Compton Cricket Team Blends Rap With Royalty

It’s a long way from the streets of Compton to the grounds of Windsor Castle, where the Homies and Popz cricket team took tea with Prince Edward and performed their hip-hop cricket rap for him.

It’s a long way from the gangs and graffiti of their home turf to the iridescent green grounds at Lord’s, the Yankee Stadium of cricket, where some of England’s best tutored them in batting and bowling.

It’s a long way, but Steve Aranda is glad he made the switch “from gats to bats,” as the rap song says.

“At first I didn’t want my friends making fun of me. Now I think they can make fun of me all they want because I am going to get the last laugh,” said Aranda, 18. “Cricket is taking me to places that people in Compton don’t go.”

The team that includes homeboys and homeless men winds up an 18-day tour of cricket life on the other side of the Atlantic today, a trip that has offered many their first glimpse of a foreign land, or at least of a place where just about everybody knows what cricket is and how to play.

Their match against the Windsor Castle staff was rained out, but they played at Hambledon, considered the birthplace of cricket, lost to a civil service team in Northern Ireland and beat a Charing Cross homeless team at Honoroak.

So what did they think of Britain?

Well, the Guinness tastes like cold coffee, the eggs are too watery, and no matter how many of those little tea sandwiches you eat, you never feel ‘em in your stomach. It rains “too damn much,” and $60 gets you about half as many (expletive deleted) pounds. Folks are hard to understand, and they use oddball words like “chaps” and “cheers.”

But it’s great.

“It’s a whole different thing,” said Aranda. “In Compton, I go out of my house, I have to be watching my back. Someone asks where you’re from, and if you say ‘nowhere’ they still try to mess with you. And if you say you’re from somewhere, it’s worse trouble.

“Here, I go out of the hotel and I don’t have to worry. It’s so good,” he said.

The Compton cricket team is the brainchild of Los Angeles homeless activist Ted Hayes and his partner Katy Haber, a native of London who actually knew something about the game before leading Hayes to a match in Beverly Hills in 1994.

Hayes played and loved it. He introduced some of the homeless men he worked with at the Dome Village housing complex to cricket, a centuries-old precursor to baseball, and soon realized that this civilized game would be good for inner-city kids, as well.

A homeless player who had grown up in Compton told Hayes that if he could sell cricket in Compton, he could sell it anywhere in America. Hayes headed for schools in Compton to recruit his team, and the Homies and Popz was born--the first all-American team in America.

The only requirement for membership is respect, Hayes says. Players have to respect their parents, teachers and law enforcement officials. They can be in a gang or on the cricket team, but not both.

For Hayes, cricket is about etiquette. Respecting the umpire and the other team, learning how to play well and to lose well and, in the process, learning to respect yourself.

“The game is bigger than any individual, and the etiquette of the game is bigger than the game itself,” Hayes said.

It is a message that Hayes feels has been lost on other American sports such as baseball, football, boxing and even that tame game of golf.

“Americans have ruined sport, taken the word sport and turned it into war or money. I believe Muhammad Ali must bear a lot of responsibility for that. He boasted about how he was the best and how much money he was getting, and now every athlete is egotistical, proud and uncooperative. They fight, don’t get along with the coaching staff, everything we try to teach our children not to do, and they get paid for it,” he said.

Hayes is aware that most Americans could not distinguish cricket from lacrosse, and many of those who can find it as exciting as watching paint dry, but he believes that cricket will catch on in the United States in the next decade.

His team members think he’s right. After all, it caught them quickly enough.

When a friend first told Aranda about a new cricket team three years ago, Aranda said, “What the hell is that?” He watched a game and thought, “Damn, I don’t understand nothin’ of this.”

Now he hopes to play pro one day.

Robert Saxton, 16, rode out with his stepfather to see the Homies and Popz practice a game he had never heard of. “I thought, ‘. . . I want to go home.’ I walked home.”

But he agreed to try once more, and four months ago he joined the team.

“After a while, I started loving it,” he said. “It’s changed my whole attitude toward life. I used to do things--I didn’t care if I went to jail or died. It was like an heirloom--in my family everyone’s been in jail or a gang. I guess I gotta be the one to break the chain.”

Thanks to the trip sponsored by the British men’s magazine Maxim, the Homies and Popz now has seen other kinds of heirlooms--the trophies at Lord’s and the armor at Windsor Castle (“You grew up in that castle?” Theo Hayes, 27, asked Prince Edward. “Did you ever get in trouble for trying to get into the swords?”)

They have had the pros help them work on their bowling (that’s pitching) arm and batting form, and traded stories about the game they have come to regard as a bigger challenge than drugs and gats, or guns.

“When you’re batting, you just want to hit that ball. You feel you want to be out there all day. It feels good,” said team captain Emidio Cazarez, 17.

“A game like soccer to me is just up and down, up and down, all you do is score. Here, you catch ‘em out, bowl ‘em out, you’re batting and trying to hit runs. Different people are pitching with different spins.

“It’s tricky. And you can’t argue with the umpire,” he said. “In soccer, you’re cussing and getting mad and start fights. Here, you’re just happy you played the game.”