“You know the Sportz Forever shop at Uttarahalli, right?” Ram Bhandari asks me over the phone after accepting my interview request.
Am I supposed to know Sportz Forever? The shop, I assume, is famous. The man, after all, is. He has repaired the bats of some of the all-time cricketing greats. Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Ricky Ponting, Brian Lara… it’s a long list. Journalists, hence, have been mining anecdotes from him for long.
“I can get there, alright,” I tell Bhandari before hanging up, desperate for an exclusive anecdote.
Sportz Forever, however, turns out to be a bit of an anti-climax. It’s a small, one-room cricket goods shop on the first floor of a three-storey building, selling bats, balls, pads, shoes, a few helmets, some wooden mallets and very little accessories of other sports. On the wall, is an A3 size poster of the Indian cricket team clad in blue. The only thing remarkable about the shop is the absence of the man, who I assume is it’s owner.
Turns out, Sportz Forever isn’t Bhandari’s, it belongs to his friend. One of the salesmen guides me to a cramped basement of another multi-storey building in the adjacent lane. Other than a working table, two steel chairs, a plastic stool, some tools and a table fan, bats pervade the entire space. Many are crammed into the shelves, some are scattered on the floor, one’s lying on the table along with a stack of bat handles. Bats, bats, everywhere.
Bhandari, amidst the wooden mess, welcomes me with a nod and a smile.
He’s wearing an indigo and orange Nike T-shirt and a pair of faded dark blue jeans covered with sawdust. The T-shirt was the Indian cricket team’s training wear a couple of years ago. “I had gone to Yuvraj Singh’s hotel room to return his bat after repairing it. As I was getting ready to leave, he gave me one of his brand new T-shirts,” he says.
A youngster, perhaps in his early 20s, interrupts the conversation. “Uncle, is the bat ready?” he asks Bhandari.
“Um... no, it will take some more time.”
“Oh, uncle, can you get it ready quickly? I have a match in a week’s time,” he pleads with Bhandari. “Alright, you can get it the day after tomorrow.” Bhandari, then, asks his customer, an U-23 cricketer, the details of his upcoming game, his scores in the previous ones and wishes him luck.
There’s over a year’s backlog of bats. Bhandari picks one from a pile. A piece of paper on its cover says it’s from Sasaram in Bihar. There’s also the bat of Tim Southee, who plays for New Zealand. “What to do? It’s like feeding 10 kilograms of rice to a man who can eat only one kilo,” he says.
Bhandari’s clients range from the world’s greatest to the neighbourhood novice. They all have to wait for him though. “I like to do a perfect job. And, that sometimes takes time.”
Ram Bhandari reduced Sachin Tendulkar’s bat weight from 1350 grams to 1250 when the latter had shoulder and elbow injuries in 2006. The master, in his next innings, scored a hundred against the West Indies.
Bat mechanics
Bhandari, like most bat repairers, fixes broken bats, seasons new ones, and adds their grips. But what sets him apart is the balance he brings to bats. It’s not that bats are usually askew — bat makers today ensure distribution of weight and harmony of design and proportion. But when cricketers talk about a bat’s balance, they mean its feel.
“Players have their own preferences,” says Bhandari. He demonstrates this by giving me three different bat handles, which he says belong to Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Southee. Kohli’s is oval instead of round, Sharma’s is significantly thinner and Southee’s is thick.
Bhandari has a knack of executing the right tweaks so the bat meets the specific requirements of the player. “In 2006, Sachin was suffering from a shoulder injury. He wasn’t playing the big shots as he used to. I thought his bat was too heavy. From 1350 grams, I reduced it to 1250. In the next match against West Indies, he made 141. He went on to score 13 more centuries with the same bat,” he smiles.
Rahul Dravid was the first international cricketer to spot him. The former Indian captain was still in college, then. Bhandari had just settled in Bengaluru and was repairing bats after a lot of wandering — he fled home (in Bihar) after flunking his Class X exams. He was in Gorakhpur, Pune, Delhi, Bombay and Madras; he worked as a painter, mechanic, bouncer and stuntman. But woodwork, perhaps, was in his genes — his granddad was a carpenter and he learnt the craft from him during his time in Bihar. When Dravid joined the Indian team, Bhandari’s reputation had just begun to spread. Soon, national and international stars sought Bhandari’s service.
The stuff of stories
Bhandari’s memorabilia, spanning over a decade, includes, among others, photographs with Tendulkar, Dhoni, Kohli, AB de Villiers and more; newspaper and magazine cuttings in Kannada, English and Tamil; match tickets and accreditation cards for IPL and international matches; a practice bat of Kohli’s apart from Yuvraj’s T-shirt he’s wearing.
And then there are anecdotes. Plenty of them. Probably more than the bats congesting his small workshop.
“West Indies cricketer Shivnarine Chanderpaul asked me to have lunch with him at his hotel room once. After I was done eating, he cleared my plates!”
“Virender Sehwag usually greets me with a box of laddus .”
“Dhoni gets two tickets arranged for me every IPL.”
Another customer interrupts the flow of anecdotes to collect his willow. “How much?” he asks Bhandari.
“Three hundred.”
“Oh… sorry, uncle. I have only ₹250. Can I pay the rest later?”
“Yeah, yeah, no problem, make sure you get me sweets after you score a hundred,” smiles Bhandari.
I ask him how much he charges international players for a repair. For the first time, the 60-year-old bat repairer says something that veers towards wistfulness. “I receive what they give me with happiness. I repair the bats with which they score hundreds. They make crores, I still live in a rented house. It’s naseeb (destiny), saar .”
With a contented smile, he switches on an angle grinder to work on a labelless bat.
(A sneak peek of Ram Bhandari’s workshop: http://bit.ly/RamBhandari)
