Chris Gayle really hit the news when he said to Australian journalist Mel McLaughlin: I’m here just to see your eyes for the first time … Hopefully we can win this game and we can have a drink afterwards. Don’t blush, baby.”
The brickbats have been out for Gayle since that day and he hardly seems to care, if this interview with Charlotte Edwardesis any indication. In the interview, he bragged about having ‘a very, very big bat, the biggest in the world’ and added for good measure: “You think you could lift it? You’d need two hands.”
He also asks the interviewer whether she’s had a threesome, and suggests that the reaction to his interaction with Mel McLaughlin was down to racism. He said: “Successful black men are struggling because people do things to put them down. They would cover for other people, but not for a black man.”
In the interview he also talks about his daughter and girlfriend (Natasha Berridge), whom he has known for ten years. Incidentally, his baby is not called ‘Blush’ but Crisalina. The proud father adds: “His mother says she has my eyes. “It’s a nice experience being a father. But I only had a short stint there. I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”
He also tries to explain how Jamaica has a ‘different culture’ and people are more relaxed about sex. He said: “We’re not so hung up about it. This is what people like doing. It’s no big deal.”
He adds: “They just want to get a little sniff of the dirt. They find out some s*** and they want to sink you. It’s reality. You have to deal with that as a successful black man – especially if you had a poor man’s lifestyle, coming from nothing to something. Usain Bolt has the same.”
He added: “And another of the presenters who said she wasn’t happy with it, later she was interviewing a man and sitting in his lap. And she’s married. She was flirting. They were playing Let’s Get It On. She didn’t get any trouble. Double standards, that’s what it is.”
