JAFFNA, Sri Lanka —
Dr. Kumar Balakrishnan, a Batticaloa-born pathologist who played five years of school cricket at Jaffna Hindu College before moving to the United States in 1970, was inducted into the Cricket Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Windsor, Conn., on Oct. 3.
Dr. Balakrishnan was one of 14 inductees in the Hall's class of 2026. He was nominated by the Staten Island Cricket Club in New York, where he serves as a vice president. The ceremony, the Hall's 45th, was held at the Marriott hotel in Windsor and drew close to 300 guests, according to NY Carib News.
A report published in Sri Lanka last weekend said Dr. Balakrishnan had been inducted into the Hall of Fame by the Staten Island Cricket Club in New York City. The club nominated him, but the honor was conferred by the Cricket Hall of Fame, an independent nonprofit based in Connecticut. The report also said his cricket career began in 1995 on an under-14 school team, a date that cannot be correct for a player who entered medical school in 1963. The 1995 date also appears in the biography the Hall posted on its website.
The Hall, based in Hartford, was established in 1980 and held its first induction the following year. It describes itself as the first cricket hall of fame in the world. Its members include Sir Donald Bradman, Sir Garfield Sobers and Sunil Gavaskar.
Dr. Balakrishnan was recognized in part for launching the Staten Island club's youth cricket program in 2010. According to a citation prepared for his induction, he had long seen how few chances young people in New York had to play the game. The club was incorporated in 1872 and says it is the oldest cricket club in the United States in continuous use.
He was born in Batticaloa, on the east coast of what was then Ceylon, and began playing in elementary school with tennis balls and makeshift equipment on roads and open ground, the citation says. At 13, he was playing for the under-15 team at Methodist Central College, a school founded in Batticaloa in 1814 by the British Methodist missionary William Ault. He was made captain in his second year.
He then went to Jaffna Hindu College as a boarder and played for the school's first eleven as an all-rounder for five years, according to the citation. In 1960, the Daily News in Colombo named him its "School Boy Cricketer of the North," the Hall's biography says.
He entered the medical faculty of the University of Ceylon at Peradeniya, now the University of Peradeniya, in 1963, at age 20. He played for the university for five years and was captain in 1967, according to the Hall. The citation says he kept playing during his internship, when he was known as "Mr. Cricketer." He graduated in 1968.
In New York, he completed an internship in internal medicine at what is now BronxCare Health System and a residency in anatomic and clinical pathology at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn, which he finished in 1975.
He found no organized cricket in New York until 1978, when he came across the Staten Island Cricket Club, the citation says. He became a regular player, known for his batting and economical bowling, and joined the club's executive committee around 1990. He has served on it since.
According to the Hall's biography, he chaired a hospital department of pathology from 1997 to 2007 and retired in 2017. He also served for 10 years in the U.S. Army Reserve medical corps, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1999.
His wife, Dr. Sushila Arasaretnam, also graduated from the Peradeniya medical faculty in 1968. She practiced as a pediatrician on Staten Island for many years before retiring, the Hall says.
