Nowsher.
As the team’s 17-year-old captain, Arya Kannantha, waits for his turn to bat, he says he’s thinking about college, and also about trying to make the US national team. Despite growing up in the Houston suburbs, few of his classmates in suburban Katy — home to one of the largest and most expensive high school football stadium in the country — familiar with cricket.
“Not many people at my school play it,” Arya said. He added, laughing: “They just think it’s baseball, but it’s weird.”
Far from a curiosity, cricket is a passion in Texas’ burgeoning South Asian community and is poised to become big business, attracting major local investors including Ross Perot Jr., the businessman and son of the former independent presidential candidate. Mr. Perot, along with his business partner, Anurag Jain, is an owner of the local major league team, the Texas Super Kings.
Mr. Perot said he recently discussed cricket with Gov. Greg Abbott on the visit of former British prime minister, Boris Johnson. “I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want you to know, we are bringing cricket to this state,’” Mr. Perot said. “He was surprised, and he liked it.”
Mr. Jain, who grew up playing cricket in Chennai, India, and now lives in Dallas, encouraged investment in the new US professional league, citing the sport’s large international following and the large fan base in Texas. “They will tell you that food is a way to a man’s heart,” Mr. Jain said. “Cricket is the way to the heart of South Asia. It’s more than a sport, it’s a way of life.”
The arrival of cricket has given some leaders in Prairie View, home of the former Black state university, Prairie View A&M, hope that the tournaments will become a revenue stream for the cash-strapped town, even though cricket is scarce. aficionados or South. Asian residents.
“Our stance is to help them, help them grow,” said Kendric Jones, a county commissioner and university graduate. “It’s a tourist attraction.”
On a night in March, hundreds of people gathered at the Johnson Space Center for the player draft for Major League Cricket.
Inside, under suspended satellites and astronaut suits, cricket fans and investors in the league’s six inaugural teams — based in New York, Seattle, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Texas — mingled with young prospective players.
Harmeet Singh, who grew up playing in Mumbai and was picked first in the draft, recently moved from Seattle to a large house in the Houston suburb of Katy.
“Weather-wise, I can play better here,” said Mr. Singh, 30, standing with his wife and 2-year-old daughter. “It’s an upgrade — we’re in an apartment in Seattle for the same price.”
Standing in the back of the museum hall, next to a large space capsule and a table of small hamburgers, are many of the people who helped develop the sport in Houston, including Yogesh Patel, 75, who started a cricket club after arriving in city. almost five decades ago.
“It’s like the dream I had in 1976 came true,” he said, looking around. “Houston has become a cricket capital of the USA”
