Cover Story - Fall 2021
Business leader, bank chairman, and tennis academy founder Mitch Lake is one of the most powerful men in Anguilla. With the island country in crisis over a daunting new tax and still recovering from the pandemic and Hurricane Irma, is he the man to lead Anguilla to a new future?
by Michael Augsberger

“It felt like my ears were in an airplane,” Helene said, recalling the hurricane that dismantled and mangled everything that wasn’t rooted to the ground in Anguilla and some items that were. “Pop. Air pressure. Oh, my Lord. That was something.” Four years on, you can still see former dwellings dotting every road on the island, skeletons battered by Hurricane Irma’s 180-mile-an-hour gusts and left for the Caribbean sun to bake. The poverty on the island does not seem abject; people do not live in these shacks or wander around homeless. They’ve simply abandoned them and moved on, unable to afford to finish the repairs, or to start at all.
Helene Blake and her son Dimitri, who was nine then, were too scared to wait out the storm alone in their house, so they went to a friend’s. When they got back, they found the whole house flooded. Three months passed until electricity was restored. Within a few days, though, along with Red Cross and British military aid, they received a generator so they could at least wash clothes.
They live just off Blowing Point Road, so named because it connects the main thoroughfare to the customs and ferry offices at Blowing Point on the southern coast. Turn left up the small hill and you’ll brake at one of the island’s five stoplights. Turn right instead and you’ll hit open field, tall brown grass and cooling squalls. Just beyond that is a rotting pavilion of bleachers facing a basketball court. And next to this are the white concrete arches of the Anguilla Tennis Academy, a six-court oasis that, since the hurricane, remains the only public courts on the entire island. Dimitri has been playing since he was five. The academy gave him his first racquet, and he gave it a name. “I don’t remember, it was years ago!” he claims, running off with his hands covering his ears to spare him the embarrassment, thirteen now and above such things.
His mother, a petite, short-haired masseuse at Anguilla’s Four Seasons Resort, has spent much of the pandemic looking for work. She relies on the commissions she receives from scheduling massages with their affluent clientele. Thirty years ago she’d gone to Iowa to train for her career—”I cried every day”—and then Berkeley. There are no mediocre masseuses at a Four Seasons, and Helene is one of their best. But with the resort shuttered so long due to COVID-19, times were tough.
This summer Dimitri walked, ran, rode to the academy however he could get there for his morning lessons. Mitchelle Lake, the academy’s founder, brings in foreign coaches to spark excitement for its summer programs. At the close of my first day there, Lake introduced to a rapt audience under the arches Kimberly and Natalie Kempf, an American mother and her college-age daughter, tennis lovers who frequented the island and were establishing a scholarship to fund a child’s tennis lessons for a year. To Dimitri it was a total, joyous surprise when they announced his name. He rose from his seat and embraced them. It was not, however, out of character. For the generator and extra supplies the Blakes received in Irma’s aftermath had come from, of all places, the tennis academy.
***

I traveled there in mid-July with Tennis Central and a group of ten high- and middle-school tennis hopefuls from Washington DC to run the summer sessions for two weeks. We found an Anguilla in crisis. After rebuilding from Irma, after reopening since the pandemic, the British overseas territory was fiercely debating a new goods and service tax meant to eat away at its massive debt. Britain, in short, was telling them to pay their way.
The GST was on every tongue. The vote was to be held just days after our return to the States. If passed it would foist a thirteen percent hike onto every transaction on the island. The government desperately needed funds, and the pressure mounted to avoid the dreaded words I heard often: failed state. But for a people rollicked by so much turmoil and now barely regaining footing, was the timing right? The tourists would no doubt pay, but what of the islanders? If spending were to stagnate in the wake of higher prices, the plan would be useless. As a number of citrus-oriented Caribbeans advised me, there is only so much juice in the orange.
On court, the kids knew little of it. It was a service trip and a luxury vacation. Before the sun grew too hot we’d pack up the dusty Renault van, which struggled to climb the steep, unpaved hill outside our residence, and drive over the pothole-infested roads to organize drills and teach technique at the academy. In the afternoon we’d return to the West End shore, to Santosha, which spreads over a campus that includes a private beach, a heated pool, and four cottages to go along with the three-story main villa. Celebrities love Anguilla for its seclusion and personalized service, and the locals fawn over no one. The personal chef, Leon, had served LeBron James and Lionel Ritchie. Next door, teen actress Skai Jackson of Disney Channel fame vacationed with her family. She considered our invitation to the tennis academy: “I’ll have to ask my mom.”
So the contrast between the two worlds was stark, not absolute. What was once colonial angst became acute need during the hurricane, and that has morphed into paycheck-to-paycheck existence as relied-upon tourism only just now returns following a year of closed resorts. You don’t really see it, but families are hurting. The kids came but needed racquets. Racquets could be found but needed grips. Not all could pay the seventy-five dollars a month to attend, yet they played thanks to scholarships. Many factors contribute, like shipping and isolation in the Caribbean, but as much as anything catering to tourists drives up prices everywhere so that locals pay the same resort prices as gentry. Gas was six dollars a gallon.
