| Published on 29-03-2007 In National |
| Viewed 2330 times | Written by R. Bhagwan Singh |
| 'Dedicated to Bapu Nadkarni' |
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As a student in the 1960s and 70s, I remember spending most of my time on Chennai's pavements. For two reasons. First, the Tamil capital still had broad pavements those days and secondly, many kids like me loved playing cricket there, chalk-drawing the stumps on walls and using any flat wood for the willow to the tennis ball, which we called cover-ball.
The pavements have been since gobbled up by either the city corporation for widening the roads or the hawkers putting up shops that yielded steady income for the area's politician and the policeman. And the cover-ball cricket moved to corporation playgrounds and the Marina Beach. Not an ounce of all that mad love for cricket did wane through all the years as the street cricketers graduated to club, state and national status. And a few of them even became international stars. Like a certain lad called Sachin Tendulkar in Bombay.
While the passion for cricket did not get diluted a bit over the years, the status of the star cricketer did undergo a sea change. Just the other day, I was sharing a lunch table with a sports official and a celebrated sports writer when the former recalled how Bapu Nadkarni during his peak days, when he used to bowl some 49 overs of which 48 would certainly be maidens, would take a suburban train to reach Brabourne Stadium for playing the test match and return home richer by fifty rupees collected as his match fee.
Many still argue that Kerry Packer was the real villain in the game's total transformation from being a gentleman's pastime to pure commercial enterprise, from the stately white flannels of a swashbuckling Gary Sobers to the multicoloured T-shirts carrying a dozen sponsors' logos on the shoulders of the Tendulkars, the Dhonis and the Agarkars, all in terrible hurry to make their millions.
There are dozens of Kerry Packers on the prowl now whenever a major world cricket event is on the board, only the rules of the game's commercial corruption have gone haywire. Sometime back, we had match-fixing scandals floating around and a few big names on the field getting dumped for complicity. And now we have popular coach Bob Woolmer murdered allegedly because he stumbled on match-fixing involving the underworld and some Mumbai bookies. At this rate, cricket might soon become a game of thieves and killers rubbing shoulders with gamblers and mafia dons, when they are not shooting for the commercials promoting colas, mobikes and marmalades.
Talking of these shooting sessions, I remember how a few years back I had gone to interview a woman beautician because she was fighting the gender bias in her profession. To be able to work for movies as a make-up artist, she needed to become a member of the beauticians' union in Kollywood but then, to become a member, she must be a man! The union simply does not allow women becoming members—an irony because that meant only its male members were employed even to dress up our heroines.
Coming back to this woman beautician and her relevance to the present column, she had told me then that just the previous day, she was busy doing the make-up for our cricket stars for a major commercial—can't remember whether it was for Coke or Pepsi--at the Chepauk stadium, where they had all gathered for an international match scheduled the next couple of days.
I was shocked that these icons of willows and leather were busy rehearsing for the commercial and spending hours with beauticians instead of sweating it out at the practice nets.
Remember the sexy jig that Sachin did under an umbrella sharing a Pepsi with Amitabh Bachchan sometime back? Would it be right to say that Sachin's cricket went for a toss because he spent less time at the nets and more before the beauticians and the cameras? Would it be right to say the same thing about all our cricketers, Virendra Sehwag included, whom we have turned into demigods so they could sign multi-million contracts promoting multinational products and make piles of money? The interlink of cricket and commercial sponsorships has become such integral part of any international tournament that we are told Sony lost over Rs.100 crore in advertisement revenues because India and Pakistan got thrown out of this World Cup, falling to lowly Bangladesh and Ireland.
The swings of fortune from these sponsorship contracts are deadlier than a reverse swing beauty from Sarfraz Nawaz. Fail a few matches, score a couple of ducks—fixed or genuine—and the star batsman falls crashing from the 60-ft highway banners and gets ripped off the jazziest of TV commercials. Worse still, fans scream abuse and throw stones—a scary prospect for the sponsor as such public rage could demolish the product the cricketer has been promoting. And we get Shah Rukh Khan replacing Sachin Tendulkar.
It is high time we adopt some tricks that are better than merely replacing Sachin with Shah Rukh. Perhaps we must replace cricket with something like football or hockey, even basketball, for getting doped the way we do whenever an international event involving our cricketing heroes gets on to the calendar. In fact, football and basketball have a larger fan following globally and their stars too earn in millions, but then, they spend more time netting the ball than before the cameras endorsing the brylcreams.
True, it may be harsh and even cruel to prescribe to our darling cricketers that they must spend less time signing endorsement contracts, considering the prime life of a player is pretty short and being a pro, he must make the best during that sunshine period so he could stack up a few millions in the bank and in investments—forget the factor that many retired cricketers continue to make money as columnists and TV commentators, not to mention the pricey positions as BCCI administrators at various levels.
Nevertheless, this latest hammering that Team India has got in the World Cup should give our cricket-crazy public yet another chance to turn sober and 'redeem' national honour---it's a pity that for long, we have tied up this national honour with the winning and losing at our cricket internationals, particularly against the 'beloved' neighbour Pakistan---by evolving some kind of a disciplining mechanism to bring our stars back to the nets and off from the adman's cameras, at least till the greedy chap is back amid runs and wickets.
One way of doing this, perhaps the best way too, is to let these cola and bike makers know that their products would be shunned like poison if they are endorsed by cricketers not delivering on the ground--rather than attack a Dhoni bungalow or a Sachin ka dhaba.
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