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ShareFollowing Sachin Tendulkar's career for a shade over 20 years, must confess, has sometimes left me frustrated. What more can one say of a player who has achieved almost everything the game has to offer? The adjectives now seem repetitive, the encomiums unoriginal, the hyperbole wasted.
On the day he has become the world's highest run-getter, therefore, I find myself stumped for words and unashamedly seek refuge in a cliché to find the mot juste to describe him: Quite simply, Sachin was to the manner born.
I don't mean this just in the sense of a batting virtuoso, but as a cricketer in all its connotations, explicit and implied. There are many outstanding cricketers who, alas, remain mere players; only a very a few who can rise above scorecards because their true worth can never be measured only in statistical terms.
A great deal has been said and written -- and justifiably so -- about Sachin's outstanding skills and awesome records. More than 12,000 Test runs, more than 16,000 one-day runs, and 82 centuries collectively define a peerless career. All records are ultimately broken, but for anyone to match this would take superhuman effort.
The manner in which Tendulkar has scored these runs made him a compelling player to watch. The bat has often seemed an extension of his arms, and the arms and legs have worked on impulses sent out by his brain with a precision about technique and timing that would put legendary Swiss watches into the shade.
He has been the delight of spectators and the despair of opponents. His batting has earned him comparison with Bradman -- and what's more, by the Don himself - which puts him on a pedestal that only four or five batsmen in the history of the game could conceivably have access to.
Yet, to understand the Tendulkar phenomena only in terms of the runs and centuries he has scored is to miss the point surely. Like Bradman -- perhaps even more, given the implosion in the media in recent decades -- he has been subjected to extraordinary pressures of public scrutiny and expectation. He was just another Indian player when he began, but soon became a national symbol of pride and aspiration that extended beyond the boundaries of cricket.
No other player could have had as much trust reposed in him by so many as Tendulkar, but for the past 20 years, he has met all of thesein a manner that has not only been entertaining, but also served as an education in living. He has handled achievement, fame and wealth with an equanimity that comes only to the rarest of rare.
Perhaps in life, as in cricket, he is to the manner born.