Yann Auzoux, former Davis Cup player for Cameroon and the leader of the trip as CEO of Tennis Central, meant to impress all this upon the American kids lest it be lost amidst the luxury. “It’s not about feeling guilt,” he told them at our oceanside dinners. “We just need to have gratitude. Respect the difference, reflect on it, and that’ll help us serve them better.”
Early in our stay, Mitch joined us at dinner and retired to the open night air with me and Yann as the two executives traded stories about former employees who tried to take over their businesses. Not only does Mitch run the ATA; he is managing director of ABC Supplies, the Home Depot of Anguilla. In all the planning the two had never met until now and were becoming fast friends and partners. I could have heard the clinks of the ice and tasted the Scotch, such was the feeling, except that for the entire trip I never once saw either take a sip. (“I can count on one hand the times since our wedding that I’ve seen Yann drink,” said his wife, Olivia, “and that includes the reception.”)
The tennis world seemingly is as full of backstabbers as any corporate ladder. “People writing checks to this guy’s name and not the business,” Yann said. “Then I’m hearing he’s breaking away and taking the whole state with him. But you can steal the set-up and all the infrastructure. The truth is you simply can’t do what I do. And it didn’t take long for people to see.”
Mitch nodded, patting my shoulder. “When I was in the hospital, I guess a lot of people thought I wouldn’t make it,” he said. “One of my tennis directors, here on a work permit, set it all in motion.” Straight from the hospital he walked in on him in flagrante: The usurper sat at Mitch’s desk at the tennis academy, holding court, as shock fell upon them. “Mitch! So glad you’re healthy!” In a matter of days, all the staff ratted him out and stayed loyal to Mitch.
They told each other the names and where the rebels ended up living out tennis exiles—one in New York, the other on some far-flung island, a Tennis Elba. The coups were squashed. The titans were not to be screwed with.
How did these two kindred coaching spirits, one emerging from French Cameroon’s revolutionary families, the other from this Caribbean outpost, both with their high-performing wives essential to their businesses, their outsiders’ view of the tennis establishment and coaching philosophies, ever cross so many miles to meet? As so much in Anguilla does, for that we rely on the resorts, and the money old and new that fills them.
***

Mitchelle Lake grew up in a one-story house that now sits just inside the fencing of Anguilla’s only airport. Despite its expansion in the early 2000s, the runway can still accommodate only smaller aircraft, which is why the two entries to Anguilla remain hopper flights from Puerto Rico and speeder ferries from St. Maarten. The latter, how we arrived, takes twenty minutes and passes from the high-rise Dutch side of St. Maarten to the French shanties before hitting the open water. “We have to go fast as it’ll be choppier going to Anguilla than coming back,” the captain told me. “Otherwise the spray would soak you.”
As always in a fisherman’s hat and black shades, Mitch took me to visit the house. Years ago it wasn’t as big as I saw it; his father built onto it gradually as the family grew, as most families in Anguilla do. Mitch can do much as pleases on his island with the connections he has, but he could only look with affection through chain-link at his childhood home. The airport had claimed the land for the expansion. It hadn’t razed the structure, though, or done much else with it. Dry weeds flourished around the front porch. “My father would sit right there with his table,” he said. “Every supplier would come to the airport, drive here, and conduct business on the porch.”
Calvin Washington Lake was a contractor who ran his own construction business. He used to ride his bicycle from The Quarter to Island Harbor in the east to visit Janet, the girl he loved. They married, and Mitch was their first child of four. Mitch told me over the wails of saws, goats, and airplanes how he’d care for the animals and make rows for corn and peas before walking to school each morning. Work shortages inspired Calvin to pivot his business model to selling supplies instead of building himself. All the lumber was laid out in the yard around the house. No roof, just a cover of sheets of plywood to cover some of it. “He taught us to tie knots to strap the wood so the sun doesn’t bend it out of shape,” Mitch said. “And if it got a bend, we’d turn it over, and the sun would bend it back again.”
A perfectionist in business and family life, Calvin was firm with his oldest son, who loved tennis but felt the dream of playing causing a rift between them. Mitch was inspired by Andre Agassi, who with flowing hair, loud outfits and overall rebelliousness in his younger years did not exactly pose as a beacon toward parental authority. Eric Martineau, a tennis coach and pilot, owned a court near the old Mariners resort—whose ghostlike courts and pavilions I visited, aghast at their state of disrepair—and held free clinics for kids on Saturdays, quizzing them on geography and the capitals of the world. He took a liking to young Mitch and made sure to include him when he could arrange for visiting coaches to teach more than the fundamentals, to which Martneau, devoted though he was, knew he was limited. Before long Mitch became the number one junior on the island. “That has to be put in perspective,” he said. “A far cry from competing around the Caribbean or the U.S.” He set his goal: To earn a scholarship to play in college in America.
