George Headley: How the brilliance of the West Indian hitter was shaped by the Panama Canal

Yet for the great West Indian hitter of the same era of the 1930s - George Headley - there isn't really a plaque in his hometown.

Headley's rise to the top world of cricket and an indelible place in the history of the game is a story involving the unlikely Panama Canal construction project, baseball and finally West Indian cricket.

Employment in the Panama Canal Zone brought the father of Headley, aged 20, De Coursey from Barbados to the Central American country in March 1908.

Shortly after arriving, he met Irene Roberts, a Jamaican woman of a similar age.

In the pier district of Cristobal, you ar, the cricketer whom legendary writer CLR James called "the Caribbean's first folk hero" came into the world.

Life for many black people in Colon has never been easy.

American engineers and politicians encouraged black West Indians, whose ancestors had worked in the cane fields of the West Indies, to build the waterway the 51-mile course to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on the assumption that they could cope with the harsh tropical climate and disease.

The idea was that a mild bout of yellow fever in childhood apparently protected many West Indians for life, while the infection tended to prove fatal to other workers.

Yet the West Indians were just as susceptible to malaria, and the snakes and tarantulas in the swamps dredged by them do not were like nothing they had seen on their island homes.

< p class="" data-reactid=".iah2mj2484.0.0.0.1.$paragraph-13">The year of birth of Headley, US President William Taft effectively ordered that all black workers in the Panama Canal Zone b We switched to the roll of cash.

In addition to better pay, gold workers were entitled to sick and home leave, better housing, and more subsidized entertainment. Blacks had to use separate toilets and stores.

Despite a kind of segregation ruled by the United States at the time, the young Headley mixed with Panamanian children as a child.

This partly explained why he had no real affection for cricket during his formative years . However, by the age of eight, George spoke mostly Spanish and, like his childhood friends, he was much more interested in baseba...