ROHIT BRIJNATH
A t the core of the great athlete often resides a self-centred animal. He is lit up by the spotlight; the rest of the world falls into his shadow. Once, a former cricketer, his nationality irrelevant, dined at my house and was staggeringly oblivious to my other guests. He was prepared to be questioned; he simply did not have any questions for them. As if they were the distant, faceless crowd in a stadium.
It is here, for me, that Rahul Dravid found his point of difference. Life intrigued him, yours included. When he came to Singapore once, he charmed my friends (one gave him batting advice; he smiled). What are you reading, he’d ask. What do you think, he’d query. Not about cricket, but tennis, toughness, politics. He’d linger in bookshops, stroll into theatres, sit in wildlife parks. One year he opted to go and learn from a visual skills specialist in South Africa; last summer, he drove to Chelsea FC to wander through their Mind Room. From his wide interests emerged cricket’s most interesting man.
He wore polished shoes but never an aura. In a world of gods, he preferred his humanness, an unadorned man battling his own imperfections with a low-key dignity. He was forever conscious of the families he represented (his own, the team, the fans, the game at large) and owned an authentic decency we crave in athletes but rarely find.
My mother is not given at all to cricket watching, yet she sent me an email after his retirement press conference that included the words “poised”, “grace”, “dignity”. If the old-fashioned among us have a quaint notion of what the athlete should represent, then Dravid met it for us. Greatness can be worn gently. A man can stay true for 16 years to the idea that desire and sportsmanship, ambition and etiquette, are not virtues in conflict. We needed a reminder that even amidst the over-indulgence and over-worship of modern sport, a man need not lose himself.
Dravid was precocious that way, always the grown-up cricketer. He had a conscience, and in a way he became ours. There is for me an irony in the mourning for him in a time when Virat Kohli is worshipped. Perhaps we realise what we are losing, perhaps the time of such men has passed. He was teased recently that it was fortunate he was not 22, for he would be a misfit: Dravid with his hair gelled, a tattoo of his wife on his forearm, retinue in tow, snarling, is an image both amusing and obscene.
Dravid took cricket seriously but not always himself. Or you. During the 1999 World Cup, watching me take a few casual swipes with his bat, he fell off his hotel bed laughing and offered this advice: “Please, don’t ever write about technique.” His batting could be classical, yet he never viewed himself as the classical hero. Indeed, the evening after his retirement press conference, he suggested with amusement that his immediate future included “practising my new sweep shot with a broom”.
I met him first in 1996, a slim young man, shirt tucked in, hair parted; and his method on the field would be as fastidious. He saw the nylon cages of the practice nets as his university and practised like a man pursuing a degree he might never earn. There, and on the field, it was the discovery of himself, this uniquely private moment, that he most relished. For him – and you’d groan when he repeated his favourite word – it was about the “process”.
There were many batsmen in Rahul Dravid. The worst one once found him the most applause. In some forgotten one-dayer, he smashed a quick fifty (these very words must make him shiver), and he joked that he received more handshakes for it than for anything before. Of course, he could be a picture of balanced harmony, his shots all refined architecture, and this was becoming. But the cussed Dravid, a man of team cause not crowd, was my favourite, playing to his own scholarly sheet music.
Laxman offered me art, Sehwag liberation, Tendulkar consistent genius, but Dravid taught us that the ability to reassure is a gift. For such a neat man, he loved an ugly scrap. Runs might emerge in unsightly dribbles – sometimes it was as if to be uninhibited was an act of immodesty for him – but he’d keep going. A leave, a block, a block, a leave, and this should have been boring – and well, yes, sometimes it was – except, by the end he’d built a lead, or rescued a situation, or offered India a winning chance, and you’d look at this man, shirt bound by sweat, ferocious in his concentration, and just think, bloody hell. Struggle, in all its forms, was his hymn.
He wanted to win, and if he took defeat manfully he also did so painfully. On the night after India exited the 2007 World Cup under his captaincy, on the phone he sounded as if he was dying.
I liked him for this and for his willingness to discuss his own and sufficient imperfections. Because he wouldn’t flinch from honesty and you could challenge him on his thinking as captain or get him to laugh at his own unhurriedness. Because he understood talent is only lent to you for a while and that only ceaseless industry can allow for its consistent expression. Because he has a strong sense of himself, for even as kind bloggers would call him “unsung”, he’d say, no, enough has been sung about me.
He was more than just a cricketer and it was evident in our meeting in October 2011. He had been invited to a discussion on the sporting mind, at the Bangalore launch of Olympic shooting gold medallist Abhinav Bindra’s autobiography.
“No speech, right?” he insisted, for that would mean a month’s dutiful hard labour for him. No, I promised. Only a discussion.
Except, on launch day, in the evening, he took me aside. “I’d like to make a short speech, is that okay?”
And so he did, a charming, generous introduction about Bindra and his virtues and the challenge of the Olympics. He is nearly ten years older than the shooter and far more celebrated, but this was not his moment, he wanted Bindra to have the sun, and being in the shadows held no fear for him anyway. It was not Dravid at his best, it was simply just Dravid being himself.
