How Sachin Destroyed My Life: but gave me an All Access Pass to the world of Cricket

by Vikram Sathaye

  There couldn’t have been a bigger day for a mediocre cricketer like me to be sitting and discussing the finer aspects of the game with some of the greatest cricketers in the subcontinent. Finally, I felt a sense of acceptance from the cricketing fraternity and a feeling of being considered of some value and importance.

  One of the most important things that happened at that show was that there was a certain sense of endorsement from one of the most important men in world cricket at a very prestigious event. It’s like if Narendra Modi has decided to approve your proposal then the local BJP corporator would not even bother to check your credentials. The moment word spread that Sachin enjoyed the show the doors of the world of cricket opened up for me in a way that I could never even imagine. All the other cricketers, Indian or international who I was doing my material on stopped worrying about my next moves and started accepting my craft and more importantly sharing all their wonderful stories with me. A treasure trove of knowledge from the world of cricket that I love dearly, was coming to me right from the horse’s mouth. It was like being an insider.

  Time went by and over the next eight years I developed a friendship with Sachin which I will always cherish. During the time I spent with him I learnt more than what I would learn in my entire academic career. Having done over 1,200 corporate shows and even the occasional stints with Sony and ESPN, I jokingly told him one day that I’ve had an unwritten rule that I’d never imitate Sachin if he was a part of the audience. I would never take the risk of irritating the bread winner of my family.

  That rule was broken once. I was invited to Sachin’s party to celebrate India’s long awaited World Cup victory. Amidst all the wild celebrations and cheering I was put in a spot once again when out of the blue, Sachin’s fabulous wife Anjali walked up to me and said, “Vikram, you have to do a Sachin imitation tonight.” There was utter silence and I said to myself, “Aaj to mar gaye, sabke saamne bajegi.” That silence soon turned into loud cheering with everyone at the party egging me on with a “Sachin! Sachin! Sachin!”. The approving nod from the master himself helped me gather whatever little courage I could. Having never suffered stage fright, I was now being put to the ultimate test and was soon about to break that long held self-imposed rule. I finally took a deep breath and went about business as usual, doing my Sachin imitation — covering everything from his batting stance to that interview with Tony Greig and this time, for a change in front of him. This was the moment that I had dreaded all my life, but had also eagerly awaited.

  I had finally repaid my debts to the Master. Here was the man to whom I owed my apartment, my bank balance, match tickets and whatever little prosperity I had built over the last ten years. I was ready to offer him everything, but like all Gods he didn’t accept my offering.

  Well in a strange way while Sachin initially destroyed my life, he later recreated it by opening the doors of the world of cricket for me which I am sharing with you in this book. Over ten years of following the Indian cricket team across the world and chatting with the boys, I figured that cricket has the ability to not only entertain you but also give you some tips that could change your life.

  2

  The Master Speaks

  I think that there are only two entities that get unconditional love in India, our parents and Sachin Tendulkar, and if there was ever a choice between looking after one’s father in ICU and watching Sachin bat on 99, we know what option the nation would prefer to choose.

  The frenzy at the Sydney Cricket Ground in January 2008 was undescribable. Sachin had scored a beautiful century. Just as he raised his bat to acknowledge the thunderous applause, the proud Australians seated besides me in the members stand, and known to dole out a compliment only once in a decade, stood up and not only gave him a 3-minute standing ovation but also raised their beer glasses and said in unison, “To the greatest batsman in the world! For the last time in Sydney.” Little did they know that he would be back four years later. I still get goose bumps just thinking about that moment.

  I happened to be sitting on the same seat four years later and once again amids all the frenzy; I was surprised to see a couple in their 90s sitting besides me. We got talking and just as I mentioned that I was amazed by their passion for the game at that age, the wife remarked, “Missed his hundred last time. Hope he gets a hundred this time because we have come a long way and the next time we might not be alive to see him bat.”

  When I told Sachin this story I could see that he felt special. He added a fun bit to this story and said that during an earlier Australian tour he had gone for a stroll after the day’s play around Sydney along with a few colleagues. Just as they were about to cross the road, an elderly woman came up to him and said, “What are you Indian boys doing here wasting your time? If I was you I would be watching Sachin Tendulkar bat at the Sydney Cricket Ground!”

  Having watched the Indian team play in most of the Test playing nations, I now truly understand Sachin’s global impact. Wherever one travelled you could see the frenzy amongst the locals and the sports media, as if a man from the East had come to rescue the world, as predicted by Nostradamus. Essentially, Sachin was not only affecting me but was affecting millions of Indians across the world.

  Over the last four years I must have seen Sachin receive at least fifty standing ovations while entering and leaving the ground. My advice to his wife Anjali is that she should record an ovation and play it on loop every time he enters or leaves his room because I am sure he is so used to it that he would need one to stay inspired all his life.

  During the course of my travels I have met a whole lot of people who worshipped him in their own unique ways. I met a woman in Pune who had published a book on the statistics of his 100 hundreds. Yes a woman! For most Indian men, she would perhaps be rated as among the most desirable Indian woman, even ahead of the beautiful Madhuri Dixit. There was also this man who could prove that he saw all of Sachin’s innings standing on one leg. I used to always wonder what was it about Sachin that drove people to behave like this? Why does the nation feel like Sachin was a part of their family and his well-being was their well-being? What was the psychology behind this?

