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Fidel Dhana
At 63, he’s gone three marriages – heading for #4 – and was the victim of a massive heart attack in 2006 that left him unconscious for three days, and now wearing a pacemaker. But once-ace Cornwall College schoolboy footballer and phenomenal all-round athlete of the late 1950s and early 1960, the indefatigable Billy Griffiths, presses on. Physically strong, hearty, cheery, cool, pleasant as usual – and enjoying semi-retirement life between his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the past 24 years, and his native Montego Bay.
Norman Constantine Washington Griffiths – his mother named him after Jamaica’s pre-independence premier, Norman Washington Manley, but the name was too long, so Billy dropped the ‘Washington’ – was the definitive DaCosta Cup and Olivier Shield striker of his era. A deadly-accurate, powerful, flashy, crafty, swift, lithe powerhouse of a player who mesmerized, transfixed, thrilled and tantalized Jamaicans for four years (1959 to 1962) with a magnificent, bedazzling football prowess, elegance of form, style and grace - and commanding agility of body-shift style and movement we called ‘popping’ in those days.
Allan ‘Skill’ Cole of Vere Technical High School would come along in the mid 1960s, three or so years after Billy Griffiths left the scene, to be compared with the extraordinary schoolboy soccer talent of the great Billy Griffiths. The debate rages on up to today as to who was the greater and better of the two. Most pundits have settled the vexed issue by agreeing that they were two of the best of the very best Jamaican schoolboy footballers ever in the history of the country. One possessing one or two little skills the other was not blessed with – and vice versa. In other words, they are on par.
All Billy Griffiths will say about his friend ‘Skill’ Cole and that unwritten, unspoken ‘rivalry’ is: “If people wish to consider me among the top five all-time, best- ever Jamaican schoolboy footballers, that’s good enough for me. Thankfully, I am highly, widely respected, loved and admired, based on public conversations, and newspaper clippings of my career on the DaCosta Cup/Olivier Shield circuits. I still often get requests for news interviews, and influential people in and outside of Jamaica’s sports and other arenas continue to comment favourably on my career – 45 years after it ended. I am still heavily recognized when I walk the streets of Montego Bay. Overall, then, I must consider myself very blessed…”
The quintessential Billy Griffiths and I grew up together in Montego Bay, went to Cornwall College together for the very same duration of time, sat in the same classrooms for years, sometimes beside each other. Billy was a hero to many of his schoolmates, including me, and as my journalism career started to take root right there at Cornwall College during my last 18 or so months on campus during the early 1960s, I had the pleasure of covering Billy Griffiths, as a schoolboy trainee reporter for The Gleaner.
Billy and I have kept in touch down through the years. We sat down to a two-hour lunch January 4 at the Wexford Hotel in Montego Bay for this interview – and Billy said he was proud of his overall achievements on and off the schoolboy football field: “I have never been a rich man – but I have been comfortable!” he reminisced. “I’ve done many different jobs, including being a purchasing agent – a man for all seasons, a head cook and bottle washer, if you wish.” Three weddings - in Toronto, Canada, where he migrated to in 1970; and twice in Fort Lauderdale - have given Billy four children, two sons and two daughters, now adults, “who’ve made me so proud!” One son, Damon, teaches and is an assistant track coach at the University Of Miami. He buried his third wife, Pauline, in September 2006 in her native Greenland district, Hanover.
Billy Griffiths is in touch more often with Montego Bay-based former Cornwall College dazzling striker, Keith Thorpe, and daredevil defence don, Noel (‘Rabbit’) Henry, than with any of the many other team members he played with in a colourful era that comprised a significant part of the glory days of Cornwall College’s schoolboy soccer supremacy. It was the age of such boys as N.C. ‘Billy’ Griffiths as a murderous, thunderous, fearsome inside right striker; Fudgy Bernard, Easton Manderson, Barry Daniels, ‘Uncle D.’ Karl Morris, Bruce Ford, Orthnel Thomas, Dwight Taylor, Kirk Taylor, Extol Mignott, and Franklyn Steadman. Colourful Ali McNab took Billy Griffiths’ place on the team in 1963, and Steve Bucknor, now a famous, elite ICC international test cricket umpire, was often a goalkeeper on the juggernaut Cornwall College team. A very young Billy Griffiths was thrust onto the field – and into the limelight – at the age of only 14.
Billy Griffiths went to Cornwall College from the Montego Bay Boys School, where his headmaster was Howard Felix Cooke, a man destined to become Jamaica’s governor-general. Cecil (‘Jumbo’) Agate was Cornwall College’s team manager, and master body builder, the famous Lloyd Young, was team physiotherapist.
Forty-eight years after it took place, Billy Griffiths today vividly remembers one of the most critical, colourful, memorable, decisive, shattering events of his career. It exploded one Saturday afternoon in late 1959 on the local Cornwall home field, during the nail-biting second leg of the Olivier Shield final with Kingston’s St. George’s College. St. George’s had won the first leg two-nil a few days earlier at Sabina Park in Kingston, and the Red And Gold Cornwallians were all over George’s in this critical local finale. When all of a sudden Griffiths slipped on the ball, fell to the ground and broke his left hand. Cornwall captain and defence prince, Aggrey Brown, diplomatically bowed to George’s requests, pressure and demands to pull Griffiths from the game, because George’s players felt reluctant and intimidated to tackle Cornwall’s irascible firebrand bulldozer. Tens of thousands of fans from around the island were watching a finale game that was supposed to crown the undisputed king of islandwide schoolboy soccer. The event caused a national sensation, but finally, the gruelling game ended in a complete reversal of the Sabina Park encounter - a two-nil victory for Cornwall College, both goals scored by the colourful George Davidson. The following morning The Sunday Gleaner said it all in a front-page lead story banner headline: ‘They Share The Shield’.
The paths of Billy Griffiths and Aggrey Brown have never crossed since they both left Cornwall College a few years later. Was captain Aggrey Brown’s decision the right and correct one? Billy Griffiths didn’t want to say – but he feels that if they ever do run into each other, the question could possibly arise. Brown is now a retiring journalism professor on the Mona, Kingston, campus of the University Of The West Indies.
Norman Constantine Griffiths – the nickname ‘Billy’ just happened to have come along one day, and stuck – has won lasting, adoring fame from a glittering schoolboy football career. But he was much, much more than a celebrated, formidable football hero at school. Griffiths was an all-round, overall schoolboy sports whiz kid maestro, whose incredible triumphs as a swift, flashy track and field sprinter, long jump star, hockey player, wicket-keeping cricketer, and hurdler allowed him to often represent his school in various competitions, including the standard Secondary Schools Championships.
He never followed up after leaving school to try for a professional career in sports. The opportunities simply were not there. If it were today, Billy Griffiths probably would be worth millions of dollars, in America. Still, he has no regrets. “And lots of memories. A pity, though, that we didn’t have videos and DVDs and cell phone cameras and all these modern high tech gadgets, in my time!”
Billy Griffiths was hesitant to compare schoolboy football standards of his day with today’s showcase. “It’s hard to say,” he feels. “You have some good players coming out of today’s high schools. But now, it’s a different thing. Every little school is now a high school – and so very often the coaches go out and recruit the players. At Cornwall College, St. George’s College, and so many of the other top, traditional high schools you don’t hear this sort of thing happening. The children do get a chance to go to a high school – and that’s good. But, the system has changed over the years. There are now many more high schools – and consequently the daCosta Cup competition has now become crowded with scores more competitors than when I was around.
“And so, the goalposts do keep shifting – if even in a manner of speaking!”
over a year ago · Report