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By Peter Della Penna

On May 23, four days before the USA squad was set to depart for their tour of Bermuda for the ICC Americas Division One Tournament, the youngest member of the designated touring party had his trip ended before it even started. While fielding at long on, 19-year-old Andy Mohammed took a full length dive trying to pull off a spectacular catch and save a boundary in the final Twenty20 match of The Pearls Cup against Jamaica. He accomplished neither and in the process split the webbing between his middle and ring fingers. It wasn’t long before the tears came streaming down his face, not from the pain, but from the realization that the necessary five stitches to close the wound would cause him to miss going to Bermuda to play with USA.

On June 15, in only his second competitive game since returning from the injury, Mohammed notched an unbeaten 109 for his SuperStars team against Royal Stars in the NYPD Cricket Twenty20 Cup. For Mohammed, overcoming hardship is old hat.

Picture (Right): Azurdeen Mohammed  [Courtesy: Azurdeen Mohammed]

To the casual observer, Mohammed gives off the appearance that life is easy. It’s hard to catch the young man doing anything other than smiling and cracking jokes at every opportunity. This is even more remarkable when you discover the path he has taken to make it into the USA national team.

“My heart goes out to my sister whenever we talk about their situation,” said Ajaz Asgarally, Mohammed’s uncle, as he reflected on how his nephew had managed to make it to New Zealand with the USA U-19 World Cup squad in January. Almost nineteen years before, Fazie Khan took her five-month old baby boy Azurdeen, Andy’s birth name, along with her other son Fazurdeen and daughter Sadia away from Trinidad to Guyana. Her husband Saieed had gotten mixed up in drugs and alcohol and she made the decision that this was not the environment to be raising her children.

“He was in the wrong crowd of people so he went in the wrong direction,” said Khan about Saieed, whom Andy has never met. “The situation was very bad. In our family, back home in Guyana, we never grew up in that kind of environment around alcohol. I wanted to get away from that because of the kids. I wanted them to grow up in a decent family.” Instead of being surrounded by vices as his father had, Andy has been consumed with cricket for as long as his mother can remember.

“When Andy was growing up, since he could walk, he was always holding a bat in his hand,” said Khan. “All of his cousins and uncles are cricketers so he always followed behind them going to the cricket ground.” His Aunt Seema took notice of the boy’s love of cricket and started calling him Andy Caddick, who had recently debuted for England at this point in time. The name stuck.

With Saieed out of the picture, Asgarally became one of the primary masculine figures in the life of Andy. The fact that Asgarally had played cricket at the U-19 level for Guyana certainly gave Mohammed someone to look up to early on. It seemed that Mohammed could follow in his footsteps too, but when he was 12, the family moved to Orlando, Florida, and he wasn’t too sure he would be able to play cricket in America.

“It was a change. I was little. I didn’t know what was going on,” said Mohammed about the transition to life in a new country. “When it comes to cricket, I didn’t know if I was going to play cricket anymore. I thought that part of my life was done.” This initial skepticism was fleeting though. A short time later, he found himself on the same field as one of his heroes who lived right in his new neighborhood.

“One week I got a call saying that [Shivnarine] Chanderpaul is playing a game and they want me to play with him. So I actually got a chance to bat with him,” said Mohammed. The starry-eyed kid got to bat with the West Indies superstar. While the chances are good that Chanderpaul doesn’t remember the encounter, it’s clearly a seminal moment in the cricketing odyssey of Mohammed as it clued him in to the idea that he could sustain his passion for the game while growing up in America.

Pic (Right): Andy Mohammed hooks on his way to a heroic 70 against Australia at the ICC U-19 World Cup [Picture Courtesy: Daniela Zaharia]

“He scored a hundred that game, but he got out early,” said Mohammed. “I couldn’t remember what I scored. I was just enjoying all of that. I was just like, let me take in this moment. He got out earlier but the crowd wanted him to bat so he batted again. Ever since then, I realized that cricket is in the United States and when I moved to New York, that’s when my Uncle Ajaz, he took me up and he put me to play Under-15 in New York. He took me to trials and I made the team in ’04 and I captained the team to Chicago. That’s when I made my first hundred when I was 13. I made my first century over there. We won five games and the championship.”

The performance in Chicago is when Asgarally says that Mohammed first demonstrated that he could be a very promising player. The next year, New York’s U-15 squad went to Southern California and defended their national title. Then in 2007 and 2008, Mohammed kept up his winning contributions with the New York Region as he helped the U-19 squad to back-to-back national championships.

“He was talented, like most of the kids that come from the Caribbean,” said Lester Hooper, the New York Region U-19 Team Manager, about his first impressions of Mohammed. “He knew a lot about the game, very enthusiastic, had a great appetite, always wanted to play, the ideal person that you would try to mold to be a senior player for the US.”

Hooper isn’t kidding when he says Mohammed always wants to play. According to his mom, the first thing she sees when she comes home from a long day is Mohammed walking around ready to practice his shots.

“Every day I get home from work, he has his bat in his hands,” said Khan. “He has his bat in his hands and he asks, ‘Mom, can you toss me that chicken bone?’ and he just imagine a ball in front of him with that chicken bone. He is so into cricket.”