  I know of people who were superstitious enough to sit in the same chair while Sachin was batting and not get up till the end of his innings. Considering Sachin had scored over 30,000 runs in his 24 year career, one can only imagine the number of productive hours that were lost in doing so. If economists were to calculate the man hours spent in India watching Sachin bat, we could finally come to terms with the reason why our GDP is just a fraction of China’s. This to my mind is the only blemish in his otherwise fabulous contribution to the country and the lives of Indians. In his defense, I would argue that the fact that so many men spent most of their time watching him play for 24 long years meant that during this time the crime rate was possibly the lowest in the country.

  For some reason, we felt our personal pride was at stake while he was batting. It was almost as if we were batting instead of him. His successes were ours to celebrate while his failures send us into mourning for days without end. Unfortunately, whatever Indians have not been able to achieve in their lives, they wanted Sachin to achieve it for them. Now that is what I call pressure. Wherever he went people would chant his name. This especially happened at the Wankhede Stadium where audiences loved him so much that even if there was a Kenya vs Bangladesh game, they would still chant “SACHIN! SACHIN!”

  Over the years whenever I asked Sachin whether all of this ever affected him, he always smiled and said, “When I am batting I do not hear anything whatsoever.” For me this was simply difficult to believe because even the presence of one other person in the room makes me lose my concentration, even if I am reading a comic book. He said, “I have gotten disturbed only a few times, once during a match against New Zealand in 2010 in Hyderabad. It was a smallish ground and I was trying to focus on the game but whenever I walked away from the pitch towards squareleg the crowd thought that I was looking at them and
they would start shouting in a chorus. This went on and on, derailing me continuously in that particular innings.”

  Thinking Out Of The Box

  I remember my coach telling me, “Watch the ball, the seam and the shining surface and you will know which way it will swing.” I once sheepishly asked Sachin, “In the backdrop of a million people do you really see the shinier surface?” I thought I would get a disdainful look from him. He replied, “That’s the real challenge, the ball essentially has three phases, when it swings, when it stops swinging and when it reverse swings. You have to be able to gauge when you enter, which phase the ball is in as that will decide the quantum or nature of swing.” Wow I thought this was like an astrologer seeing the phases of the moon and then deciding on the right time for the mahurat. He said that unless you are constantly observing the ball you will never be able to pick it. There are times when you just can’t pick it and that happened in Kolkata, in the famous 2001 Australian tour to India, where he entered when the ball had stopped swinging for sometime. Suddenly McGrath reverse swung; Sachin missed the ball completely and was out LBW. That rattled him and he couldn’t get over the fact that he had missed out because of his lack of judgment in understanding the state of the ball.

  Sachin scored 14 centuries with this bat, priceless.

  This is the coffin which carried the Master’s armoury.

  One of my cherished moments with the Master, post the Boxing Day Test 2011-12, at a vineyard near Melbourne.

  When will you ever see Bhogle at forward short leg while Sachin’s batting! Playing gully cricket at a vineyard in Australia.

  Even with his family Dravid gives his 100 percent. A true champion.

  Yes, Sehwag is Superman and for him the surface of the earth called the “Pitch” is irrelevant.

  Nice khichdi dinner with sports journalist Mr Lele, Harsha Bhogle, Suresh Raina and MS Dhoni.

  MS Dhoni’s bat on the left is double the size of Barry Richards’s bat on the right. Now you understand why the “helicopter shot” takes off with such speed.

  During the next Test in Chennai he was still carrying the burden of the Kolkata dismissal when he went in to bat. His mind was constantly thinking about what to do to actually figure out how the ball was going to play. That’s when an idea struck him. He decided to just follow the ball from the time it comes on the field and not take the eyes off the ball even after the over finishes and just go on. This gave him a photographic recording of the condition of the ball enabling him to judge how it would behave the entire day. So from the point the umpire handed the ball to the bowler, to the bowler running in and bowling the ball, followed by it reaching the wicketkeeper and then the fielders and then back to the bowler—he just constantly watched the ball. Even during the drinks interval he was watching the ball go into the umpire’s pocket. This even made the umpires a bit nervous but it became an obsession. Well, the results were there to see, he scored a magnificent 126 runs in the first innings. Sachin says, “It was obsessive behaviour, but I had to do it. I only realised the gravity of it when I reached the dressing room and realised that I was completely drained, I barely reached the hotel and immediately dozed off because of the sheer fatigue.” One thing was clear, if one has to get extraordinary results and overcome challenges one needs to think out of the box.

  The one lesson that I always took away from my numerous interactions with Sachin was the level of attention he paid to every single detail. I remember once driving from Pune to Mumbai with him after an event in his BMW SUV. Those 2 hours, yes 2 hours, that we took to reach our destination were like a complete lesson in driving for me and an insight into his knowledge of cars and Formula 1. I personally am not a great fan of cars and speed so I did not understand half the technicalities but I have heard from friends that even Narain Karthikeyan believes that Sachin is an excellent driver. This obsessiveness is what makes a champion and that is something Sachin reflected in abundance, in whatever he took up.

