DC batter Rovman Powell’s rise from poverty to cricketing riches

The day Rovman Powell’s mother Joan Plummer found she was pregnant, her partner told her to abort. She broke off the relationship and decided to go her own way. At the start of every month she would tell herself, “if I can get through this month, then I can do it for one more month”.

She did odd jobs to support herself and Powell popped out, in her words, a “bouncy nine-and-half pounds baby”. “No adjectives are enough to describe my mother. I grew up watching her wash clothes for people just to make a living, just to put food for us, just for me to go to school,” Powell says in a documentary-series produced by Caribbean Premier League.

“Whenever I am faced with tough challenges, I tell myself, ‘ listen I am not doing this for myself… I am doing it for my mother, my sister. Maybe if I was doing it for myself, I would have stopped. I am doing it for the ones I love just so that they can live a better life than what I had when I was a child. She is an incredible woman.”

When Nicholas Dhillon, his sixth-grade teacher, gave the class an activity to do something for their fathers, he found Powell in tears. “Sir I don’t know my father. So I can’t do it,” the kid would say. A stunned Dhillon recalls telling him, “Don’t let it be a stumbling block,” and promised him that he would be a father figure in his life. Life wasn’t easy. If days were spent scratching around for a living – as a boy Powell would raise goats, shepherd them for some money in his small community, the nights too often proved a curse. Especially rainy nights.

It was a ramshackle tin-roofed unpainted structure they lived in. Two rooms in all, and “one was used to cook,” says Powell. A small community in wilderness in the bowels of Jamaica, the family stumbled along led by the dignity of the mother.

When it rained in the nights, the mattress would get soaked up. So, they would move it to the centre of the room, with water dripping all around them. He would tell his mother to sleep and that he would keep a watch on the water pouring down from the roof, making sure it didn’t reach the mattress in the middle. “He always saw himself as a big boy, a man of the house,” the mother smiles. She would gently dissuade him, and take turns to let the kids sleep as much as possible. “so that they get some rest before school in the morning”.