/ARTS WEEKLY/SPORT: In India, It's Cricket versus Hockey

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Oct 14 2003 (IPS) - Sports in India these days is a matter of which game can capture not just the eye of fans but sponsorships – gentlemanly cricket favoured by the country's anglicised elite, or the rough and tumble of field hockey that is dominated by tribals and players from deprived social backgrounds.

''Just as Indian society is hierarchical there exists in sports a hierarchy of games,'' Abhijit Pathak, professor of sociology at the Jawaharalal Nehru University, explains to IPS in an interview.

There is little doubt that cricket and its players are the top dogs.

Not only do channels vie for rights to telecast important games live because of sponsorship keep rolling in, but the game's suave, well-groomed players rake in millions of dollars as brand ambassadors or through endorsing a range of consumer products from colas to bank credit cards.

But after India's undervalued hockey team sneaked up from behind to claim the Asia Cup in Kuala Lumpur on Sep. 28 – and that through a convincing 4-2 win over the country's all-season rival Pakistan – sponsors and spectators are taking a second look at why cricket gets all the attention and hockey none.

As the triumphant stick-and-ball players returned home with the trophy, television viewers were treated to the unseemly spectacle of coach Rajinder Singh trying to block captain Dhanraj Pillai from speaking to a crowd of reporters waiting to interview team members at the airport.

Singh's contention that hockey players had to be banned from interacting with the media, because it affected their performance, rang hollow against Pillai's simple argument that his game badly needed the kind of public support that cricket receives.

''This support can come only if my players get a chance to build up a profile,'' Pillai said.

The story of Pillai, 35, may as well be the story of Indian hockey over the last 15 years. He has had to doggedly claw his way to stardom from an impoverished childhood in the slums of the western Indian city of Pune and ,like the game itself, seems to be stifled at every turn by a notoriously self-serving, patronising sports bureaucracy.

Commenting on the airport incident, the chief editor of the 'Indian Express' newspaper, Shekhar Gupta wrote in an editorial page article on Oct. 4 that ''the old establishment'' was yet to come to terms with the television age and needed to learn how to handle stars because ''they alone bring everything else that matters in competitive sports: spectators, viewers, endorsements, moolah''.

''It has always been a struggle for me. We used to play hockey with old and broken sticks tied together with ropes in the narrow bylanes of Pune,'' recalls the only Indian who has figured in three Olympic games.

Today, Pillai has done well for himself. He counts among the international sports personalities that the goods manufacturer Reebok has sold its goods on – through products showing a visage that looks if it was chiseled out of the dark granite that occurs abundantly in Pillai's native, southern Tamil Nadu state.

It speaks volumes that while Pillai is still struggling to find a place in the sun for hockey and its players, India's best-known cricketer Sachin Tendulkar recently wrote to the Indian government asking to be exempted from having to pay customs duty on a Ferrari Modena, which was gifted to him by Italian automobile giant Fiat in August for his services as brand ambassador.

Tendulkar's fan following, which seems like half of India's one billion people, readily pitched in behind him. While the controversy raged over a government move to waive the 300,000 U.S. dollar customs duty, Fiat stepped in to pick up the tab and saved both the player and the finance ministry embarrassment.

Comments veteran sports journalist Harpal Singh Bedi: ''Tendulkar is undoubtedly a great cricketer and rated as the world's best batman. But there is no justification for the government to make such a large exemption on a purely commercial deal between Tendulkar and Fiat.''

''On top of that Tendulkar can certainly afford to pay up,'' Bedi says.

Apart from Fiat cars, Tendulkar endorses Pepsi-Cola, Britannia biscuits and a major Indian tyre manufacturer, and is quite easily the richest of India's sports personalities.

According to Bedi, the reason why cricket scores over hockey in popularity is because it offers a mental component and provides its fans an opportunity to memorise volumes of intricate statistics on the batting averages of players in a particular year. It also discusses such bowling niceties as ''googlies'', which are completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated, he added.

''In a country with so much unemployment, people have little else to do but sit through matches that last all day, while hockey matches are brief and offer little scope for extended discussions on how a particular 'over' may have turned different if only a particular player had looked sharper,'' Bedi says.

Test cricket, which is played over five days, is even more time-consuming but offers advertisers greater scope to engage eyeballs and push the products of sponsors over the televisions channels.

Pathak agreed with Bedi's view that cricket is in fact a mind sport and appealed to notions prevalent on the subcontinent that anything to do with the mind was far better than the physical.

''Among elite Indians there is a disdain for physical activity and hockey is intensely more physical than cricket with the scope for contact and even bodily harm far greater,'' he says.

He saw little wonder in the fact the real heroes behind India's victory at Kuala Lumpur were in fact three players with tribal backgrounds – Dilip Tirkey, Ignacious Tirkey and Bimal Lakra from eastern India.

''These are modest, self-effacing players who started out with nothing to play with but bent sticks and stones and would in any case shy away from television cameras and would think twice before demanding even basic allowances while on tour,'' says Bedi.

''The inescapable fact is that television demands not just good players, but telegenic faces and skills in articulation, preferably in good English,'' says Pathak.

This has led to a situation where the sports officialdom has near complete control over players unless they are mavericks like Pillai who, some years ago, was dropped from the team for asking to be paid match fees.

In his editorial in the 'Indian Express', Gupta decries a culture in which an Indian athlete or hockey player can expected to be ''treated no better than a peon, or if successful, a court entertainer''.

Cricket, introduced into India by colonial British, still carries the aura of the Raj era when many of the players were actually young princes or scions of well-established royal families, treated on par with English aristocracy and likely to have gone to the same public schools in Britain.

Modern Indian cricketers are drawn from more ordinary backgrounds, but many of the more successful one can certainly afford to live like princes. Right now they are busy negotiating a 'match fee' of 700 dollars for each match they play apart from the millions they rake in on product endorsements.