While in school David ‘Wagga’ Hunt was that tall sixth former in the crisp white shirt who introduced many of us to the game of chess. Up to that time my classmates and I were convinced that chess was a game played only by Russians with weird sounding names such as Karpov and Spassky and the enigmatic American Bobby Fischer. As captain of the school’s chess team Wagga took it upon himself to go from classroom to classroom during the lunch breaks to talk about this esoteric game, trying to convince us to learn it and start playing. At that time most of us had more interest in the ritualistic pulsating lunch hour box-football games being played under the pavilion but we stayed to listen to Wagga anyway probably thinking that playing chess would make us smarter. Because of Wagga’s obvious passion for the game many of my classmates, including myself, took a liking to it and went out and bought our first chess sets so that we could learn the game and play at home as well as at school.
I recall that Wagga organized an inter-form chess competition which I entered for the fun of it as I was, and still am, a lousy player. To my utter surprise I somehow managed to win one game by beating a member of the school’s chess team who resigned our lunch time game in disgust after I had captured his queen! Those were the only points I won in the competition. A year or so after Wagga left school KC’s chess team was made up of three members of my class, namely, Vance Gardiner, Peter Smith and Paul Smith plus a prodigious fifth former Neil Fairclough. That team in true KC style won the inaugural Inter-Schools Chess Competition in 1975. I am sure that they credited Wagga for their success because I did. Fairclough, who was also an athlete, went on to become Jamaica’s chess champion and was for many years Jamaica’s leading and top ranked player. I would like to think that KC’s chess tradition began with Wagga who could see that chess was a worthwhile and enjoyable game at which KC boys could excel. I still follow chess to this day and recently read where a past popular world chess champion Kasporov (one of the Russians with a weird sounding name) is considering a run for the Russian presidency when President Putin steps down.
At school I never saw Wagga playing football neither did he participate in track and field but, ironically, these were the areas in which he had tremendous success after leaving KC. We all know by now that the MeadHaven Football Club was his baby and that they won many competitions and trophies over the years in various KSAFA junior leagues. He was also a Pelicans player/coach/ manager and his exploits at Calabar, culminating with a stint as national junior football coach, are well known and documented. The only time I ever saw Wagga play football was probably around 7 years ago when I accompanied one of my friends who was on the Pelican’s team to a training session at the UWI Bowl one evening. (The Pelican players are UWI alumni who play in the Masters League Competition) There were many KC Old Boys on the Pelicans squad then, including Peter Thompson, Denzil Wilks, Max Straw and the late Guy Jones. When a friend of mine who did not know Wagga called me a few years ago to tell me that Wagga was named the football coach at Calabar I immediately told him that Wagga would bring a new dimension to schoolboy football. “And what’s that,” he asked. “Brains” I, replied. During the competition he called me back to tell me that I was right as Wagga had taken the Calabar team to new heights and was showing that he was a different kind of coach.
However, to me and many, Wagga was best known as that brilliant publisher of the outstanding Champs Magazine published a few days before Champs year after year. Some people go to Champs and simply buy a copy of the official programme. The true track and field aficionado however, would not go to Champs without buying Wagga’s magazine (Champ’s Preview) as a matter of course.
If you wanted to know which school had the best chance of winning then you had to refer, or defer, to Wagga’s magazine. One had to ignore what the coaches were saying, ignore what the fans were saying and also what the athletes themselves were saying; all one had to do was to read Champ’s Preview to see what Wagga was saying. Nine times out of ten Wagga got it right; even down to which team would finish in the cellar with four points or less!
There were statistics in his magazine that left you asking, “How on earth did Wagga know that?” How did he know for instance, and was able to predict, accurately, that John Brown from Belfield High (and where on earth is Belfield High anyway?) was going to win the 5000m by all of 30 seconds from the second placed runner from Guys Hill High? How did he know that? And how did he know that those were the only points that Guys Hill High would score over the days of the competition? There’s more. How did he know that Tom Stroke, the defending Class 2 high jumper from Morant Bay High for instance, was carrying a slight metatarsal injury (look it up) and was unlikely to win the event this time around even though he dominated it last year? Did anybody other than Wagga and a few coaches document such things? Even though Wagga was a die-hard Fortis he was never biased in his predictions. If his analyses showed that KC would finish fourth in the standings then that was what he wrote. If you got into an argument with him he would show you where all of KC’s points would come from and state that three schools, and only three, would get more. To him it was that simple. And who could argue with that.
Sitting in the stands at the National Stadium year after year we (my Champs posse) often wondered if Wagga attended every athletic meet in Jamaica in the track season as well as every Sports Day held at every high school across the island (including Belfield’s and Guys Hill’s) in order to be able to document and make those accurate predictions for Champs. Invariably, on the final night of Champs we would all be comparing the official points standing after each race with Wagga’s predicted points standing and more often than not Wagga was right on target.
For those who do not know, the entire Hunt Family went to KC - the males anyway. Their father went to KC in the days of Bishop Gibson. Paul, who was in my class, often spoke about Garth his eldest brother who had left KC and was at UWI in Trinidad by the time we got to first form. And I do recall coming across the youngest brother Christopher when I was in 6th form and he was in second or third form. Christopher went on to play Manning Cup football for KC in the early 1980s and in an interview a few months ago Wagga reminisced that it was Christopher who initially got him involved in coaching by asking him to coach his corner league football side, which he did. That coaching initiation apparently led to the formation of the Meadhaven Football Club a few years later!
Now that Wagga is gone, I will have to search for the last edition of Champs Preview magazine that I bought and put it away, carefully, in his memory.
