When his experiences of
racism went viral, the West Indies legend reached an audience beyond
Cricket. ‘It’s society that needs fixing’
Twenty minutes into our interview, Michael Holding starts to cry. He is in the middle of a story about a holiday he took with his mother when he was a little boy. His mother’s skin was brown, his father’s was black. Her family had objected to that and cut her off when she married. “We went on a trip to
New York and we were staying with one of our aunts in Rochester We were upstairs and she got up in the morning and looked through the window and she saw a black girl and a white girl playing together in another backyard, having great fun, and she pointed them out to me and she said: ‘Look at that, we have hope.’ That was 50 years ago.”
Holding turns away from the screen and puts his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. I’m getting emotional thinking about it now.”