Even more impressive is Tendulkar's record as top scorer in both of
cricket's main formats--the exhausting five-day tests and the intense
one-day internationals. Usain Bolt would have to win the marathon as
well as the 100 m at the London Olympics to approach that level of
achievement. Unlike in baseball, a cricket batter keeps hitting until he
is out. Tendulkar once hit 241 runs while whacking 436 balls without
getting out. You need a calendar to keep score for this guy.
Tendulkar's
genius stems from a combination of physical attributes--superhuman
hand-eye coordination, lightning reflexes, powerful wrists and near
perfect balance--and a voracious appetite to keep accumulating runs to
utterly dominate bowlers. Opponents have tried to intimidate him with
speed and bounce, with guile and spin, all to no avail: he has no
Achilles' heel.
He performs within a national sports culture that
is uniquely difficult. Cricket is important in England and former
British colonies in the Caribbean, South Africa, New Zealand and
Australia, but it competes with soccer, rugby and other sports for
popularity. In India, cricket is the all-consuming passion. Although it
was introduced by the British as a pastime for elites, Indians turned
the tables on their colonial rulers and made cricket a true people's
sport, played with as much enthusiasm in the streets and slums as on the
manicured lawns of exclusive clubs. It's hard to think of another
nation so obsessed with a single sport. Indians like to say that of
their top 10 sports, cricket ranks No. 1 through No. 9--and nobody knows
or cares what comes 10th.
So to begin to comprehend Tendulkar's
place in the Indian consciousness, imagine how Americans might have felt
about Michael Jordan if they followed no sport but basketball. Then
imagine that Jordan's team represented not just Chicago but the entire
nation. You might begin to understand that the common Indian expression
"Cricket is my religion, and Sachin is my god" is not really a joke.
Tendulkar says he tries not to think too deeply about the adulation and
claims his fans' hopes for him don't match his own. "Something which
still gives me sleepless nights," he says, "is, 'How will I go out and
keep that standard and live up to my own expectations?'"
Tendulkar's deification is also testament to the fact, deeply
discomfiting to most Indians, that their giant nation is a sporting
Lilliput: heroes are few and far between. Every Olympic year brings
forth great hand wringing about India's inability to compete with other
large nations--India's haul from Beijing in 2008, a gold and two bronze,
was its best medals tally ever. (China won 100.) Its only consistently
world-beating performer outside the cricket pitch has been chess
champion Viswanathan Anand.
The scarcity of sporting success
feeds a national inferiority complex. Growing up in India, I learned to
take comfort in pseudoscience trotted out by PE teachers that we were
genetically disposed to pursuits of the brain over brawn. (It didn't
work; I was good at neither.) "We'd come to think of ourselves as too
soft, too physically weak to win on a playing field," says historian
Ramachandra Guha. "Sachin showed us that was nonsense--not only could we
play, we could consistently beat countries that were supposedly of
stronger physical stock." (Indians routinely refer to Tendulkar by his
first name, a sign of both affection and possessiveness.) It helped too
that Tendulkar was no physical giant who could be dismissed as a
one-off: at 5 ft. 5 in. (165 cm), he's almost exactly the national
average for male height.
When Tendulkar played his first match
for India in the fall of '89, he was only 16, one of the youngest
debutants ever; I was 22, already too old to fantasize about a career as
a cricketer. But I could live vicariously through the prodigy. After
all, we shared a middle-class upbringing and a sketchy academic record. I
did not imagine myself smacking the big Australian bowlers around as
Tendulkar did at Perth in 1992, when he scored a breathtaking 114. Even
so, I partook of his success: I walked taller, dreamed bigger and felt,
like hundreds of millions of Indians, that I too could take on the
world. Our chance was just around the corner.
Pitchman Perfect
There
had been great Indian cricketers before Tendulkar, but his arrival
coincided with momentous events that would catapult him and his country
to dramatic successes. In the summer of 1991, India began to liberalize
its economy, unshackling private enterprise and unleashing a burst of
consumerism. Almost overnight, we got access to dozens of TV channels.
The market was flooded with new companies and products, including
foreign brands that had long been denied access to India. The TV
channels needed programming, and cricket was an obvious lode of ratings
gold. The new brands needed pitchmen, and who better than the Master
Blaster?
He already had the makings of a marketer's dream:
cherubic in appearance, soft-spoken and scrupulously well behaved, he
was the ultimate Mr. Nice Guy. His father was a well-known novelist, but
Tendulkar himself was a man of few words, steering clear of controversy
on the field and off. When four colleagues were thrown out of the sport
for match fixing, he largely kept mum. When he eventually broke the
hearts of millions of Indian women and got married, it was not to a
Bollywood star or supermodel but to a pediatrician turned homemaker
named Anjali. The couple mostly stayed home and worked hard to keep
their two children out of the limelight.
At the start of his career, Tendulkar, like most cricketers at the
time, had to hold down a job in order to make ends meet; he worked at an
apparel manufacturer. In 1990 he did his first ad, an embarrassingly
low-rent affair for a cheap moped. Two years later, he was endorsing
Pepsi and was on his way to becoming cricket's first millionaire. In
1995 he signed a five-year, $7.5 million contract with a
sports-management company, the first deal of its kind in India.
For
much of the 1990s, his exploits on the cricket pitch were solo efforts:
he was world-class, the team around him less so. That great 114 against
Australia in Perth? Despite Tendulkar's brilliance, India lost the game
by a humiliating 300 runs. That pattern was repeated over and over
again.
