By Rahul Nair
December 11 2005

There is an unusual tradition at the Cricket Club of India headquarters in Mumbai. Even if your father is a member, you cannot enter the goddamned club-house if you are below 18. But there was one genius that made the illustrious babudom bow down and relax its strict rules: Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. At age 15, the stripling lad took guard for the CCI, after sipping on his favorite paani-kum-chai.

I was outside the net-iron fencing beyond the boundary (my uncle was a member, but I was not allowed into the Club due to my under-18 status), avidly watching as everyone around me exhorted me to watch this young lad “my age bat like a magician.”

He played a copybook cover-drive on the up and I thought, “Damn! This guy is good.” When he hooked a bouncer, I was clapping and jumping up and down like a madman. (I was, of course, excused since the only time I had seen the hook shot played before was by a guy from the West Indies called Rohan something who always fell when he played it. This schoolboy didn’t fall.)

Next I saw him was just before an international against the Windies at Wankhede. I forget the match, which we lost ignominiously, but what I cannot forget were the scenes before the match started.

The players were having their hit-about when suddenly, the guy next to me in the stands stops eating his vada-pav in mid-chew and says, “saala, tikde bagh… to Shardashramcha Sachin porga aala re!” Sachin had been “invited” to the hit-about, although he was not yet a regular Mumbai Ranji player. I saw him hit a few very good straight-drives, before he asked Sandhu to bowl to him from half-pitch distance and every ball he bowled, nay, “threw,” Sachin clobbered out of the park.

Months passed. Then, during my teenage angst-phase, I had a big fight with one of my physics professors during a Special Theory of Relativity lecture about how he had “relatively no mass” and got thrown out of class. “Screw you!” I said, and went to a friend’s to watch a Test match between India and Pakistan. India was reeling at 4-101 and Ravishankar Shastri was just dismissed, leaving Sanjay “the technician” Manjrekar at the crease. I told my friend, in between sips of Pepsi Cola, “Yeh to maha bore hone waala hai… Apni vaat lag gayee samajh.” My friend shook his head in disdainful agreement. He sipped his cola. His mom brought samosas for us to eat while watching the game.

The next hour was so gripping, the samosas turned cold, uneaten. Both friend and I were enthralled by a little boy who got hit on the face by the fastest bowler in the world, but continued to play after spitting out the blood and getting a couple of band-aids. More importantly, the little boy went on to score a superb maiden Test fifty.

“Yeh saala fultu Mumbaikar hai, re!!” my friend said.

Soon after that, I saw a repeat of Tom Alter’s interview with the “phenom schoolboy” on TV. One answer stayed with me: the boy’s palpable respect for his mentor “Achrekar-Sir.” That’s when I felt ashamed of my outburst in class. That’s when I thought to myself, if chhota Sachin can make it, so could I. Thus began the story of how a 10th-class-pass willow magician inspired yet another middle-class boy from the ‘burbs to push the envelope, to look beyond the negatives, to go past the merely possible into the realms of the unattainable through sheer application and focus, allied to a strong belief in one’s innate talent.

There are many apocryphal tales of the young Sachin, who stole cricket balls and refused to give them back unless the boys who owned the ball agreed to bowl to him for one hour. But it is beyond doubt that he is one born to bat, who lives to bat and who will, frankly, be at a loss when the time comes that he can’t bat any more. This boy, now the senior citizen of world cricket, only had one burning desire: to “bat for India and win lots of matches, including the World Cup.”

That may or may not happen, but he has won countless matches off his own bat and has now attained the acme of the batting world, surpassing the peerless S M Gavaskar in record books for Test centuries. Considering that most “great” international bats would be happy to score 19 tons, it is mind-boggling that 19 is just the number of Test tons he has scored away from home. 73 international tons notched up, and the man still looks hungry for many more.

Even more than this achievement, which to many observers was merely inevitable, what is truly remarkable about the champion’s career is the fact that—to a man—there’s nary an opposition player who has a SINGLE unkind word to say about him. That, in a way, is what ex-coach John Wright alluded to when he said, “[Sachin Tendulkar is] In the truest sense of the word, the only great player there's ever been.” Grace-under-pressure could be another monicker for this remarkable sportsman.

Many think his unsung years would be the ones when he single-handedly carried the torch for the Indian batting. But his cathartically terrible years were when he was given the reins of captaining the India team with the match-fixing coterie scheming all around him. His will never gave up until that dismal dark day when he realized that even the establishment was up against him—sending in Noel David as a pace bowling replacement was merely the last straw. That was the only time us Mumbaikars saw him in a tizzy—upset, troubled, frazzled—so much so that, at the end of the tour, he went “walkabout” like an Antipodean aborigine. He took refuge in a “safe house” (his maternal home in Pune) and BCCI officials had no clue as to his whereabouts for 48 hours. He did some serious soul-searching and then decided that enough was enough and all he wanted to do was fulfill his destiny—becoming the premier batsman of his era, and to hell with captaincy.

The only changes to his approach to the game since then (his focus and dedication never wavered, even in his worst phase) have been purely biological. For the philistines among us who have never lifted a bat, let me not try and waste time enumerating the shooting white-hot pain that would affect every forcing stroke when played with a tennis elbow, not to mention the umpteen stress fractures, the mashed toe, the spasming back and more. Matter of fact, the man is so Clint Eastwoodian, instead of making excuses, he put a little splint on his broken finger and produced master-class after master-class during the World Cup 2003. After all, like I said before, this man lives to bat. So one can imagine the anguish he must have felt when he was forced to lay off from the game due to tennis elbow.

The post-tennis elbow Sachin has a new lease on his batting life. And the man knows it. For those very familiar with his game, it didn’t take rocket science to figure out that Sachin was enjoying himself during the 90-odd against the Lankans in the ODI series. Nor did it take brain surgery to figure out that in his first Test inning of any significance since the elbow rehabilitation, he played himself in and then after his fifty, took complete control of proceedings with a joy in his handiwork that took us beyond the mature façade, took us closer to the schoolboy from Shardashram. We did see some nerves during the late-90s, but then who wouldn’t, trying to break the record of a man who has been his idol for 32 years?

But truly the most endearing and lump-in-the-throat moment was when Sachin Tendulkar turned one from Chaminda Vaas backward of square and after punching the air, there was a long spiritual communion with the late high school teacher Ramesh Tendulkar. Fans may remember his sudden trip back to Mumbai during the 1999 World Cup (and the subsequent thrashing of Kenya) to attend to his father’s last rites. If there was a poignant moment in Tendulkar’s personal history, it has to be this one.

But again, the simplicity of the man is disarming. On being asked what he told his team-mates after returning to the dressing room following his 35th Test ton, he said, “I felt shy. I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.”

That’s a fitting epitaph. Let’s not say anything, as well, Tendulkar-sir.

Let’s merely watch a legend unfold itself.

Let’s feel blessed and privileged.

Amen.