  To me the most outstanding moment of the drive was the shocked expression of the toll attendant when he saw Sachin hand him the toll money. At first he took the money but nearly threw it back in shock when he saw the Master in the driver’s seat.

  As a cricketer, I have never carried a bat for my team, but I did it once for Sachin. I remember we were leaving for the 2009 New Zealand tour a week later than the Indian cricket team. Just before I was to leave I got a call from his wife Anjali saying that she wanted me to carry Sachin’s bat for him to New Zealand as it was just made by the bat manufacturer to suit the New Zealand conditions. The bat was packed in the box with his name on it. From the time I entered the Mumbai airport to the time I landed at Auckland, at least fifteen people asked me about this parcel. It was simply crazy but the power of that box was such that the airline even allowed me to carry excess baggage. I had become a kind of VVIP because of the parcel I was carrying. The authorities were considering it their moral obligation to ensure that the bat reached the Master safely and on time, because in case it didn’t and he didn’t get runs, they would not have been able to forgive themselves forever. That’s what you call Impact.

  It was a rainy day in Wellington before the first match when I went to his room to deliver the bat. When he opened the room I saw something unreal and I thought I had entered a carpenter’s workshop. Apart from the India colours, his kit bag and clothes, there were an insane number of glues, tools and apparatus lying there. Every time you met Sachin in his room during a match, you would see something that would intrigue you. I’ve seen a carpentry box which had an entire tool kit which would make even the best interior designers proud. Just like a warrior who would test and service his weapons, Sachin would sit there trying to do various things to his bat to get the right balance. He says, “It would be difficult to find a manufacturer while on a tour who could understand your needs and fix a problem so it was better to carry your kit. I am like a carpenter of the team, I would carry sand-paper, superglue, bat tape, steel wool, and the whole team depends on me for this. I spend hours to ensure the bat has the right balance and weight distribution. The final test of any bat is the sound it makes when you tap it with your fingers in a manner you would hit a carom striker with your finger. I know that sound since school and till the time I do not get that sound I would work on the bat day and night.” Legend has it that once Dwayne Bravo had misplaced his bat in the Mumbai Indians dressing room. When he found a few bats which looked like his bat it left him confused. Well in a few minutes the Master did the sound test by tapping the blades with his fingers and to the surprise of Dwanye Bravo he got his bat and they lived happily ever after.

  I am like a carpenter of the team, I would carry sand-paper, superglue, bat tape, steel wool, and the whole team depends on me for this.

  — Sachin Tendulkar

  While he was narrating this story to me, I remembered a concert at which I saw Ustad Zakir Hussain tuning his tabla for a full 10 minutes till he got the right sound. I guess whether it’s music or sport, eventually it’s all about the right sound and the maestros never start before they get that part right. That’s what I call “pursuit of excellence”.

  The relationship of any master with his equipment is a special one and that’s what I was observing. I remembered some of my friends for whom that special equipment was their Bullet motorbike. They would spend hours shining the vehicle as if that meant the world to them. Even spitting on it to give the handle a good shine. If only they had just 1 percent of that love for their wives, their lives would have been so different.

  Sometimes the need to be a perfectionist irritates the opposition. I have seen this in many matches. When Sachin walks from the dressing room to take strike he spends a little more time than many batsmen of his times. Many times the fielding side would be irritated by some of his antics before facing the ball. Typically this is how the scheme of things played out before he took strike:

  1. Walk to the crease

  2. Adjust the box (i.e. his abdomen guard) />
  3. Take guard

  4. Walk to the middle of the pitch and tap the ground

  5. Adjust the box again

  6. Practise a stroke and look at the fielding placements

  7. Stretch the front leg

  8. Ask for adjustment in the sight screen

  9. Sometimes throw some soil in the air to check wind direction

  10. Talk to the non-striker

  11. Then adjust guard again and then finally face the ball

  “Yes, I took a little extra time because I believed that unless you find the perfect balance you should not start your mission. It’s about finding that moment of complete control over the controllables that get you ready for the battle. Unless you are in the right frame of mind and in harmony with the surroundings it’s not worth starting. Remember you don’t get a second chance. Each one has to find his or her right frame of reference before they go on to do their task. I used to change my stance in the middle of the match to suit myself. It was about that moment. After years of practising, your instincts are honed to feel that comfortable position. I knew that standing at a particular angle against Dale Steyn would help me get comfortable. Likewise one has to find that for every bowler.”

  Every ground is different when it comes to the light factor. Sachin always preferred batting in Australia as the brightness was superb for sighting the ball. In India, it varied. In Kolkata the seats were dark in colour and that also had an impact on the overall lighting. Many a times the dressing room is dark and as you step out and walk to the pitch your eyes need to acclimatise to the light really quickly. That’s why Sachin purposely took a few extra seconds to face the ball because he knew that unless he was comfortable and balanced it wasn’t worth beginning the innings.