Still, his wondrous bat would keep Indian hearts beating.
Says Anirban Blah, who runs the celebrity-management firm Kwan
Entertainment: "We'd watch as long as Sachin was batting, because there
was a chance we could win. The moment he got out, we switched off the TV
set and went back to work, because we felt victory was no longer in the
cards."
But Tendulkar was influencing a new generation of
players such as Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly who would soon arrive on
the national stage with an aggressive, winning mentality that owed as
much to Tendulkar's exploits as to India's new economic confidence. By
1998, the Indian team entered most games with a decent chance of
winning. The following year, I wrote a story for TIME on the upcoming
World Cup. There was little debate over who would be the first cricketer
on the magazine's international cover: Tendulkar, representing not just
India but the rising power of Asia over the game.
India didn't
win the 1999 World Cup--Australia did--but Tendulkar served notice that
India's time was coming. By then he was unquestionably the world's best
batsman. Sachin became a popular first name for newborn boys, and his
face was seemingly on every second billboard and TV commercial, hawking
everything from cars to cameras and cookies. India's economy, roaring
along, growing 6.4% annually, was extremely good to its cricketing god.
He
was great for the Indian cricket industry too. With hundreds of
millions tuning in to watch him play, India became the biggest TV market
for the sport, and cricket's Mumbai-based governing body supplanted its
traditional power structure in the hallowed halls of London's Lord's
Cricket Ground. This also had an impact outside of cricket. Says Shashi
Tharoor, an author and member of India's Parliament: "Eventually, when
an Indian company bought the great English car companies Jaguar and Land
Rover, it made perfect sense--we already owned their national sport."
But
the pressure was beginning to show on Tendulkar. A long-untreated case
of tennis elbow hurt his performances, and a spell as team captain was a
failure. The man of few words didn't communicate with his teammates
well enough and couldn't motivate them.
Surgeries in 2005 and the next year took him out of the game for a
spell and brought with them an epiphany. During his recovery from the
second surgery, he took part, unannounced, in a couple of friendly
games, away from the spotlight and with hardly any spectators. For the
first time in years, playing was just plain fun. Competing for India had
become "so much about commitment and pressure and doing things
correctly," he says, he'd forgotten to enjoy himself. Those practice
games, he now says, were "a game changer for me."
And it showed.
Back in national colors, he demonstrated a new gusto for batsmanship
that disheartened bowlers everywhere as much as it thrilled spectators:
his stunning 154 against world champions Australia at the start of 2008
may be his finest performance ever. The records came fast and thick:
most runs, most centuries. Riding on a rejuvenated Tendulkar, India for
the first time became the world's No. 1 team, and last summer the
country went nuts when the team won the World Cup on home soil. During
the victory lap, teammates hoisted Tendulkar, their top scorer for the
tournament with 482 runs, on their shoulders. "Sachin has carried the
burden of the nation for 21 years," said up-and-coming star Virat Kohli.
"It was our turn to carry him on our shoulders."
Ton of Pressure
No
sooner had the fireworks died down, however, than pressure began to
mount again on Tendulkar: he'd scored his 99th century during the World
Cup, lighting up South Africa for 111 runs, and his countrymen wanted
him to go past that new milestone. Wherever he went, he was asked when
he'd score the ton of tons. The rest of the team suffered a dramatic
slump in form, losing its No. 1 status to England. Criticism centered,
unfairly or not, on Tendulkar. At 38, he was long in the tooth for a pro
cricketer; wouldn't the honorable thing be to retire gracefully?
Those
questions preyed on Tendulkar's mind, making it harder and harder to
get into the zone. He came tantalizingly close to the ton a couple of
times and claimed, implausibly, not to be especially stressed by the
quest. But it was a full year before the 100th came, in Dhaka against
Bangladesh, the final run coming in an easy single rather than a
thumping blow; afterward, he admitted to feeling "50 kilos lighter."
So
what now for the Master Blaster? Twenty-two years is a long span in any
sport. When I ask him to sign a copy of that 1999 TIME cover, he adds a
tongue-in-cheek inscription, "Time flies!" He may not want to talk
about the R word, but he turned 39 in April, so speculation about his
plans will only grow. Several members of the great Indian team of the
2000s have hung up their gloves. In April, he was nominated to the upper
house of India's Parliament, the equivalent of Britain's House of
Lords. The position is mostly ceremonial, and it's hard to imagine it
will turn into a long-term career: Mr. Nice Guy seems ill-suited to the
rough-and-tumble of Indian politics. And anyway, "the Honorable Sachin
Tendulkar" seems a steep demotion from god.
The traditional
postplaying career of TV punditry would likely be too small-bore for
someone with an estimated net worth of $115 million. And his value as a
national pick-me-up is waning. High on economic success, India may no
longer need a dose of Tendulkar to feel good. "India's self-confidence,
which he helped to build, is now strong enough to cope without Sachin,"
says Guha. "There is life in India after Sachin, but I don't know what
life for Sachin can be after cricket."
Unless there is more
cricket. Freed of the huge weight of expectations he has carried for
much of his career, the world's greatest athlete can now pursue a pure
enjoyment of the sport he has enriched. History suggests an unburdened
Tendulkar is a prolific Tendulkar, especially if he continues to unravel
the mysteries of the zone. The satisfaction of reaching the zone is
personal and intense, he says, even when there's no winning outcome. He
then quickly adds, "But I would want an outcome." A world-class player
can tolerate nothing less. So everybody please pipe down and let him
play.
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