But his father never believed tennis would do anything for him. It was the sport of the elite, of British colonialism, and of the resorts. “Because I didn’t like construction,” Mitch said, “he thought I wasn’t disciplined enough to be successful in life. He wanted me to be like him, jack of all trades and master of none. That’s what it takes to be a success on a small island, he thought.”
When Mitch graduated from Anguilla’s only high school, he turned down the University of the West Indies and a route to a stable government or teaching job. Instead he went to Cap Juluca—one of Anguilla’s most prestigious West End resorts, for whom Greg Norman designed the island’s sole golf course—sweeping the courts and answering phones for a few dollars an hour. His father grew restless, saying he had no designs on supporting a prodigal son. With enough dues put in Mitch might have become a teaching pro or facility manager in obscurity.
Cap Juluca, fate would have it, attracts the opposite of obscure to its staterooms. Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and avid tennis player, happened to be vacationing there and made his way to the courts with fellow billionaire Richard Branson, of Virgin Group. They met Mitch and liked him so much they offered to fly him to Thailand for a tennis camp. And they discussed paying his way to college in the States, which Johnson eventually did. The tycoon insisted Mitch stay with his family for two weeks before the first semester. Like Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon, the Anguillan wouldn’t let the chauffeur carry his racquet bags at Dulles.
Mitch played at Gardner-Webb University, just outside Charlotte, NC, and majored in mathematics. For a time afterward he jetsetted as tutor and personal tennis coach to Johnson’s son, Brett. “We only stayed in presidential suites, wherever we went,” says Mitch. Once they went to the U.S. Open in New York. Upon arrival they received two invitations to the stadium’s suites. “‘The Williams sisters’ or President Clinton’s?’ Bob asked me. ‘The president.’”
Dinners with Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, Ritz-Carltons, custom Range Rovers—“It was a great life, surprising that someone would leave it,” Mitch says. “People that powerful aren’t used to being told that you find something more meaningful to you.” The lifestyle couldn’t be better, but he lacked the drive of building something for himself now that he’d experienced dashing entrepreneurship up close. He saw the poverty of parts of Washington DC, where the Johnsons lived, and tried to instill in his lessons with Brett a sense of responsibility to the poor. It is one that he himself feels toward Anguilla. After he left, he taught math for a few years in Virginia.
In 1996, Mitch founded the Anguilla Tennis Academy. With it he hoped to help Anguillan children earn their own college scholarships. In the beginning it was just two public courts in The Valley, Anguilla’s capital town, and whatever off-season court time he could scramble from the resorts. He continued Martineau’s tradition of inviting foreign coaches to taste the island’s delights and serve its children. The first ones he hosted were his Gardner-Webb teammates. But his grand plans for a facility of his own quickly came to fruition.
His father had since expanded the store from the backyard to a four-hundred-square-foot building next door. Calvin closed it early the day Mitch gave his presentation to islanders outlining his dreams for the academy, so he could attend. “This is pure,” his father told him. “This is good.” The man who cast a blind eye on his son because of tennis now saw what the game could bring his people. “Everyone thought I was passionate just about the academy,” Mitch says, “but I never told them the truth. I was finally having a relationship with my dad over something that tore us apart.”
The airport’s eminent domain seizure of the family home so strained Calvin that Mitch blames it for his father’s downturn in health and death in 2005 at just fifty-two. “Just before he passed, he advised me what to do. He gave me a blueprint for the supplies business. When I was struggling to raise funds for the academy, he said, ‘I saw it.’ He used the past tense. ‘It is so pure, so good for the country, that people will come from diverse places to help you. You won’t know them, but they will know you.’”
It has turned out to be true. Liam Neeson and Billy Ray Cyrus have visited. The most chance encounters have led to great things. Natalie Kempf, whose family would eventually fund Dimitri Blake’s lessons, happened to book a lesson at the Four Seasons. Why don’t you visit the academy? her coach asked. She fell in love with the kids. Yann Auzoux happened to be her high school coach back home.
Before knowing all that, Mitch returned from the U.S. to devote himself full-time to what he’d fled at the start, the family business.
***

To understand the trademark Anguillan distrust of its foreign partners, you have to understand the island’s romantic history. It’s never had a power-couple marriage or a solid, tender, lasting one. They’ve all been marriages of convenience. Nor has Anguilla been robust enough to remain single for long.
It changed hands twice between the French and English in the 1600s, with subsequent French attacks repelled well through the 1700s. Slaves were brought from Africa to plant mostly tobacco, though salt amassed at Road Salt Pond eventually became a vital export. It was ruled from Antigua until the British incorporated it into St. Kitts and Nevis in 1882. Murals commemorating the 1969 Anguillan Revolution paint St. Kitts premier Robert Bradshaw as a tyrant, with good reason. Anguilla had no electricity at that point, and islanders blamed St. Kitts for hoarding all the funding from the mother country for itself. Two referendums were held, and the people voted for independence.