Rohit Brijnath is a senior correspondent at the Straits Times in Singapore and the co-author of the autobiography of Abhinav Bindra. This piece was first published in Mint Lounge on March 10, 2012
[ 22 ]
A sportsman of model decorum
GIDEON HAIGH
Rahul Dravid is a thinking cricketer. But one person I learned that he does not spend a lot of time thinking about is… Rahul Dravid.
It was shortly after the Boxing Day Test, and we were having dinner with a mutual friend near my home, at a spaghetti joint in Lygon Street, Carlton. As happens when you’re in distinguished sporting company, the subject of conversation turned to setting down some thoughts about that career when it ended – as Dravid announced yesterday it was.
Test cricket’s second-tallest scorer, and the man who faced more Test deliveries than any other, would seem to have a tale to tell. Dravid did not agree. What, after all, had he done? He had had a comfortable upbringing, a good education, a loving marriage and… well, yes, he’d made more than 24,000 international runs with 48 hundreds, but what of it?
Dravid had recently read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. Now that was a story. Drugs, girls, money, triumph, disaster. By comparison, Dravid said seriously, he had hardly lived at all.
While it seems almost churlish to dispute such a commonsensical self-estimation, on this occasion let’s quietly beg to differ. For most of his 15 years at the top, Dravid was the most immaculate cricketer in the game, a batsman of preternatural serenity and a sportsman of model decorum.
That wonderful Indian cricket writer Sujit Mukherjee once said of Dravid’s great antecedent Vijay Hazare that his innings had “no beginning and no end”, because “whether his score was 2 or 20 or 200, he [Hazare] was assessing the bowling with the same exacting concern that characterised his every moment at the crease”.
The same was true of Dravid. He batted as a river runs, at an immemorial pace. You could tune into an innings of his at any time and be unsure whether he had batted six hours or six minutes. He carried himself with the same easy dignity in success or failure, in India or abroad: unlike the other members of his country�
�s prestigious batting elite of Tendulkar, Sehwag, Laxman and Ganguly, he boasted a higher average away than home.
Dravid’s decision to retire will not come as a great surprise to those who watched him struggle through the Australian summer. You arrive at a point in contemplation of any great batsman dealing with poor form where rational explanation no longer suffices. Some little advantage has been lost, some indefinable aura has faded.
Bowlers sense it: they attack where they used to be content to keep quiet. Fielders sense it: they crouch in eager expectation of catches, and relax in confidence of accepting them. Such was the case with Dravid in 2011-12, and he is too perceptive not to have sensed it, despite his valiant struggles. He was, as ever, a model guest, his Bradman Oration being quite possibly the season’s outstanding Indian performance. It is also characteristic that Dravid waited until the Australian summer was completely done with before making any announcement; it is in line with his view that individuals are at the game’s service, not vice versa.
Not every cricketer’s cricket faithfully reflects his personality, but Dravid’s would seem to. In company, he thinks before speaking, gives his interlocutors undivided attention, is unhurried and unflappable.
That evening, dining al fresco, we were perfectly at the mercy of passing rubberneckers Every two minutes, it seemed, someone would ask Dravid for an autograph, want him to pose for a photo, or simply stop to gawk. Even the chef came out to shake his hand.
Dravid gave every petitioner perfect partial attention, not once growing flustered, not once losing the thread of a conversation – dealing with them rather like balls wide of off stump, giving them their due but no more. There was, I realised after a while, a well-honed technique to it. Dravid acquiesced to each request politely but straightforwardly, volunteering nothing in addition. People got the message; it was impressive.
Various subjects were discussed that evening, which it seems impolite to divulge, and may even be unenlightening to, because Dravid is so reticent about his career and so respectful of opponents. About one opponent, though, he was forthcoming, and that was Ricky Ponting. He recalled being accosted by Ponting, whom he hardly knew and had barely conversed with, during Australia’s tour of India in 2010. “I want to talk to you,” Ponting insisted.
Dravid wondered what he had done wrong; on the contrary, Ponting wanted to tell him what he was doing right. Dravid was having a poor series; Ponting urged him to hang in there. “I know you’re not making runs, and I know there’s probably a bit of pressure on you at the moment,” Ponting told Dravid. “But let me tell you: every time you come in, I tell the guys that you look like you’re going to get runs today. You’ve been getting out, but I reckon there are some big scores around the corner for you.”
Dravid was moved by the grace of Ponting’s gesture – as indeed were we, his companions that night, to hear of it. He went and proved Ponting right, too, enjoying in 2011 the second-most prolific calendar year of his Test career.
Just over a week after our dinner, Ponting dived headlong for his crease at the SCG, just beating a throw and achieving his first Test century in nearly two years. It was noticeable that while most of the Indian fielders assumed excruciated poses, hands on heads, looking martyred, Dravid moved in from mid-off clapping appreciatively, and perhaps also gratefully.
You would think that having a cricketer play at international level for more than 15 years might conduce to a little succession planning; this being Indian cricket, you would think wrongly. Nobody stands out in this Indian line-up as an inheritor of Dravid’s mantle. His retirement will leave the same breach in his team as it would have done a decade ago.
