A leaky tin-roofed home, little food on table, a mother’s sacrifice: 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 ba”. “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 Caribbean Premier League.
“Whenever I am faced with tough challenges, I tell myself, ‘ len I am not doing this for myself… I am doing it for my mother, my ser. 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 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”.
Rovman Powell plays a shot while batting for Delhi Capitals. (Source: iplt20.com)
Life carried on in this vein, until one day when he came back home from school with a bat in hand. Joan, the mother, remembers that day clearly. She had just told him that there was “just little food” for him and his ser when the boy responded, “Don’t worry Mum, I am going to take you out of poverty with cricket.”
It’s a beautiful moment in her life, and heartwarming in her retelling in the CPL show. She breaks down with a most graceful smile that one can imagine, tears reach the brink of her saucer-eyes, and she throws her head back with a smile. “That’s the day he told me. I never ever doubted him. I gave my support.”
Hunger to excel
On Thursday, he hit a whirlwind fifty, slamming a flurry of sixes and fours off Umran Malik , another boy whose rise to fame from a son of a vegetable seller has touched hearts this season. Powell, muscles ripping out, smashed that white ball as if his life depended on it.
In some ways, it is. “There is a hunger deep within me that I want to be compared with top cricketers around the world. When people sit down and talk about good cricketers they have seen, there should be Rovman Powell’s name.” Seldom has a third-person reference to oneself felt so humble. It’s as if he is reading out a dream, a vision statement about his life, before he adds, “Still a long way to go. Keep doing what I am doing, keep improving and I will get there.”

When he gets there, he won’t be alone. His mother, and ser, of course understandably get his grateful raves, but even the way he describes his father says much. “I am thankful for him for being a sperm donor, for donating his sperm for getting me here. I have no hard feelings against him. The days of searching for him are gone. It was tough, not everyone will do good when they should.”
At the end of the show, he is huddled with his mother and ser in their new home that he had bought for them, looking at some photos. A picture of him celebrating a hundred in Harare, Zimbabwe pops up. Powell, whose mother describes him as “quiet, always jovial, easy to get along with” pipes up: “When I get my first girl, my pretty little daughter one day, I will call her Harare!”
Brian Lara named his daughter Sydney after his double hundred at the famed SCG ground in the city. The ser, with a whiff of Michael Holding-ish humour about her (Holding once jested about Lara, “thankfully he didn’t get a hundred in Lahore!” ) retorts, “what if it was a boy?!” Powell stumbles for words, “I don’t know, Zimbabwe boy?!” And a lovely laughter fills up the room. The mother finds her voice even as she lovingly slaps the back of the boy who told her that one day he will get her out of poverty with cricket, “Can’t wait for my granddaughter”.