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INSIDE TRACK
The effect of Sachin Tendulkar's stroke-filled return to international cricket last week has been quite extraordinary. Television ratings for cricket, I am given to understand, have improved dramatically. Men switched off work at peak office hours to watch him bat, mums across the country are enrolling their kids into cricket camps with renewed vigour, grandmums sit in front of television sets with their rosaries praying for runs from his magnum blade. The Indian cricketers, under so much flak in recent months, now look upbeat, and the Sri Lankans, to stretch the point a bit logically further, extremely downbeat. Suddenly, cricket seems a different ball game, as it were, in this country.
However, while this ra ra stuff is good for the ego (not to mention the Indian team's fortunes), it also adds enormous pressure on the player concerned: Especially when this happens day-in-day-out for almost two decades. To meet such high expectations, not only consistently but also without apparent concern, is like scoring a double hundred almost every day of your life. Apart from his cricketing skills, to me this is what makes the Tendulkar saga extraordinary.
A few years before his death, Sir Donald Bradman compared Tendulkar to himself, highlighting aspects of their batsmanship which were similar. Now, seeing Tendulkar cope with the pressure of not only the entire nation, but every country where cricket is played, one can understand what Bradman went through.
The amazing part about players like Bradman and Tendulkar is that they actually used this pressure to raise the level of their performance. Not once in 16 years have I heard Tendulkar cribabout pressure, nowhere have I read about Bradman complain of high expectations.
The history of sports lists only a handful of such larger-than-life performers. Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Pele, Diego Maradona, Dhyan Chand, Gary Kasparov, Michaell Jordan, Ayrton Senna, Bjorn Borg, Martina Navratilova are some non-cricketing names who not only redefined the way their respective sport would be played, but also shaped how their generation thought and behaved.
Cricket is played in very few countries, but the impact of some players has been even more dramatic because of the texture and tenor of the sport. W G Grace's influence on Victorian English society forms a substantial part of early literature on the sport. Bradman's remarkable run-getting was an antidote to the Great Depression, and provided Australia with hope of a better future. Sir Frank Worrell's rise to captaincy - and his conduct thereafter - signalled the decline of white colonialism in Caribbean countries. Sunil Gavaskar's defiant batsmanship in the mid-70s dissipated the trauma of the Emergency to some extent even as it proved to the world that Indians could be world class.
Tendulkar already has the most Test and one-day centuries, the most one-day runs, more often than not the best average in both forms of the game. By the time he finishes, he will have rewritten almost every batting record. But that is a linear, one-dimensional assessment.
His cricket also symbolises the post-liberalisation India; an India unshackled from self-doubt, capable of dynamic enterprise and flair, able to compete with the world and be the best on merit.
As C L R James writes, "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?''
Email: ayaz@dnaindia.net
