By Neto Baptiste
Well, with a name like Hercules you’d expect the individual to be as strong as, well the biblical figure himself.
This was however not the case for former national fast bowler, Hercules Grant, whom, according to many, possessed the potential to play at the highest level.
Grant, during a recent interview on the Good Morning Jojo Sports Show, said that although mentally, he was prepared to go all the way, he wasn’t physically capable so to do.
“Physically, my body started giving me some trouble and I didn’t have adequate therapy at the time that could have helped me through, and in retrospect, the problems were very simple so what I did, after I started to get injured so often is that I started doing a lot of weights and that sort of took my edge off. I became a little bit slower, a little bit heavier and it wasn’t good so I think my body was crying out after a while so I think my body was falling apart,” he said.
Grant, who attended and represented the St Joseph’s Academy (SJA) during his years as a school cricketer, was a right-handed batsman who bowled right-arm fast-medium. He played non-first-class matches for Antigua in 1976; in that same year he played for the Leeward Islands Under-19s.
The player, who grew up in Pigotts and Barnes Hill, migrated to Canada over 30 years ago where he studied and currently holds a Phd in Rehabilitation Science (an interdisciplinary field that focuses on human function and disability).
“It was a totally different culture, a different standard, different expectations, but I think that one beautiful thing though is that in Antigua and a lot of the Caribbean, our standards are quite high and as a matter of a fact, when I came over to university here, I didn’t have [need] for an adjustment period at all; I was very comfortable. I fitted right in academically,” the former player said.
Grant, also represented Canada in cricket, pointed to his days in schools’ cricket here as some of the most competitive cricket he has ever played.
“You had some guys coming out of All Saints School at the time like Trevor Simon, Challenger, Casworth James and I think he eventually went on to play for Antigua and Leeward Islands but these guys had tremendous talent so the standard was very high and it was highly organised,” he said.
“Out of that school league we produced a combined schools’ 11 that played in what was then a first- class competition in Antigua so we were playing against the big guys as it were and it was a very good experience for us at the time and from that, there was a select team of combined school boys to Trinidad to tour and we handled ourselves pretty well down there,” he added.
Grant played in England in 1978, making his debut for Suffolk in his only A-List appearance against Sussex in the Gillette. In that match, he scored 15 runs before being dismissed by Imran Khan, while with the ball he took the wicket of Kepler Wessels for the cost of 41 runs from 12 overs.