Sachin in my life: Ayaz Memon

Inside track

 

Sachin Tendulkar entered my life irrevocably through a series of singles that he scored in a school match at the CCI in early 1988. Only some days earlier, he and Vinod Kambli had put on 664 runs for the third wicket, which immediately put Wisden and sundry other record-keepers on high octane. He had scored a few other hundreds besides. But hardboiled cricket writers need greater vindication than just a world record to accept a player’s genius. Moreover, Tendulkar then was just 15, belonging to an age-group where flukes are not uncommon. Some more solid evidence of his class was needed.

 

I went to the aforementioned CCI match at Dilip Vengsarkar’s behest. “This boy Sachin is approaching another hundred,’’ he called to say. By the time I reached the ground, Tendulkar had already notched up another ton and was flaying the hapless bowlers all over the ground.

 

The opposing captain pushed his fielders to long on and long off in the hope that Tendulkar would succumb to bravado, but the 15-year-old was not to be suckered. He started pushing, rather than driving the ball, and picked up his runs in singles, compelling the rival captain to pull his fielders back in close again. Tendulkar then began lofting the ball over the fielders, resulting in a flood of boundaries.

 

Raj Singh Dungarpaur, Indian cricket’s eternal romantic  was quick to highlight the youngster’s cricketing acumen. “This boy is destined for greatness,’’ he said. “Batting is about making runs, but even more about knowing how to make runs.’’ The layperson might find this befuddling, but for the diehard, there is no conundrum in it.

 

My favourite Tendulkar story emerges from an encounter a few months after watching him at CCI. By then he had made a hundred on debut in the Ranji and Duleep Trophies and was being touted as a candidate for the tour of the West Indies in early 1989. But when the team was announced, his name was missing.

 

The actor Tom Alter and I were to interview Dilip Vengsarkar for a sports video on India’s prospects in the Caribbean and thought it would be a good idea to throw in one with the youngster too.

 

When he came, we learnt that Tendulkar was upset at being left out in spite of a string of high scores in domestic cricket. “The selectors wanted to protect you from Marshall and Walsh,’’ Tom and I told him. This appeared to rile him. “I’m not afraid of being hit,’’ he said, “I will only learn faster.’’

 

That was my introduction to his indomitable spirit, the willingness to learn, the great desire to succeed. There was concrete evidence of this on his first Test tour, when he was hit in the face by a snorter from Waqar Younis at Sialkot in 1989. Tendulkar shrugged away medical attention to his bleeding nose, took fresh guard and hit Waqar’s next ball for four.

 

At that point in time, he established himself as a stotan – a combination between a stoic and a Trojan – in my eyes. Over the next few years he was identified universally as a genius.

 

When I met him in July, he was working out in a gym, preparing for his comeback after injury. Apart from physical pain, he was also dismayed by the doubts of the skeptics. “But this spurs me on even more,’’ he said. “You can’t contest such people, you have to let your bat do the talking,’’

 

His bat has spoken.