The Hindu : So near, yet so far

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

Sports

Sports

So near, yet so far

By Nirmal Shekar

With megastars like David Beckham visiting their drawing rooms — via television — regularly, few sports fans care to attend local events.

THE other day, driving along the Marina, on a whim I turned into Pycrofts road and parked in front of a cricket ground that was no longer a ground where any sane person would consider playing any sport.

A once-picturesque ground that is so much a part of the cricketing folklore of Madras — competitive cricket has seldom been played on the Marina since Madras was forced to rename itself Chennai — has become a stinking wasteland, home to vagrants, stray cows and nomads.

It was impossible not to get mistily sentimental as I stood there with a lump in my throat, recalling an unforgettable August day in 1980 when this writer, as a trainee sports reporter in The Hindu, got to watch and write about a cricket match for the first time. It is easy to recall that almost 1,000 people had watched an under-19 game on that day.

Today, in an era when any State association hosting a Ranji Trophy final will be thrilled to have that kind of audience in the stadium, the decay and death of a great Madras sporting landmark — the Marina ground — somehow seems to stand mute testimony to the passing of time.

The Marina. The old Nehru stadium behind the Ripon Building near the Central Station. The old Mayor Radhakrishnan stadium in Egmore. Not long after The Hindu marked its centenary, each was a home away from home to a young cub reporter and every one of them has changed almost beyond recognition in the years since, two of them for the better, to be sure.

Yet, 10 years ago, on my first visit to the new Nehru stadium, I was enveloped by a great sense of loss, almost as if someone had bulldozed my beautiful old house and rebuilt it to suit their convenience.

There I was, staring at the shining jewel in the crown of the city's sports infrastructure and dreaming not so much about the grand spectacle that an international football match would be at the state-of-the-art new stadium but, strangely enough, being swept back as if in a trance, on a time machine, into the past.

Where, for heaven's sake, was the patch of land along the sidelines of the western ground where I started my career in sports journalism, sitting on a rusty, ageing steel chair? Where, oh where, was that ancient scoreboard which was not so much a board that displayed scores as a monument in itself?

Where then, I thought, in all the concrete labyrinth, would I find Mani, the groundnut vendor who walked a considerable distance to the western end of the ground every evening (all the spectators were on the eastern side) just to keep a solitary customer happy?

Where, really where, was my friend and football connoisseur extraordinaire, the inimitable Rehman-bhai?

Was he lost in the bowels of the magnificent structure? Always in a white dhoti and a crisp khadi short-sleeved shirt, Rehman used to sit at the same spot day after day, whether it was a senior division league match or any other more important contest.

Nostalgia, they say, is a sure sign of old age. Nothing-is-what-it-used-to-be is a lament that you come up with when age catches up with you. It is even worse when you look at change, that inevitable agent of Time, with jaundiced eyes, particularly when the change is surely, immeasurably, for the better.

Surely, the old Nehru stadium wasn't Wembley and the old Marina ground wasn't Lord's. Nor was the Mayor Radhakrishnan stadium, where much of the best of tennis was played in those days, Wimbledon.

But, then, looking back now, sometimes it was greater fun working at these places, watching whatever football or cricket or tennis that was being played with eyes shielded from the lazy evening sun, than trying to elbow your way through the throng on the All England Lawn Tennis Club walkways between courts with an impossible deadline doing little to normalise your blood pressure.

Then again, I am not at all sure if a young sports reporter doing today what I did almost a quarter of a century ago would endorse this view. For, most local events these days — whether it is in Madras or Bangalore or Hyderabad or wherever — are held in near empty stadiums.

While a Ranji Trophy match between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka would attract at least 2000 to 3000 spectators in the late 1970s and early 1980s, today, it would take you exactly two minutes to count the number of people in attendance at Chepauk when those two teams play.

Indeed, over the last two decades, local sport in every big city has taken a big beating because of the television revolution. With Sachin Tendulkar, David Beckham, Shane Warne, Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher, Ronaldo and Andre Agassi visiting their drawing rooms, so to say, week after week, fans are simply not interested in extending patronage to local events.

And much of the charm of watching sport and reporting it for a newspaper is lost when the action takes place in an empty or near-empty stadium. For sport without people is a body without soul.

Television may have turned modern day sports stars into multi-millionaires and readily recognisable celebrities but the flip side of this commercial revolution is the fact that it has also turned local, or third and fourth tier sport, into a sort of social outcast.

This apart, for a sportswriter, another great loss because of the television revolution is the fact that he does not get to know the sports heroes of his era as well as his predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s and even 1970s did theirs.

You'd perhaps think the opposite was true; but not really. In the era when fans who worship cult icons such as Beckham and Anna Kournikova want to know everything, you'd think that all-seeing TV cameras and tabloid news hounds give them everything they want.

Of course they do. But, then, the more you think you know about the superstars, the less you actually do. Television has brought them closer to us but has taken them far away from us too. What it has brought closer is the image of the superstar, what it has removed from our grasp is the real person.

As professionals in the business, we may have met a Pete Sampras or a Steffi Graf or a David Beckham or a Sachin Tendulkar several times in the course of work.

But, at the end of the day, we will never perhaps know them — or perhaps be able to author a perfect personality profile of any of them — as well as sportswriters of the 1950s and 1960s knew the heroic performers of their era.

My predecessors would have been able — week after week — to join a Ken Rosewall or a Roy Emerson for a few beers in the pub after a long day at Wimbledon; they would have been able to go out to dinner now and again with the late M. L. Jaisimha or Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and get to know them in bare flesh, so to say, stripped of all the attire forced on them by the image makers.

But, if, today, I tried to do that with a Beckham or a Kournikova or even a Tendulkar, I'd first have to get past the sort of security that George Bush would find suffocating and then lash out at the FBI for over-reacting to threats!

Even then, even if I did manage to pull off the impossible, it would still be tough to get under layers and layers of popular myth to try and get to know the person, warts and all, before setting out to tell the readers the truth, and nothing but the truth.

But what the hell, we have our icons, don't we? We know our icons, don't we?

Awesome Sachin. Sweet Sachin. Faultless Sachin. Beautiful Beckham. Brilliant Beckham. Ravishing Anna. Drop-dead-beautiful Anna.

Come to think of it, let's leave it at that, no matter that I'd right now give up my constant companion — a trustworthy IBM laptop computer — and all the other comforts brought in by modern technology and go right back to my old Olivetti portable typewriter if I could watch and report sport in the 1960s and 1970s.

Unfortunately, Time has no reverse gear.

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