Sometimes though, there have been distractions that have gotten in the way and almost managed to cost him some golden opportunities. After such a long run of dominance with the New York Region, the Queens Village resident found himself without a roster spot when it came time for the 2009 National U-19 Tournament, after which a squad was going to be picked from the event to represent USA at the first round of U-19 World Cup Qualifying matches in Toronto.

“We decided to exclude him from the trials,” said Hooper. “The New York youth program has specific criteria in order to be selected for the team. Up until the time we had the trials, he did not meet any of those requirements. It was unfortunate because he’s a talented player, but we have to go by the rules. The rules are the rules and we don’t bend them for anyone.” The major part of those requirements mentioned by Hooper apparently was a series of winter practices that took place at indoor facilities on the weekends.

“It was every Saturday,” said Hooper. “Given the fact that the USACA tournament was held early in the summer, we were basically practicing in the indoor facility during the winter. It was not just practice bowling and batting. It was basically assessing each player mentally, trying to assess them off the field as well. Unfortunately, he didn’t show up. For whatever reasons, he never communicated that to us until after he found out that he was excluded from the trials. It was very unfortunate because he was surely missed.”

Mohammed and Asgarally both claim that Andy was working at a law office part-time to help support his single mother. Khan works as a housekeeper and looks after an autistic child to make ends meet for Andy, Fazurdeen and Sadia, as well as Sadia’s toddler daughter Zaarah, whom Sadia is raising alone after divorcing her husband. Other sources claim that Mohammed’s problems with New York Region management date back a year earlier to the 2008 National U-19 Tournament in Florida when among other things, he was allegedly caught in the hotel bar as a 17-year-old.

Asgarally called up Mahadeo Ajodhi, the Manager for the North East Region U-19 squad, who allowed Mohammed to come to their region’s tryouts and practices in Connecticut. Mohammed is very grateful to his uncle, who drove him there from New York on three consecutive weekends to fit in with the team’s plans. North East Region U-19 Coach Tony Boyke says that Mohammed made a quick adjustment to his new squad in that tournament.

“He listened to my directions and he did outstanding for me at those games. I didn’t have a problem with him,” said Boyke. “He brought to my team, at that time, an opening batsman who could guide the team. When you have opening batsmen, that’s what you need, leadership, and he showed leadership at the top, and batted well, fielded well and wicketkeep well for me. He was an all-round outstanding player for me at that tournament.”

Mohammed was selected for the USA U-19 squad after two half-centuries and 157 runs in three innings for North East. It was only a sign of things to come. In his first major contribution for USA’s U-19 team, he turned in a Man of the Match performance in a crucial encounter against Bermuda at the ICC U-19 World Cup Americas Qualifier last July. The left-hand batsman scored 60 opening the match before taking 3 for 15 bowling left-arm orthodox spin to push USA to victory by 61 runs.

In the Global Qualifier two months later, Mohammed notched USA’s highest score in the tournament as he grinded out 90 runs from the top of the order in his team’s loss to Afghanistan. Mohammed spent time fluctuating between the middle order and playing as an opening batsman throughout the USA U-19 squad’s path to New Zealand and it was from the number six slot that he had perhaps his most impressive performance scoring 70 runs in a defeat to Australia. Mohammed’s innings brought some respectability back to his team after they had been reduced to 28 for 7 by Alister McDermott and Josh Hazlewood, who made his ODI debut for Australia’s senior side on June 22 against England.

“I think I became more experienced being that I faced better bowlers than we have here in the United States,” Mohammed said of his U-19 World Cup journey. “You just have good bowlers coming at you spell after spell, especially when you’re playing teams like South Africa, Australia and Ireland. I learned how to put away the good balls. That’s what I’m working on actually. When you play at that level, you have to learn to put away balls that in the United States you normally don’t score off of. When you’re playing at that level, you need to score off the good balls.”

Mohammed was a shooting guard on the varsity basketball team for two years at Forest Hills HS in Queens and counts ten-pin bowling as one of his favorite hobbies. But they just can’t compete with the feeling he gets every time he steps out onto a cricket field. The fact that his mom works so hard to support his passion only makes him more driven to succeed.

“I think when it comes to cricket, she always pushes me. My mom, she’s like my best friend,” said Mohammed, who currently works overnight shifts as a security guard while juggling the pursuit of a college education along with his cricket career.

“I work Monday to Friday, but I never take a weekend job because of Andy,” said Khan. “I always want to be there to support him. I work from morning until night Monday to Friday but not on Saturday when Andy has his games.”

Mohammed hopes that his most recent century in the NYPD Twenty20 Cup shows the USA senior team selectors that he’s healthy again and that despite missing an opportunity to go to Bermuda, he wants a chance to prove he belongs. Even though he’s still a teenager, he feels he has a lot to offer USA at the senior level.

“I think I can add youth,” said Mohammed. “I feel like I add a better intensity in the field being that I’m very active in the field and hopefully bring a lot to the table when it comes to the batting.”

If Mohammed gets selected to be a part of USA’s team to go to Italy for World Cricket League Division Four in August, it would be one more instance of his will to triumph over adversity and make things happen.