All the same, there is perhaps no modern cricketer better equipped intellectually and temperamentally to make a contribution to the game’s governance and direction. Dravid’s greatest impact on cricket might lie ahead of him. And that would be a story worth telling.
Gideon Haigh is an author and cricket historian, whose writing has been featured, among other places, on ESPNcricinfo, in the Guardian, and the Australian (where this piece was first published)
[ 23 ]
The reason I got married
JARROD KIMBER
I’ve always hoped there is an alternate universe where Rahul Dravid is the man, the best batsman in the world and the guy that everyone wishes they could be. In that world everything he does or says is gospel. When he bats, the whole world, every single country, stops and sighs. His forward defence is the sole reason for world peace. It’s as if before him there was no reason to live. Laws are rewritten for him, ice-cream is named after him, and when he finally retires from cricket he takes over the whole world as a unanimously elected benevolent leader.
That’s the world I wish Dravid lived in, because I think he deserves it and because of the effect he has had on my life. I can’t write about him from a distanced and analytical perspective. He once shook my hand and it’s because of him I’m now married.
Even before he touched me and changed my life, Dravid was always there. In the late ‘90s I’d become obsessed with him the way you did in those days, via Cricinfo and newspaper scorecards. When India were touring Australia in 1999-2000 there was much hype over Sachin Tendulkar, so I went out of my way to make sure that every cricket conversation I had about Indian cricket preceding that summer had Dravid’s name in it. I wouldn’t let him be forgotten.
Dravid averaged 15.50 that series.
Four years later he came back to Australia as that guy who had stood at the other end while VVS Laxman defeated Australia. Australians still didn’t really rate Dravid, if they thought of him at all.
Before the 2003-04 series India were playing Victoria at the MCG in a warm-up. I convinced my girlfriend to spend the day watching some Indian legends and sit in the sun. It was us and a bunch of Indian students. No one else was stupid enough to watch the third day of a tour match that had fizzled out well before. The “crowd” were there to see Sachin, and so was I, but I also wanted to see Dravid. As the fans slowly left, knowing that the chances of Sachin batting were quite low, my girlfriend begged, abused and did everything short of dragging me out of the ground. Aakash Chopra and Sadagoppan Ramesh batting quite slowly didn’t please her. But I was resolute. I wanted to see Dravid bat.
This didn’t please my girlfriend even a little bit. But finally I was justified as he strode to the crease. I told her that she could say she saw Rahul Dravid bat in front of a crowd of 16 people.
Dravid was watchful as he faced Victoria’s back-up wicketkeeper for five balls before the match was called a draw. My girlfriend and I broke up shortly afterwards. It probably wasn’t because of that day, but you never know.
Recently I read a piece in an Indian newspaper that described Dravid as more English than most English people. But I remember when he was pretty Australian. It was in an IPL match where Dravid had edged to slip and Tendulkar had claimed the catch. You expected Dravid to just walk off. Tendulkar and Dravid probably know what the other eats for breakfast and what Adam Sandler film is the other’s favourite, but here was Dravid, doubting what many people count as the word of god in India. Not walking. The Australian way of cricket from cricket’s ultimate gentleman. It was brilliant. I am sure many took offence. But for me it showed that even in an IPL match that he might not take seriously, he still wanted to win more than anything.
Then there was the time I was making a film about Test cricket and luckily, due to our producer’s insistence and good timing, Dravid agreed to appear. I was going to be interviewing Rahul Dravid, the man whose forward defence is tattooed into the memory of every Test cricket lover.
That Monday (which was due to be day five of the 2011-12 series against Australia) he shook my hand twice.
He turned up and was polite, distinguished and reserved. Exactly what you’d expect of him. It was gentle, and you could barely feel the hand whose sil
ky soft touch guides the ball behind point. Either he was just a man who shook as softly as he catches in the slips or he was put off by our shabby demeanour and questionable aroma. Once on camera, he answered questions the way he bats – thoughtfully, without rashness.
Sometimes he replied with a late verbal defensive shot, and other times he answered with an elegantly punched oral drive. But when we spoke, he didn’t treat us like the disgusting men we so clearly were. He has this way about him that makes you feel like he’s on your side.
The second handshake came after the interview. It was completely different from the first – this was the handshake of a man who clearly liked the questions he’d answered and was happy we were making the film. It was firm, more like he slapped our hands and then held on, giving a firm enough shake. And he didn’t just do it to me, he went through our whole crew with the same sort of enthusiastic handshake that makes you feel better about yourself and life in general. I’m not sure any handshake has ever made me feel better.
In our own shambolic way, we appeared to have won over one of the keepers of Test cricket’s flame. With one longer-than-he-agreed-to interview and boisterous handshake, Dravid had reinforced to us that we knew what were doing and that we could, in fact, make a film about something as monstrous as Test cricket’s future and present. Sure, we could run out of money, overdose on chips, or even be freakishly killed by some rabid T20 fundamentalist’s aggressive six while we walked, Reservoir Dogs-style, through a park. But Dravid shook our hands like we were doing the right thing. So we have something on our side.
Touching me was something, but Dravid didn’t stop there. Rahul Dravid is the reason my wife and I got married.
Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel Page 13
