Shame of the cricket scribe
As the Indian cricket writer managed to upgrade his column from the last page to the first, he missed on his way the most important story of his life. Or did he choose to? Sure, he has now gone to town about the match-fixing scam, but why did he not tell us the story as and when it was happening all these years, much much before the weekly Outlook broke it in 1997?
Why, indeed, the silence? Did he want to not spoil the fun, while overfeeding us with the great exploits and grand failures of the stars, by reporting what seems to be the sad truth, that cricket was better fixed than the WWF's fights? Or was it simply that he felt his beat did not allow him to write about the fixer's world? Or was he too much in awe of the star, basking in that proximity enjoyed by the sports writer? Or, perhaps, he just did not know?
Granted, the cricket writer was never meant to be the investigative reporter. But when he is actually spending much of his time with a group of pampered young and not-so young men, who are not beyond intrigues and gossip, it is impossible that the word was not out there. But the reporters preferred not to tell the hundred of millions cricket fans of South Asia that anything was untoward. Year after year, match after match, over after over, the fiction of probity was kept alive, without a whiff of questioning.
While the other sportswriters remained stuck to the back pages, the cricket reporter received his promotion to the front-page the day "Kapil's Devils" walked away with the World Cup in 1983. Our cricket scribe revelled in his new-found status, continued to write drably, and yet more patriotically about the game. He whined when India lost, went orgasmic when Pakistan got licked, groaned when an Indian missed a century, and castigated the umpires. He knew all about the North-South-West-East basis on which players got selected, and his box stories would be on these lines—"Azhar's cap missing", "Ganguly's goggles stolen, Bengalis enraged" …
The only thing he kept from us for two decades and more was the information that the matches were fixed. Now, when yesteryears' shady deals come tumbling out of the closet in a breathless rush, we know for sure we have been taken on one hell of a ride. When you put together all the attention paid to the game by, as we said, hundreds of millions, when you calculate the billions of manhours spent by India and all South Asia on the sport—live, on radio, on television—then the scale of the crime becomes clear. A crime surely committed by the players, but with full complicity, it seems, of the cricket press. The formative years of a whole generation in the Subcontinent was spent following the game and idolising the stars, and the young boys (and some girls) thought cricket was even more than a game, it taught him about life itself, and its literature gave him diction. Except, now we find out, it seems to have been less than a game, more a bookiepulled puppet show.
In a region so lacking in heroes in the modern age, bereft of mahatmas and pandits, cricket did provide what we thought were role models, upright men in white who were able to stand up to pressure and hit one for the South Asian gipper. But now the value of our trust and enthusiasm has been made a mockery of as stories 'break' by the day, and more icons bite the dust. Forget the adults, it is the young ones who have been left devastated by such betrayal; they are no longer sure whom or what to believe. If cynicism were to rise exponentially among the next generation, part of the answer will have to be sought in all the heroes who have overnight turned into villains during the spring-summer of 2000. But yet, our reporter continues to forsake his reader; he has done little to clear the confusion, other than add on with dramatic allegations.
Who then shall give us the correct story? Maybe India's finest cricket writer could, R. Mohan, now exiled to the Gulf after The Hindu sacked him for his alleged bookie connections following the Outlook story. Amidst the mediocrity in the much-hyped cricket journalism, Mohan was the exception. The fact that he at the very least knew of the racket, demands that he come clean with the story. He is the one man sports editors in India could goad to write, and it is surprising that none's taking his name these days.
But that has been the problem with Indian cricket writing, most of it has always missed the point.