March.01 : It has been five days since Sachin Tendulkar scored that epic 200 not out against South Africa at Gwalior — the first male cricketer to do so in limited-overs international cricket (former Australian skipper Belinda Clarke having achieved the feat 11 years ago) — and echoes of the knock are still echoing around the cricketing world.
The adulation greeting the inning are still rolling in and no less a figure than the original Little Master, Sunil Gavaskar, has had words of high praise for his fellow-Mumbaikar. Tendulkar’s magnum opus was scripted in the third decade of an extraordinarily long career and highlighted the qualities that make him so special — an almost monastic devotion to his sport married to his immense natural talent. In a sense, the Master Blaster’s double hundred also inadvertently highlighted another aspect of Indian sport that tends to stay get clouded by the sheer numbers that turn out to watch cricket matches, particularly of the shorter variety. And it is this. Quite simply, sport here in India is still more about spectatorship than participation, and it is almost exclusively confined to the willow sport. A good example is the Hockey World Cup that began in the national capital on Sunday to almost empty stands. Granted that the run-up to the tournament was not the best with security issues, rank mismanagement and buck-passing taking precedence over the game itself, yet an event of this scale and magnitude should have drawn far more people that it did. The India-Pakistan game had a near full house but that was for reasons beyond the sport itself. Yet with great names of field hockey in live action literally at the doorstep, the game was given typically short shrift in that passes had been distributed or picked up in plenty but not reflected in the number of people who actually turned up to catch the action live. With the Commonwealth Games not too far away, it does not augur well for the turnout for the quadrennial event that the nation is going to such lengths to make a success of.
Yet all may not be doom and gloom. Yes, India is more a nation of people who would rather watch than participate in a sporting activity, which anyway does not appear to be high on the average person’s agenda. Recent trends, however, suggest a slow but steady change in attitudes. Just like the 1982 Asian Games sparked off a fair amount of interest in other games and sports — witness the stunning rise of a golfing phalanx in the wake of Jeev Milkha Singh’s feats overseas, which was in turn born of India’s success at the 1982 Asiad — and there yet seems to be cause for hope. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore’s silver medal at Athens in turn led to a boom for competitive shooting and Vijender Singh and Sushil Kumar’s bronze medals in Beijing sparked off renewed interest in boxing and wrestling. In short, nothing succeeds like success, as the old chestnut goes, and that is one reason why cricket has been elevated in this country into something far more than just sport. It is a common cliché to label it a religion, and going by the way the country’s cricket stars are deified it is sometimes hard to disagree. Yet it also suggests that if Indian athletes achieve the heights, they will be sowing the seeds to popularise their respective sports. Twenty-odd years ago, P.T. Usha sparked such a boom in women’s athletics that a grateful nation is still reaping the benefits as Indian women’s teams routinely outperform the men. More such stories may just help — in the years to come — to turn India into a nation of participants as much as spectators.
