The Hindu : A story of consistent growth

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Sep 13, 2003

Sports

Sports

A story of consistent growth

By S. Krishnan

FROM the early days of sports coverage when a solitary inspired gentleman — the late Murugesa Mudaliar — did a fair imitation of Lance Armstrong on a daily basis to report on sports activities in Madras, The Hindu's sports pages/columns have come a long way.

From a few tiny items on page four, sports coverage in the paper is now spread over the best part of three — sometimes even four — pages, featuring reports and pictures ranging from the Test match at Lord's and the day's action at Wimbledon down to college and school level events.

And, through seven or eight decades, going back to the 1930s, it has been a fascinating process of evolution as special attention was given to sports coverage by successive editors of the newspaper and what was once a poor country cousin to politics and civic news reporting grew into one of the big pillars supporting the edifice of The Hindu, so to say.

As in any other newspaper anywhere in the world, in The Hindu too sports reporting grew with the times, reflecting, for good measure, the patronage enjoyed by different disciplines among the public. Yet, in many instances, The Hindu has been a pioneer, to say the least, in terms of promoting sports/sportspersons through its columns.

All major competitive sports — and horse racing as well — are covered in considerable depth by the paper. One of the first newspapers in this country to send a sports reporter overseas for coverage — the late S. K. Gurunathan was the first to travel out of the country, in 1952, to cover the Indian cricket team's tour of England — The Hindu has many other firsts to its name in the area of sports journalism.

Since those early days after India's independence, dozens of The Hindu sports scribes have travelled abroad to report major events for the newspaper. And it must be said that cricket has not been the only sport that has demanded our editors' attention when it comes to overseas coverage.

The Hindu reporters were among the first from India to cover the Olympic Games and our coverage of tennis, hockey, athletics and, in the last 10 years, chess has expanded in a way that the late Murugesa Mudaliar would have hardly dreamed of on evenings when he cycled back to The Hindu office in the 1930s to file his reports.

In fact, the attention paid by The Hindu to the coverage of chess — with the rise of Viswanathan Anand as a world beater — is unparalleled in the history of sports journalism in this country. A sport that had a tiny column devoted to it once a week is, today, among the most widely reported in the pages of The Hindu.

With so many sports demanding our attention, and with the television revolution in the country requiring our leading writers to adapt themselves to the times, a lot has indeed changed since the early days of sports reporting in The Hindu.

From a few handwritten copies and later, a bunch of telegrams, in the early days, today, the sports desk of The Hindu handles hundreds of copies every single day out of a state-of-the-art CCI system.

Three quarters of a century after Mudaliar's pioneering days in sports journalism, The Hindu, aged 125, employs 48 sports writers/sub editors apart from receiving contributions from leading columnists and several stringers. Indeed, it has been a story of consistent growth from Mudaliar's days on a bicycle, going around the city for sports news.

(The author is Associate Editor, Sports)

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