Ronald Webster led the first independent Republic of Anguilla, hoisting the three-dolphin flag for less than a year until three hundred British troops landed to return the Crown’s territory. The “invasion” of so small an island sparked worldwide indignation—some dubbed it the Bay of Piglets—but the goal never was violence, on either side, and none was shed. It was independence from St. Kitts that Anguillans were after, not from Britain. After further negotiation, the compromise was reached. Though the groundwork was laid in 1969, Anguilla officially seceded from St. Kitts in 1980 and remains a British territory today.
Since then the island has remade itself a luxury destination. Of its fourteen thousand inhabitants, about eight thousand work, many in the hospitality industry. The government has three key components. Ellis Webster, Yale graduate and Anguillan native, is the premier, elected by the island. The governor, with a larger swath of influence, is appointed by the British. Since January this has been Dileeni Daniel-Selvaratnam, a lawyer of Sri-Lankan descent. Legislative decisions are made by the House of Assembly, a body of eleven members, plus two ex officio members. Seven voters represent districts on the island: Island Harbour, Sandy Hill, West End; The Valley and Road districts are divided in two. Four ministers represent the island as a whole. The ex officio members represent British interests. Among these thirteen would the GST live or die.
There are a number of battle-tested ways a strapped government can tax its people. A value-added tax (VAT) considers the value increase in each step of production and only taxes the business responsible for that bit. The raw wood becomes polished chair legs, the legs an upholstered chair; each is more valuable than the previous iteration. A sales tax simply tacks a flat rate or percentage onto the last step in the process—point of sale. Only the end consumer pays, but businesses have to account for it in their pricing. The twist in the knife of the goods and services tax (GST), in the minds of locals, is that every step of the manufacturing process is taxed that same thirteen percent.
They bombarded with petitions and pleas every last House minister, oldest to youngest. It’s hard to say for sure, but at twenty-eight Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers must be one of the youngest ministers of parliament anywhere in the world. The Minister of Education and Sports is the pride of Anguilla. Having competed in two Commonwealth Games, she read law at the University of Birmingham. In 2018 she won the Miss Universe Great Britain pageant and competed for the world title. Two years later, The Valley (District 4) elected her to the House of Assembly. She visited the academy to see our camps in action and hit strokes for the cameras with Mitch and Yann, who presented her a gift—one of his sponsored Babolat racquets. It brought back memories. It wasn’t all that long ago that she herself attended the academy’s summer camp, using another borrowed racquet.
We stood in the shade of the ATA entranceway. “The GST works on paper, but knowing the island the way we do, it might not in practice,” Kentish-Rogers said. “Most people would prefer a sales tax. Most of the LLCs have to do with the resorts on the island. So many of the other businesses here are under the table, Ma and Pa shops. Perhaps we have to find another way. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and it’s on us to ask ourselves and the British whether we’ve truly exhausted every possibility. Have we truly looked hard enough?
“There are a thousand government employees on the entire island. The governance is not—” she stopped and considered. “We may not have the capacity to handle all that comes with documenting it.”
Later I met an entrepreneur who’s trying to scale his hot sauce business. The stuff is high-quality and goes fast at the resorts. But the natural nearby market, the U.S., won’t accept liquid imports from Anguilla. And by the time his packaging arrives from China, it’s marked up so much already that, he said, “It can be better for me to buy Tabasco off the shelf, dump the contents, put our sauce in the bottles and slap our label over it. Tell me, how are you helping the economy grow when it’s set up like that? And now you want to add cost to it?”
***

The small shack from which Calvin Lake once sold nails and screws is now a gift shop run by Mitch’s cousin. Its back room is still roped off because of hurricane damage unaddressed. We rolled back out in his silver pick-up, a weathered Toyota. Even for a man of means, even among the celebrities, there are scarcely any luxury cars in Anguilla. I saw just one that passed for a statement car in two weeks, a black Escalade. Anguillan roads simply beat them up too much.
On the short drive, a tourist couple searched for the airport entrance. Mitch got out and gave them directions. Hospitality is inextricable in every soul on the island. “We were raised on love,” Leon, the chef, had told me. “That’s where it comes from.”
I asked Mitch if it were totally selfless. “We don’t want you to have a bad time here,” he said. It reminded me of what I’d read in Travel and Leisure: “As a tourist, do you talk about the [hurricane], or pretend it never happened? What can you do to help? Well, you help by being there.” True, but the thing is, Anguillans actually believe that. Resentment over differences isn’t directed at class, but governance. They take pride as hosts, Mitch no less than any other. I saw it in the preparations he made for visitors meager and powerful. There was a moment I began to get my bearings around The Valley and pointed out from afar Mitch’s hardware store to our companions. Then I watched him grow quiet, just a second, and I immediately regretted it. It meant a lot to him to present it himself, even to these schoolkids.
Before that, though, Mitch pulled onto Calvin W. Lake Road to unveil the new store to me. The building, like the road, he named for his father. It is sixteen-thousand square feet with more than eighteen-thousand products: hardware supplies, hand tools, power tools, lights, fans, plumbing, electrical, home decor, Valspar paint mixing, key cutting. His time in the States paid off. The math major took his father’s vision and married it to what he found at Home Depots and Lowe’s abroad. “I looked at the layout and was intrigued by how things were organized, the spacing.” Its architecture looks more resort-inspired than the simple white concrete boxes built to withstand the next hurricane. Circling above was a chandelier of a fan, the largest I’d ever seen.
