On and off the field, cricketer’s humility may be the deciding factor for posterity.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: The glowing tributes to Sachin Tendulkar’s retirement from cricket, in the American media, is unprecedented for an Indian sports personality.
From The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to Time Magazine, there were articles, columns and photo galleries dedicated to the Little Master, who is leaving the game after a 24-year career, at the age of 40.
Some were opportunistic; to capitalize on the frenzy of the Indian masses, both in India and here, to get eye balls on anything remotely connected to the name Tendulkar. A case in point is a weak photo gallery put out by the Post, which didn’t capture the reverence for the player, had even photos of him with the actor Sanjay Dutt and an Australian politician; in a span of 13 photos.
Time Magazine hastily pulled down a quote attributed to president Obama on Tendulkar, who pontificated on how the country’s economy plummeted when he played (presumably because people stopped working). Turned out it was put out by a website that specializes in satire a day earlier, but has been circulating for months without attribution. Time should have stuck to the term they put out last year profiling Tendulkar: “The God of Cricket”.
Some tried to define Tendulkar’s importance and impact on the game of cricket and his popularity in India: “Suspend your disbelief and think of him as a cross between Babe Ruth and Martin Luther King,” Tunku Varadarajan wrote in an Op-Ed in The New York Times.
It requires a supreme act of imagination to conjure up a mix between the two legends: the civil rights champion who won a Nobel Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence, and the big hitting baseball player, who as a Yankee won seven pennants and four World Series titles, in 22 seasons.
But more than that, it’s interesting to note that Varadarajan, a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has chosen to convey to Americans who are ignorant of Tendulkar’s fame and stature, and indeed of the sport itself, the greatness, aura of a sporting personality whose fame transcends the game itself – something which ESPN had said of Ruth and close to Tendulkar that way – with two icons who are no more, in an era of great heroes who are still alive. Ruth was born in 1895; King in 1929. Both died young, before Tendulkar was born.
America has had countless global sports heroes since the time of Ruth.
Basketball stars Michael Jordan, who has six NBA titles, and Shaquille O’Neal, with four titles, are perhaps the most popular global sporting stars, after European and South American soccer players, rubbing shoulders with tennis greats Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
Tennis stars from the yesteryears like John McEnroe and Pete Sampras, and the evergreen Williams sisters, track and field champions like Carl Lewis are still hugely popular in the US, can hold their own against contemporary stars like Olympic swimming hero Michael Phelps, golfer Tiger Woods and boxing superhero-turned villain, Mike Tyson.
Baseball stars like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees – the latter’s salary for 2013 is estimated to be $28 million, as compared to $22 million by Tendulkar – raise envy in most Americans.
Going by the adulation poured on Tendulkar, most Americans would think that he is also the richest sportsperson in India, but that is not the case. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who made $31.5 million this year, is 16th on the Forbes list, compared to Tendulkar’s 51st standing.
However, the one sportsperson in America today, who has the global appeal and fascination that comes closest to Tendulkar is boxer Muhammad Ali, who defeated every top heavyweight boxer of his era, and was crowned ‘Sportsman of the Century’ by Sports Illustrated and ‘Sports Personality of the Century’ by the BBC.
Tendulkar’s personality and legacy is more likely to be on the lines of Ali, who is now also known as a champion for social causes.
At 71, and despite suffering from Parkinson’s syndrome for almost three decades now, the respect and reverence Ali commands is more than NFL players like Tom Brady, basketball star Kobe Bryant, and Jeter combined generate.
The reason: unlike the national and international adoration Ali got, for his activities both on and off the ring, the popularity of the stars of NFL, MLB and NBA are all confined to their teams, often heckled, derided when they play elsewhere in the country. Only a few like Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal managed to rise above that regional face of the sport.
Phenomenal celebrity athletes like Phelps and Woods have had to deal with their vices, and while the public still enjoy their exploits, they will also be remembered for their fallible behavior off the sporting arena.
Tendulkar could also become an ambassador for the game – like Ali did globally – and help bring it to America, the last frontier for the sport, as despite numerous attempts, it has failed to take off here. ESPN Cricinfo reckons it gets more viewers on its site from America than from India.
After all, cricket did come to America in the beginning of the 18th century. President Barack Obama, as the other presidents before him, and the ones to come after him, owe the title of their job to cricket.
One of the founding fathers of America, John Adams, when mulling what to call the top government official in the country, is said to have pointed out that “the most respected man in a New England village was the president of the cricket club,” and the name of the chief executive was thus decided. Cricket flourished in the US in the beginning of the 18th century.
Despite The Wall Street Journal surmising that Tendulkar’s records “will almost certainly never be surpassed, simply because of the sheer unlikelihood of a player breaking into an international side aged 16, staying in it until the age of 40, and spending almost all of the intervening period at the very top of his game,” there is a good chance that talented cricketers like Virat Kohli, Cheteshwar Pujara and Rohit Sharma – if they have the longevity to stay on for two and a half decades – can break most of his records, considering that there is more cricket played today.
But what remains to be seen is if they can also emulate the grace and humility showed by Tendulkar that endeared him to the masses, and has respected writers like Varadarajan compare him to Martin Luther King.
When it comes to popular sporting stars globally, India has had a paucity of names to boast about, apart from the world of cricket and some in tennis: Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi, Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan may be more popular names for sports buffs in America than the names of Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev. Milkha Singh, P T Usha and Geet Sethi are like stars in another universe. Viswanathan Anand does not feature on sports pages here, has a rank in popularity equivalent to the Spelling Bee champs.
The euphoria surrounding Tendulkar will dissipate in a matter of days in India too. Focus will shift to the one-day series with the West Indies, and then to the series in South Africa. New stars will emerge. Like in films, so in sports: the show must go on.
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar).