The writer Colin Wilson who “awoke one morning and found himself famous” on the publication of his first book, later wrote about the “enormous sexual possibilities” that came with the fame. International sportsmen are keenly aware of such possibilities early in their careers. “I used to go missing a lot,” said the football star George Best, clarifying, “Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World.”
Fame is an aphrodisiac.
It is not something much commented on till it becomes public — most people are happy to see that as a personal matter between the sportsman and his wife or girlfriend. This is a sensible attitude.
Usually there is a conspiracy of silence around the sportsman; most reporters are happy to stay clear of that particular story. For years Tiger Woods had the image of a clean-cut good boy till that image crashed on the rock of marital infidelities. Suddenly, he was a “sex addict” who needed therapy.
In the case of India cricketer Mohammed Shami, there are two separate issues and those who take the Board of Control for Cricket in India to task for withholding his contract fail to recognise this.
The BCCI was right in acting as it did. It reacted to the second issue: the possibility of domestic violence. If everything his wife has charged Shami with is valid (and that is a big ‘If’), violence is a crime; adultery isn’t and we need to be clear about this.
If Shami’s wife has over-egged the pudding, throwing at him charges from adultery and violence to match-fixing and consorting with Pakistani women, suggesting that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the authorities will do well to get to the truth.
Messy and sad
It is already a messy affair. Either way it is sad. If Shami did all the things he has been accused of, it is terrible to imagine; if he didn’t, then it is terrible to imagine him living through the manufactured nightmare.
Most contracts have a “good behaviour” clause although that is not what it is called (Indian players sign a “code of conduct”). In commercial contracts, there is the line about behaving in a manner that affects the brand negatively. In cricket contracts, you could be hauled up for “bringing the game into disrepute”, which has the kind of vagueness that lawyers make a fortune out of. “Moral turpitude” is the old-fashioned expression that is a catch-all for this.
Without getting tangled up in philosophical arguments about moral relativism, it is enough to point out that what is acceptable in one generation is not necessarily so in another.
Kripal Singh incident
In the 1960s, when Kripal Singh asked out the receptionist of the hotel the Indian team was staying in, she complained to the manager. Both Kripal and his roommate Subhash Gupte were dropped from the team. Kripal was in his 20s, and unmarried; Gupte’s “crime” was he shared a room with the all rounder.
Gupte, rated above Shane Warne as a leg spinner by Garry Sobers, was 32 and never played for India again. “Nothing had happened,” Gupte said later. “Kripal had not assaulted the girl, he had just asked her out for a drink.”
As the 1960s progressed, it was no longer seen as a crime by the BCCI to ask a girl out for a drink; if it were, India might not have had enough players to field a cricket team.
Writing in Wisden more than a decade ago, Derek Pringle said, “Cricket and family life have never been easy bed fellows.” One newspaper reported that “playing for England can seriously damage your wedlock.” It was around the time that Darren Gough, Graham Thorpe, Mark Butcher and Dominic Cork all had their marriages break up while playing for England.
If we don’t hear so much about marriages of Indian players breaking up owing to cricket, it is not because Indian players are pure as the driven snow. Wives and girlfriends tend to be more forgiving, especially when there are children involved. Mohammad Azharuddin’s public break-up is more the exception than the rule.
The key to the Shami case is the domestic violence. Cricketers have been convicted before. From the West Indies fast bowler Roy Gilchrist who pressed a hot iron to his wife’s skin to Geoff Boycott who was found guilty by a French judge of assaulting his girlfriend in a hotel in the 1990s. He was fined and given a suspended jail sentence. He believes that cost him a knighthood.
Shami, a gifted cricketer and till now a certainty for the Indian tour of England later (after the IPL), has garnered much sympathy from those who consider the whole issue the personal affair of the couple.
This is wrong. Only a part of it — the adultery (if that’s true) — is personal. The other part — domestic violence (if proven) — is a criminal act. The BCCI is merely waiting to see how the case proceeds. The governing body is right to do so.