Residents can’t afford for this place to falter in the next hurricane. It’s where they’ll go to rebuild things. So it has a generator that’ll last for four days should the facility lose power, now less likely since Mitch insisted that all the electrical wires feeding it be planted underground. The shed that houses the piping for sale---separated by color, yellow for hot water, white for cold, grey for electric---Mitch built himself. The outdoor lumber courtyard is like a hardware store in Switzerland, pristine and organized to perfection. Like the old days, all the wood and supplies that can be outdoors is out there to maximize the two-story storage area inside. Much of it used to be office space that ABC rented out but later reclaimed. “It’s not necessarily more lucrative,” Mitch says, “but it’s better from a standpoint of being able to maintain, not have wear and tear, and for flexibility to have product available when customers need it.” At first they had no way to haul larger items up that high. So they replaced one wall with a loading door and now forklift them up.
There is still plenty of office space. A credit union occupies one end of the hall. By now it won’t surprise you to learn that Mitch is its chairman and co-founder. He tried to shed the jack-of-all-trades label his father prepared for him, but it turns out Dad was right: A islander needs to take up sometimes surprising roles to make an impact.
Liberty Cooperative Credit Union has thirteen hundred members. At a thousand they were admitted to the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Unions. For this role he’s not paid; for the academy, he draws a stipend. He founded it because banks have picked up and left Anguilla, leaving people with limited options. Partly he means to pave the way for more financing for small businesses and bolster the faith in savings of a cash-based society in which U.S. dollars and Eastern Caribbean dollars both flow. It’s also a matter of combating the “predatory fees,” Mitch calls them, levied by the few banks left like Republic and National Commercial. “We don’t charge those,” he says.
We eyed the forklift, and Mitch stepped inside. “How did you learn?” I asked.
“Trial and error.”
“There’s no training or certification required?”
“No, because it’s on your property. You just have to be careful.”
The lift operator, Jay Cardiff-Warren, a Jamaican who just married an Anguillan and has been working for ABC for thirteen years, wasn’t far off. “I trained him,” Mitch said, “and now he’s a pro. If I hire you to clean the bathroom, I’m going to show you how. It’s my way of motivating my employees because they see at any time I do what they do.” And he does it. The boy who swept the Cap Juluca courts still sweeps the entranceway to his store. He trims the hedges for his meditation time. Elderly ladies had trouble ascending the few stairs; Mitch noticed and installed railings. On rare rainy days people slipped. He laid down grip tape on the sidewalk. Executives afraid to roll up their sleeves, he believes, miss those opportunities to improve.
He eschews suits for the practical cargo shorts and short-sleeved Oxford, ideal for shuttling around a Caribbean island, which he does because he doesn’t have an office. “It confines you to a space, and there’s so much to be done,” he said. “You need to be out there helping, shaping, encouraging.” He says he doesn’t read about himself, though something tells me he’ll read this. The suits and reading “make you feel like you’ve arrived, and you haven’t.”
“Do you get your managerial style from your father, or Bob Johnson, or where?” I asked.
“My dad didn’t travel. He’d been to Puerto Rico, maybe once. So my experiences have opened my eyes more. And when my dad told you something, he gave orders. He was firm. I try not to be that way.” Coaches and teachers the world over have their pneumonic mantras. Mitch is no different. “I have the three Fs. Fair, friendly, firm. That’s what I’d told the kids at the academy.”
As we were leaving, the owner of Roy’s Bayside Grill, a restaurant in Sandy Ground, moseyed by as Kool and the Gang played over the speakers. Another man was introduced to me as Pastor Phillip Gumbs, who heads the Church of God of Holiness. “Mitch? He’s too good to come to my church,” he said, laughing. “I wish that he would run for office, as I’ve always said, I don’t go to speeches and rallies, I look at the man. Is he an unselfish man? He is what we aspire to be in Anguilla. They would give him a department and tell him to run with it.”
***
Keesha Fleming-Lake met Mitch when she was ten years old. She originally came from the U.S. Virgin Islands and moved as a child with her Anguillan parents back to Anguilla. They became best friends in high school when he’d visit her home often to study together. They had a natural affection for each other as friends, but it never went beyond that. Keesha went off to England for boarding school. Mitch stayed to graduate and start at Cap Juluca. As he entered college and circled the globe with the Johnson family, and she studied law in Miami and then Michigan, they shared the ups and downs with each other. Eventually, Mitch realized that “this friendship had a little bit more to it. I decided, if you’re going to marry somebody, why not your best friend?” She patiently supported him as he navigated his family through the turmoil of his father’s death, and they married soon after.
It’s clear Mitch idolizes the power-couple dynamic. His admiration for Sheila Johnson, whose business acumen he witnessed up close, is great—he knows Bob “couldn’t have done it without her.” He acclaims his mother, a housewife, for stepping in to learn the family business once her husband died. Surely the mindset plays a role, however subconscious, in his fast partnership with Yann. In the two marriages Mitch sees two power couples with ambition, rising. As chief operating officer, Olivia wears so many hats that despite Yann’s tennis and strategic mastery their business would simply short-circuit without her. It is a description not far off for Mitch, either. The men would be the first to tell you.
“I use the business resources like trucks, cranes, shipping, and law offices for the academy, Mitch said. “The academy can’t pay them. The academy’s an expense for the business.”
The law offices he mentions are his wife’s. Fleming-Lake Law Office handles the administration of the academy, from staffing to scheduling to scholarships. “Anything that isn’t directly tennis,” Keesha told me. “There’s an incredible investment in the stronger kids in order to get them ready to earn college scholarships, and that has to come from donations and such.” One of her employees is devoted almost solely to the academy’s work.
She doesn’t play, but she sees the joy it gives Mitch. It’s all the more stirring to her since Mitch suffered a heart attack six years ago. “We were in Chicago in our twenties,” she said, “and I remember a doctor examining him and telling me that by the time he’s forty, he’ll have a massive heart attack or be dead from one. He was thirty-nine when he had it. We had to bring him to America for the quadruple bypass surgery.”
Now they split time between Florida and Anguilla. They have three children: Alex, who’s 16; Amia, 11, whose violin lessons I watched Mitch enjoy on his phone; and Amara, 6. Mitch gave me his parenting philosophy. “I vowed not to do to them what my father did to me. More caring, compassionate and not just firm all the time. I want them to have an education, a mission, an attitude of gratitude, and always give back. We work hard to give them a private education. Tiger Woods’ children go there, too.
“The reason I live in the States is to have the access to the healthcare I need now. But I have to be here to run the academy. It’s a Catch-22.”
***
“Dude, you forgot what you’re doing with tourism, putting Anguillans last.” Mitch chats on the phone as we drive toward the western shores. “Why didn’t you mention all of this? And he gave all the tourism jobs to foreigners.” He wants to show us the famous arch, a naturally formed oval of rock protruding out from the Caribbean blue. We throw stones from a nearby cliff at it and miss. Plunk, they go into the sea.
Next to the arch is a small beach that requires a long strip of steps to reach. Their concrete suspends sturdily enough from the jutting rocks, but it’s without railings or firm foundation underneath. Each major hurricane blows them away, eating the limestone lining the coast along with them, until the islanders scrape together another set. As you look up from the sand your eyes meet the concave, eroded rock, the daily beating it receives from the waves, and then the picket fences vainly protecting a pool from the ocean. Two luxury villas are built atop it.
“Next hurricane, that one out farther should be okay,” Mitch says. “It’s better ground there. But this here, gone. Maybe not the next storm, but eventually. Someone just wanted to milk as much as they could out of the spot in rentals until it’s gone.”
A short drive follows. He gets calls the whole way. His office is wherever he is. “My mom calls for little things. For political things, it’s operatives calling to bring me up to speed, to get advice, what’s the next move.”
We come upon what seems a haunted mansion. There’s half a roof here, half a wall there, no furnishings inside. Yann and the kids carefully explore it as Olivia yells out to two kids who might miss a flight home. “Hurricane?” I ask.
“No. That’s what we call a Western Union move,” he says with a laugh. “Some oligarch or even an islander started to build a villa and couldn’t finish. Ran out of money. There’s a lot of those.” Now they stand there overlooking the sea, monuments to hubris, too brittle to complete and too bothersome to demolish.
***
“Blessed,” says Leon, the villa’s chef, as I greet him. So do most locals. Gratitude is a way of life. Mitch wears a large—not showy—cross necklace. The Catholic church I attended, St. Gerard in The Valley, could be seen from ABC Supplies. (“You left early,” a small girl at the academy chided me the next morning.) Its walls and those of the old chapel next door boast an intricate latticework that exposes the inner chamber to breezes but provides shade. “Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture,” the lector read, from Jeremiah. “You have scattered my sheep and driven them away. You have not cared for them.”
“We have to decide as a people,” Leon told me. “Do we want self-determination or to join someone else that’s gonna help us better? But you know what? We can’t blame anyone outside. We have to look in the mirror. We’ve been in this relationship for fifty years, and it’s not been fruitful.”
Leon Lake was in total command of his craft, cooking three meals for twenty each day at Santosha. He is a leader. He’d captained the Anguilla cricket team and worked as manager of all food and beverage at Viceroy, another resort. In May 2017 he opened a restaurant with sixty-thousand dollars of savings. It was hopping. Then Irma destroyed it. So now he runs his own chef-concierge service. He signs with different private villas, contracts lasting a week or fortnight.
