‘Don’t worry, mom. I’ll take care of the water’: The night that made Rovman Powell

Rovman Powell, the big-hitting Caribbean star who makes bowlers around the world lose sleep, now plays in leagues for money that would have seemed like a fairy tale to that boy with wet feet. But he remembers those damp nights with the clarity of yesterday. “I knew the importance of a male figure in the house,” he says simply. “I was that male figure.”

“My mom was a single mother, and my sister was there. As a male, part of your job is to protect, I felt then,’ he adds.

Natural. The word hangs in the air. What’s natural for an 11-year-old? Playing with friends, perhaps. Worrying about homework. What grammar of survival produces a boy who understands himself, at 11, as the one who must stay awake?

He turns that question about his childhood to talk about economics. “I grew up in a small family where small entrepreneurships is a way to go, you know, that often results in more sellers than buyers. In a third-world country as Jamaica, a lot of people are not from stable financial backgrounds. My mom, Joanne, a single mother, worked several jobs. She slogged for us.” And he watched her work on their unfinished house year after year, trying to do a little bit, never quite able to complete it.

It was in grade six that he made his promise. Came home from school and told his mother: “Listen to me. I’m going to change things around. Just give me time. I am a boy now. But as soon as I get older, I’m gonna change things around.”

Powell reveals the mathematics of his childhood: “I always believed that cricket or education is the vehicle to drive my family out of poverty.” And she believed him. That mattered to him. He took education seriously at school. He played cricket intensely knowing that it could take care of his family. More than mere love of a game.

But grade six held another defining moment. His teacher, Nicholas Dillon, gave an assignment involving fathers. Powell broke down. He didn’t know his father, who had left the mother early.

Dillon’s response would shape a life: “Don’t let that define you. Don’t use it as a stumbling block. Use it as a pillar of growth to ensure you are the total opposite of your father.” The relationship became father and son, born from teacher and student. They still talk once or twice a week. “Massive respect and gratitude for him,” Powell says.

The cricket came in stages. Jamaica Under-19s, where he looked around after doing well and thought: just maybe. A scholarship to the University of the West Indies, working under Robert Samuels, who remains his batting coach today. Then the golden moment—getting picked by Jamaica Tallawahs for the CPL at what he calls “a good price.

His first thought when he saw the money? “What am I going to do with so much money? I’ve never seen that type of money.” His first big purchase wasn’t a car, though that came later. First, he asked his mother to list every debt. The television, the fridge, the stove… then he paid all of it.

“That lifted all that weight off her shoulder,” he says. “So she can walk around now a little bit freer.”

The heavy lifting of childhood, Powell believes, shows up in how he bats. “You build that natural, strong resistance from a young age,” he explains. If water needed carrying, he carried it. If something needed lifting, he lifted it. The body learnt what his mind already knew: that he was the one who would bear things. The man of the family. “So, now it shows in my cricket where you are strong and you hit the ball as hard as you can”. Muscle memory as autobiography.

Sometimes now, he sits with his mother and they just laugh about it. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine traveling the world to play cricket. “Your imagination sometimes is as far as you can see,” he says. Through IPL contracts and ILT20 performances in Dubai, through all the leagues and all the sixes, Powell says he’s never strayed from who he is. “I’ve always stayed rooted, stay grounded to who I am.”

On Wednesday, Rovman Powell will play in the T20 World Cup in Mumbai. He will hit big sixes. What’s the piffling matter of pressure of a World Cup for that 11-year-old boy who stood guard, pushing away the water from his mother and sister, and who kept his word, after all. The house got finished. The debts got paid. The dream became real.

The rain still falls in Jamaica, but now when it does, there’s a proper roof to keep it out.