Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
It seems ages ago, when cricket was a gentleman’s game, with little financial gain for those who played it. And, believe you me, it is not as if there were no cricketing heroes then, chased by students, hailed by the cognoscenti and coyly eyed by young ladies as the players moved up and down the steps from the ‘pavilion’ to the ground. Remember the thump by the the mali on a thick brass plate (gong) to announce the start of the match and the umpires in their faded whites walking up to their positions. The players, for the most part young and bubbly, looked as graceful, if not better, as do some of the brats who have made millions from the same game in recent years.
Why suddenly cricket? You might ask. Simply because I started my journalistic career in 1951 as a sports reporter with a now defunct English daily published from New Delhi. I was lucky to be able to move from one ground to the other, thanks to the rented bicycle (Rs. 6 a month), chasing club players out on the many grounds where they played. Most players were expected to have their own kits, bats, guards of a basic nature, and even the whites they played in were bought by the player himself, and very often the white would have turned a muddy brown by the end of the day.
Those who didn’t enjoy the luxury of a second pair had to wash it, dry it, press it overnight at their lodgings to be ready for the morn. Not the pampered lot of today whose kit might include a dozen, if not more, bats, all kinds of contraptions (guards) to protect their limbs, their heads and more. Can you imagine one of the most entertaining test cricketers of his era, Polly Umrigar telling you how he had just one pair of cricketing trousers and how he would commute by the Mumbai (Bombay then) locals between his home and the match venue.
There was favouritism then too, your group and my group, organized cabals which would somehow always manage to retain control of a club, a State association and at the highest level of the Cricket Board itself. The difference was that the men who occupied positions of power in a club or an association were working men, Babus of ranks high and low. But there was no dearth either of canny, sharp business men like the Malhotras and Mehras of the Delhi & District Cricket Association or the Bengali “mafia” Pankaj Gupta, Datta-ray, A.N. Ghosh etc. who made the Board a monopoly of their own for a number of years. That’s after they had gotten rid of the ebullient sports czar (a visionary man who wouldn’t suffer fools, until the latter got together and showed him the door) Anthony De Mello who also gave the country the National Sports Club of India with residential as well as sporting facilities in Delhi and Bombay.
I distinctly remember Bawa Jaswant Singh, Hargopal Singh and Tulja Ram, sarkari babus, who led or played for Delhi in the Ranji Trophy for a number of years. They were dedicated men as were the others who played for the glory of the game. Their daily allowance, if memory serves right, was Rs. 6 per day. I remember University lads of the day Kukreja, the Mathur brothers, Little and Bobo, Suresh Sharma, Prakash Bhandari, Rajan Mehra, each brimming with class, getting even lesser than the Ranji Trophy players, when they represented Delhi University in the Rohinton-Baria Inter-University cricket championship. Some 2,000 students would turn up each day to watch the inter-college tournament in Delhi played at the Stephens ground near Kashmiri gate and at the University ground itself.
That was cricket at its noblest, played by men of great honesty and dedication never waiting for corporate houses or match-fixers to fill their pockets. And it was not as if most teams did not have their backers in the community but obviously no one had thought of cricket as a money-making machine. Even the bosses who controlled the associations were very often happy with the good times office assured them: a good room, good food and good drinks. Money crept in only at the time of the selection of a National team or the State teams.
I am reminded of the early 50s when a father chased the press corps to their hotel rooms for days together to ensure that his son made it to the Indian hockey team for the Melbourne games. The turbaned old man showed up in our rooms in a Jalandhar hotel- the hockey Nationals were on under the legendary Ashwini Kumar’s watch- a dozens bottles of beer tucked into large household buckets, duly deposited in respective rooms; the message in each case was (in Punjabi) “Omi da khayal rakhna”. The selectors of the team would obviously have received casefuls of the harder stuff!
Influence peddling at the time of selection was very much prevalent in cricket as well. And I have seen some of it displayed in the lobbies of Delhi’s Imperial, Swiss, Maiden’s and Cecil hotels. I saw it in Lucknow as well when the Pakistani team visited India with Pankaj Gupta and Datta-Ray acting as the cricket Czars of the day.
Frankly they weren’t any different from the successive lots that have controlled the Board ever since those days in the 50s. Prior to that in the 40s and 30s it was the Maharajas, Nawabs and their advisers from among the ‘gora’ log, with each Indian boss trying to look sterner than the white man himself. Remember, the circumstances in which Lala Amar Nath, the cricketing legend, was sent home from a foreign tour by the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, the captain of the team, who later had a stint as the Board President? A very poor cricketer himself, he was only asserting his princely right to put the ordinary ‘Lala’ in his place.
And how much do you think did a cricketer get as his daily allowance for a Test match then: Rs. 50 a day. That works out to Rs. 250 per match or was it Rs. 300 which it may have been in case they got paid for the rest day in between the match which actually lasted six days. They travelled third or second class (rail) with the captain and the manager probably sharing a coupe. Poor pickings, did you say? Think of Don Bradman who has calculated that the money the Australian players received on an English tour worked out to 1200 pounds for the whole year, considering that the team spent half the time in commuting by boat from Australia to the UK!
That brings me to my first interview with a visiting cricket captain. I was a young 22-years-old cub reporter (sports at the time) when I was rushed to Rajghat to see the first Pakistani side ever to visit post-partition India. I reached the spot a few minutes before the bus carrying the visiting team. As is wont with cubs I charged into the bus as soon as it came to a halt and made for Abdul Hafeez Kardar, the handsome Oxonian Pakistani Captain. I had seen his photograph in my paper two days earlier and that had made identification easier.
Not having spoken to an international cricketer it took me a while and Kardar asked “Yes, what’s that you want”. “I want to talk to you……” Be brief, I have to lead the team to the mausoleum”. I asked some inanities which elicited polite replies. But my day was made; I had broken the sound barrier, spoken to a visiting captain”.
To go back a little in time I had seen a Pakistani cricketer a few years earlier on the greenfields of Srinagar’s Sri Pratap College . It was in 1944-45 probably. Khan Mohammad who was in Kardar’s team now as a fast bowler, had come to Kashmir with the Islamia College, Peshawar team to play a friendly match with the local college team led by Billoo Sethi (later a national golfing champion) and beaten roundly by the visitors. Not an unexpected occurrence.
I don’t remember Kashmir having many notable cricketers except the one who has now turned up for the one of the franchises in the just concluded IPL. The name : Rasool. I do, however remember the stench that was raised last year over the alleged defalcation of funds given to the Kashmir Cricket Association by the cash-rich BCCI.
The Cricket Board has indeed brought Indian cricket into much disrepute with the manner in which it has conducted the 6th IPL. Crimes of the most horrendous type have been committed in the name of cricket–and for filthy lucre. Such greed by men, young and old, would shame even the toughest of criminals and to think of the BCCI President and his family (his son in law) being directly involved in a grave misdemeanour! Don’t they have a sense of shame?
I can understand a player from the hinterland tempted to make a quick buck but what do you make of billionaires like N. Srinivasan allegedly engaging, directly or indirectly, in illegal practices. A shame, it has been. And, don’t you start imagining that the likes of Jaitley and Shukla are going to make any difference to Indian cricket. The rot is much deeper than we imagine. Take a look around and see how many billionaires Indian cricket has spawned in recent years, players and commentators included?
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