He’s also a calypso singer. We sang “One Love” together to close a karaoke night. (More than once on the island, I started humming “No Woman, No Cry”, and a stranger finished it. Marley was everywhere.) De Messenger, he’s known in the Anguilla music community:
The rich man he got it made
They don’t care what de poor gets paid
And for that mankind gets a failing grade
“People are naturally gonna gravitate toward people like me, people like Mitch,” he said. “Even when we were kids, we were the same age, but I admired him for it. You could see it early in debate societies where he spoke.”
After another sumptuous round of shrimp and chicken kebabs from Leon, the coaching staff lingered at the table. The hour grew late as we discussed the GST. Mitch recalled Ronald Webster’s short-lived Anguillan state, at odds with Britain and St. Kitts and Nevis. “We should have broken away from both. Independent fully. Everything the British do is colonial, and it suppresses growth in the name of democracy. They don’t want you to reach your full potential. Five hundred years of what they did in Africa and they can’t shake off that thinking. Only difference now is that they do it in a more diplomatic way.” He lifted his water bottle. “They say, ‘I’ll give you this, but you can only drink half. To get the other half, you need to give up power.’ But you need the water.”
“It’s standard operating procedure for imperialists,” Yann said. He ought to know. His grandfather was Charles Assalé, who wrote the declaration of independence that unyoked Cameroon from France and became the new nation’s prime minister. “The French tried to assassinate my grandfather six times. They want to drive down the value of everything here, so people leave and they can snap it up for bargains. Prices and taxes high, drive locals out. Keep the local economy stagnant but the foreign-owned resorts flush.”
“Do you know what the governors do here?” Mitch asked. “The ministers of parliament are voted in. But their secretaries are appointed by the governor and report to her! On a permanent basis! They hardly ever change them if a minister requests. Now how can you get anything done if your secretary isn’t loyal to you? If you can’t choose your own? The wheels just spin.
“To be a good governor, you have to care,” Mitch continued, “and they don’t give a s---. There are only so many hotels, who are already so stretched because everyone asks them for everything. We have to look outside the island.”
“What if they pass the GST?” I asked.
“We may have to resort to civil disobedience. We may have to rise up and shut the island down. In any true democracy the rights of the people should be respected. It certainly isn’t hard to block traffic on the few roads we have.”
We walked from the dining hall and looked out over the palm trees reflecting moonlight. Over the sound of crashing waves I pursued him. “You’re one of the most well-connected and successful businessmen here. Aren’t you a natural choice to lead a movement toward independence?”
He thought a moment before responding. “Yes, but I can’t put my wife and children through that. They’ve sacrificed too much already. I mean I’m forty-five and already put them through it once with my heart. There were times I thought I’d be a politician. My father said, ‘Look, politics may need Mitch, but Mitch does not need politics.’ I made my decision to fulfill his vision instead long ago.”
***
Estimates put Florida’s damage from Hurricane Irma at fifty billion dollars. Anguilla’s figure was 190 million, but it’s only thirty-five square miles, smaller than the city of Miami. If the island had been as big as Florida, all things the same, the damage would’ve been 356 billion. Perhaps nowhere is it more confronting than The Valley’s Ronald Webster Park, really the only public park for sports on the island. FIFA subsidizes the football stadium. But the cricket field resembles a cow pasture. Around it runs a coarsely outlined oval of dirt and dead grass for sprinters; the island that sent Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers to the Commonwealth Games for the heptathlon has no track.
Across from the dilapidated lies the dangerous. Mitch walked me to the remnants of the academy’s first two tennis courts, brutalized by Irma. “We called them the dungeon and the palace,” he told me. With sometimes seventy-five kids on a court, coaches needed some way of taming the chaos. “You knew if you messed around you’d be sent to the dungeon,” which was the far court, worse-for-wear even back then, with cracks and bad bounces. “And if you worked hard you’d be called up to the palace.”
Mitch took a few cuts with his racquet at the palace. Irma swept away the netposts and some fencing, and weeds have overtaken the sidelines, but the lines are still there, the blacktop surface still flat enough to roll a ball. It wouldn’t take much to get it ready for casual play. The dungeon, however, is unrecognizable as either a tennis court or a dungeon. We climbed upon the raised foundation and beheld a serrated and pockmarked surface. Scrap metal and bare piping jut out. Jagged rocks chipped from the former court cautioned my every step. A black hole led somewhere deep beneath. “It’s four years,” he said. “Shameful the government has let these go so far.”
I interjected. “Yes, but would you say they have more important rebuilding to do?”
“Acute need is one thing,” he said, “but it’s about the systems and the youth. Life and routine after the hurricane need to be normalized again. And the way that you address inequality is through these programs, so kids discover ambitions and start thinking beyond thirty-five square miles. They don’t even know what’s out there unless mentors and places like the ATA expose them to it.”
***
The new academy had just reinstalled its lights before I arrived. It too had been smashed by Irma. Fencing, windows, equipment, light towers—all vanished or gnarled. Only the concrete structure and flat courts remained. But in Florida following Mitch’s heart attack, Keesha and Mitch understood triage. In the initial days after Irma they mobilized the academy as a distribution point for essential supplies. Families like Helene and Dimitri’s knew they could go there. Generators were shared from house to house as they were needed. Incredibly, within a month the courts were ready to go. “There is always a sort of a sense of guilt in not being there,” Keesha told me. “But it was a blessing in being able to coordinate everything with reliable communications and a bird’s-eye view.”
