Sachin Tendulkar is my hero: Mahesh Bhupathi

When I was asked by DNA to write a piece on Sachin Tendulkar, I wasn’t too sure I had enough knowledge about the sport to comment on it publicly.

However, like Sachin, I play professional sport and aspire to win every major accolade there is to win in my discipline and figured I am probably one of the best equipped people around to tell all you readers the magnitude of what goes into being able to perform at the level he has been for over 21 years.

There is no shortage of superlatives used to describe this genius, every sport throws one out now and then. In golf, it’s Tiger Woods, in tennis, it’s Roger Federer and in cricket, it’s Sachin.

The difference here is Sachin plays a team sport. So I’ll use the rest of my article to draw a parallel to what I know best. I’ll try to explain an athlete’s point of view of the classic facets — fitness, technique, confidence, leadership, pressure, motivation and more — that have led him to lead India to the World Cup.

I don’t think there is a doubt in anyone’s mind that Sachin has God-given talent. What one does with that talent defines how he will be remembered in history. My fitness trainer from South Africa Shayamal, who has been with me for four years now, was part of the Indian team when they played the World Cup in South Africa.

The one story that he keeps repeating to us time and again is that of how Sachin would stay back daily after team practice and have him throw short pitch balls just to make sure he was able to have that extra edge when he needed it under pressure.

The book Outliers says to achieve ‘outlier’ status, there needs to be ten thousand dedicated work hours put in. I say to reach genius status, it’s probably a hundred thousand, the combination of discipline, dedication, work-ethic and mental toughness all bundled in with a hundred thousand hours of working on his game gives us Sachin Tendulkar.

Like every Indian, I am a cricket fan. Being fully aware of the fact that we as athletes cannot play well or perform daily, I selfishly expect Sachin to score every time he bats for India. As soon as Sachin was out in the final, my text message to my wife (who was at the stadium) from Miami was “OH GOD.”

We are fanatical about our cricket, and I remember after the team came back to outrage from an early exit at the World Cup in the West Indies, I said playing cricket for India is possibly the highest pressure job out there across all industries.

For Sachin, I am thinking it’s triple the pressure. Not only do all of us expect him to score, all his teammates expect him to, and he has his own internal expectations. But time and again, he delivers. That’s what sporting geniuses do. They are big stage players and they thrive on delivering under pressure.

Roger will never play a bad Grand Slam final, Tiger will never miss the cut at the PGA Championships, Sachin will always deliver in a big tournament.

I was recently in Kolkata doing a clinic for kids. And at the press conference, I was asked if I thought Sachin deserved the Bharat Ratna. I tried to keep my answer diplomatic. I think Sachin deserves every award in the country if not once at least twice. But as a sportsman, a time comes in your career when the only person you are challenging is yourself.

When Pete Sampras retired, no one thought anyone would come close to his record. Roger had other plans. And last year he had the audacity to say his goal now is to win 20 Grand Slams. All we can do when we hear stuff like that is smile from the sidelines. Will he get there? No one knows, but the fact is, he has achieved everything he has to in his sport. So what does he do now? Challenge himself.

The one thing that was missing from Sachin’s cabinet was the World Cup trophy. He has already broken every batting record there is. So now what? We definitely don’t want him to stop, he is playing some of the best cricket of his life, he’s definitely not as audacious as Roger to announce what next in public.

But trust me, the winner that he is, he is setting goals for himself internally. Being able to motivate yourself and put in those extra hours to keep you one step ahead of the competition as you get older is also a challenge. I firmly believe that the older you get, the harder you have to work in sport, the youngsters are always knocking at your door.

Another interesting debate I had post World Cup was the line — “We will win it for Sachin” — a lot of the boys in the team were using.  Sure, cricket is a team sport and you need different members of the team to fire constantly over a month to win it. Spain have been dominating Davis Cup for the last few years.

That’s because every time they go into a tie, they are pretty much guaranteed of two points from Rafael Nadal. The presence, leadership and intimidation he brings to the team are second to none. Now, it’s up to the rest of the team to rally around him and make them special.

When India plays, it’s the same with SRT. He is the man every captain targets, and the scalp every bowler wants. Half the time, he shatters the bowlers’ confidence or frustrates them to a pulp when he opens the innings.

The boys probably felt they had enough firepower to rally around him and sure enough they came out on top. Sachin, as humble as he always is, gave credit to his teammates and in a perfect end to a perfect World Cup, he was carried off the field by the rest of the team.

I have been fortunate to have interacted with Sachin multiple times. I have even played tennis with him and he has a mean forehand. He has a love for cars and told me that one day he would love to meet Roger Federer.

Funnily enough, a couple of years ago in Paris during the French Open, when I walked into the locker room during a rain delay, Roger said, “How about that amazing double hundred by Sachin” referring to Sachin’s one-day double century a few weeks earlier. We discussed it for a few minutes and I told him Sachin wanted to meet him if they ever crossed paths.

His response was: “Anytime. I would love to.” Roger’s mum is a South African, so he follows cricket. My goal now is to facilitate this meeting, hopefully at Wimbledon this year and try to eavesdrop on a conversation between two true geniuses and two of my all-time sporting heroes.

In closing, one of Sachin’s first few messages on Twitter, post winning the World Cup, was everything is possible, keep working hard and keep chasing your dreams. That’s a cliche but it sums up all the good and bad emotions one has gone through to achieve one’s dream in one phrase. For me, those words are inspirational and hopefully can inspire me in giving the Olympics another good crack next year.

—Bhupathi is a 11-time Grand Slam winner. He has been representing India since 1995