Sach a Life: So long and farewell

In today’s world I would challenge any reader of this newspaper to nominate a sportsperson that they could truly say they have an emotional attachment to. Messi, Ronaldo, Federer, Nadal, Tiger Woods; these names roll off the tongue as behemoths of their respective sports. Hearing these names evokes admiration, loyalty, respect, but never a sense of identification, brotherhood, or, most importantly, a sense that that particular player could ever possibly be bigger than the game itself.

Well, this is precisely where Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is different; and in a category of his own. For the reasons that I will delve further into below, this man has dominated both the sport as well as the hearts and minds of fans; boys, girls, mothers, fathers, doctors, lawyers, rich, poor, old and young for the best part of a quarter of a century. He has carried the hopes and dreams of a nation that was beginning to find its voice and emerge from insecurity. The rise and rise of Tendulkar coincided with the rise and rise of naya India – and this is probably one of the most important things to consider. I will try and make the rest of this article as easy as possible to understand for those of you not yet acquainted with the glorious sport of cricket. Tendulkar’s career as an international cricketer began in 1989 as a tender 16 year-old boy facing some of the most fearsome and skilful bowlers to ever grace the game. He was hit in the face, blood flowing from his nose, but continued to play on. Fast forward 24 years to the day and he bows out from the sport, having broken nearly all conceivable batting records, plundering runs with ruthless efficiency and outrageous flair all over the world. It is almost impossible to convey how great his career was without having to revert to some nerdy statistical analysis (cricket fans love stats), and whilst statistics do not tell the full story, there is much truth to the old adage ‘the numbers don’t lie’.

The best way to measure the greatness of a player during his career is to compare him to his contemporaries/rivals. He has scored 24% more Test Match centuries than the next highest century maker. He has scored 19% more Test runs than his nearest competitor, who has retired, incidentally. A whopping 63% and 34% are Tendulkar’s respective ODI numbers. In addition to this he holds just under 100 individual and team records. Compare these achievements to modern day legends such as Tiger Woods – who has yet to beat Jack Nicklaus’ record of Majors won.

“India is a country where cricket is almost like a religion, and Sachin is treated as a god”. This is a cliché that is bandied around all the time; I dislike it and feel it does injustice to the average Indian cricket fan. I would like to embark on a more detailed analysis of what Tendulkar means to Indians. To clarify the quote, he has been a beacon of hope and aspiration to the entire Indian Diaspora. But let me put this statement into context.

India gained independence from the British in 1947. The next 40-50 years were ones of turbulence, wars and relative global economic insignificance. Citizens had limited heroes and role models, Indian politicians have by and large been a source of despair and corruption, and inequality was still widespread. Cue, within a few years of one another, two of the most important Indians of the past couple of decades; Manmohan Singh and Sachin Tendulkar. The current PM and then finance minister implemented wide-sweeping, critically acclaimed economic reforms in response to the Balance of Payments crisis in 1991. These reforms liberalised the economy, opened India up to foreign investment and signalled a new chapter in the development and international recognition of India. At the same time Tendulkar emerged as India’s great national treasure, still merely a boy at the time. He was magnificent; able to tame and decimate all that stood before him with joyful abandon. Tendulkar has now retired, a shadow of his former self for the past few years; Singh has been increasingly ineffective, mainly due to his party’s incompetence and is facing the very real possibility of the end of his political career next year with the upcoming general elections. The symmetry between the two is striking.

Coming to the subject of unity and equality, Tendulkar brought all sorts of people together, in the early days it would be listening in silence around a transistor radio, and later television shops would be invaded to capacity. Indeed, such was Sachin’s hold on the nation that economic output could be seen to drop in the morning after he reached stumps not out. People could forget about their problems for a short while when he was batting.

Throughout the 24 years he has represented the largest democracy on earth, there has never been a scandal in which he was implicated. He helped restore credibility to Indian cricket after a damning match fixing exposé in 2000. He played the game in its true spirit, and was one of the last of a generation of real gentlemen. He exhibited sportsmanship down to his core and was one of the main instigators in the calling back of the England batsman Ian Bell when he should have been given out. He has hardly said a bad word about an opposition player and, out of respect, has hardly ever been abused or ‘sledged’ onfield. This is made all the more remarkable given the overbearing adulation of over a billion people. No other athlete in the history of sport has had to deal with so much combined pressure and expectation and not buckled at some point.

Furthermore, Tendulkar was a true pioneer of his sport. He reinvented the ‘One Day International’ format almost single-handedly, displaying a never-before-seen combination of the traditional and the new. Dogged by uncommon injuries for a cricketer, tennis elbow being his most potent nemesis, he also helped scores of first-class cricketers by leveraging his status as a healthcare ambassador. This ensured that these poorly paid cricketers would have some kind of cushion if they became unfit to play. He even refuses to advertise for companies that he feels uncomfortable with; one example is his turning down a $4 million a year contract to be sponsored by Vijay Mallya’s United Breweries Group. Tendulkar, for a large proportion of people, was synonymous with childhood. Perhaps this is because the average age of the Indian population is 26 – approximately the length of his career. He has straddled three generations of cricketers in his career, but never seems to have aged. He still has the chubby 16 year old’s face, perhaps a little more worn around the edges; he has celebrated every opposition wicket with childish glee, never the angry, profanity-inducing macho-isms of others. Fittingly, the most common source of sorrow for cricket fans was that their only source of innocence and current link to childhood had been severed when Tendulkar retired. Even now, merely footage of his strokeplay is enough to turn grown men into babbling schoolgirls.

As I am coming to the end of this article, I would like to add a few personal anecdotes and views. My grandfather (who, incidentally, announced he would leave his job if he wasn’t allowed leave to watch a particular Test Match) was fortunate enough to watch Tendulkar on his first tour of England. He arrived home and prophetically exclaimed in Punjabi “This boy is going to be great”. I also had the privilege of watching him bat on his last tour to England at Lord’s on the 5th day of a pulsating Test Match. For the first time in many people’s living memory, Lord’s was at full capacity on a 5th day. I myself have never been one for putting Tendulkar particularly higher than other cricketers, but a certain journalist was able to sum up emotions from the past week very well: “many who didn’t believe they were red-blooded Tendulkarites, or even cricket maniacs, listened to him speak and were bewildered by their own reaction. They didn’t belong to the “Sachin” faithful, yet they sensed a reverberation”. This is completely correct; as I listened to his retirement speech, I struggled to contain tears, as did about a billion across the world.

Not only were the crowd and myself moved beyond belief, but they realised that they had been in love, true love, for 24 years, without them knowing.

Tendulkar, the Little Master has been a colossus of the game and a constant in every Indian’s life. He has stoked fierce pride in the face of opposition, pure enjoyment for the neutral, and most of all, someone to place all your faith and hope in. I hope this article can help those people who don’t know who this great man is understand the impact he has had. Farewell, Sachin, thanks for the memories.