Anguilla’s top young female player, Sunzahra Liburd Banks, was just about to start her first season at Savannah State University, in Georgia, on a tennis scholarship. Her story epitomizes the academy’s goal. A few years ago she barely played tennis. A tennis player can be college-ready in a year if she works hard enough. Sunny did. Dimitri’s mother tells him to look at James Blake, the former pro who shares their surname, saying, “That can be you!” The kids who really love tennis, like him, now look at Sunny that way. So far thirteen academy players have earned scholarships, saving Anguillan families at least 1.3 million dollars. Sunny is the latest in a line of beneficiaries.
She made the final of the academy tournament held in our last few days there. Clayton, one of the Americans, won it, 6-3. Dimitri made the final round of the younger players’ bracket. Overall the hosts and guests advanced equally through the bracket. To paraphrase Malcolm Gladwell, the disadvantages of advantage shined through, as did the advantages of disadvantage. Here were kids who would, after a signature spell of Caribbean rain, dry the courts with sponges and towels. To the Americans rain meant an off day. The Anguillans were fitter, they took on coaching with ease, they were eager to learn. Ours had more polished technique, built points smarter, stayed patient longer. They knew what questions to ask. Some complained of the constant wind, and one or two quit mid-drill because of the heat, while Sunny and Dimitri played through it.
“Let’s be honest, you can be soft,” Yann put it. And the Americans, having met the Anguillans, pondered this criticism with more open minds than they’d have done two weeks prior. He issued them a challenge. “Make the most of your coaching and resources, like they do. Every morning until we leave, run up the hill outside Santosha one more time than the day before.”
Steven, a tall Anguillan boy among the older group, arrived early every morning at the academy with his basketball. He ran from his home, sometimes Dimitri with him. He seemed lanky with a racquet, but that vanished on the basketball court. On our way home we’d ask if he wanted a lift and cheer him as we passed when he declined. He was devastated when he left his basketball in the academy corridor and a few hours later it was gone. Even replica balls in Anguilla can cost a hundred fifty dollars. Who would steal his ball here? he wondered. The Americans mustered another ball and signed it, giving him a farewell gift. He teared up. Luckily he won’t have to smudge the memento. I saw his familiar black Nike ball soon after. Turns out he was tricked into thinking it was stolen. His mother had seen it lying unguarded and taken it. “To teach me responsibility or something,” he said.
It made a splash among my companions, but what struck me wasn’t that Dimitri and Steven ran together along Blowing Point Road to the academy. They are boys enjoying the freedom of summer. The distance is barely a third of a mile. Indeed I remember walking to school as a boy, walking farther to the Little League complex to watch my friends play all day until it was my team’s turn. Yet the American kids beheld this fact with utter awe, as if this were the mark of poverty. They never ceased talking about it; they wanted to join them on their runs; they wanted to film them on the road against the arid wasteland that surrounded Blowing Point. In Bethesda they wouldn’t dream of going without parents chauffeuring them.
***
What comes of the GST will shape the direction Anguilla will take. Its full effects none can predict. Its initial ones augur poorly. Islanders already feel it at the gas pump, though the law takes effect next July. The bill passed by a vote of seven-to-six in the House of Assembly with the help of the two ex-officio members whose vote is constitutional, but who in the past have allowed the eleven elected members to decide matters themselves. So argues the Leader of the Opposition, Cora Richardson Hodge. Kentish-Rogers and Kyle Hodge, another minister, voted against the GST but have issued official statements since. Critical eyes find that they are backtracking, perhaps pressured to do so by the British. Optimists say they were defeated and are now moving forward in a united front. “Voting my conscience,” Kyle Hodge wrote, “was not a vote to cross the floor or bring an end to my Government.” An island pins its hopes on that.
The question about tourists, even service volunteers, is how long do the lessons stay with them? The kids plan to return, to coach again and to clean up the island’s refuse, to tell their newfound friends’ stories. Yann’s challenge was well met enough. But assistant coaches have the luxury, sometimes, of blending in with the team. Players say things they’d never say and cut corners they’d never cut with the boss watching. One morning, I went out to the hill. Some of them clearly disagreed on where the slope began, where it tapered, and what running is. One girl, though, the one I thought most touched by the locals, summited fifteen times just to ensure no one outdid her. You learn a lot about their character by blending in.
A few days later, I arose early but not early enough. Sweaty, tired teens already filled the dining hall, their patter subdued. I’d missed the run. Quietly I ducked out and waffled toward the hill. Was I really going to do this? Belief is as contagious as a swirling virus. It is the currency coaches like Mitch and Yann trade in, and not even wily assistants who know how the sausage is made can stand impervious to its charm. They believed I could be better. So I looked up and started for the dusty hillcrest.
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