Sporting Activities
As a sportsman, McDonald was junior tennis champion of Trinidad & Tobago for many years and first represented that country at the senior level at the age of 16. He played at Wimbledon in the 1950s (the only player from Trinidad or from Guyana to do so). He captained Cambridge University in 1955. He represented Oxford-Cambridge against Harvard-Yale in the Prentice Cup in America in 1952 and in England in 1954. From 1956 to the early 1970s he was champion of Guyana and captained the Guyana Lawn Tennis team. In 1957 he was Guyana’s “Sportsman of the Year” with George De Peana. He also represented and captained Guyana in Squash. He represented the West Indies in its first ever Davis Cup team in 1953 and went on to play for and captain the West Indies Davis Cup team later in 1950s and in the 1960s. He also served as Secretary of the Commonwealth Caribbean Lawn Tennis Association for a number of years.
He received the Guyana National Sports Commission Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Development of Sports in Guyana, in 2006.
He received the Guyana Olympic Association Award for Contribution to the Development of Sport in General and Lawn Tennis in particular, in 2007.
He has the unusual distinction of representing his country in five different decades: tennis (Trinidad) in the 1940s; tennis (Trinidad, Guyana, the West Indies) in 1950s; tennis (Guyana, the West Indies) in the 1960s; tennis and squash (Guyana) in the 1970s; squash (Guyana) in the 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Ian Mc Donald (Guyanese Writer)
Famous quotes containing the words sporting and/or activities:
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)