POLITICAL DIARY

New Delhi, 23 February 2008

Sports Goes For A Six!

  ALL ABOUT MILLION DOLLAR BABIES  

By Poonam I Kaushish

It was billed as the mother of all auctions. Where 77 ‘men in blue’ were paraded as prized bulls. And Corporate India’s Mukesh Ambani, Vijay Mallya and Ness Wadia jostled with Bollywood stars Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta to get a slice of the action and own the czars of cricket. Each cricketer went under the hammer ranging anywhere from Rs 20 lakhs to Rs 6 crores. An auction which has clean bowled the way we play cricket for ever. All in a matter of seconds. Paisa phek tamasha dekh!  

Welcome to the Great Indian Bazaar of Indian cricket. Of big bucks and million dollar boys. Who could’ve imagined that the auctioning of 77 players for the five Indian Premier League teams would result in mass hysteria. Never mind, that the true blue-blooded sportsmen are horrified by this brazen gambling and commercialization at its crassest best.

In addition, it has kicked off a political controversy with the Left Front, Janata Dal President and Union Cabinet Minister Sharad Yadav and Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray lambasting the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the Indian Premier League (IPL) as "a gambling game of industrialists and a shameless, obscene demonstration of money-power."

Think. The eight franchisees of the IPL forked out a combined Rs 7000-plus crore first to buy the team franchises. Then, they spent a whopping Rs.160 crore on purchasing players at the auction. Before this, the telecast rights were sold for a huge Rs.3,672 crore for 10 years and the title sponsorship for another Rs 200 crore for a five-year period.

Raising a moot point: when money becomes the driving force of the sixes, bumper, silly mid-off, first slip, LBW, googly et al what happens to the “desh ki izzat?”  Will Team India give its heart and soul to play for the country? Will being selected on it continue to be treated as the ultimate honour in the life of a cricketer? Or, will club identities come to replace national loyalties? After all, whoever pays the bucks gets the loyalty.

Has cricket in India entered the age of sponsored gambling where its stake-holders are abdicating their responsibility and letting the 'free-market' forces take control of the sport? Will it only create a super-elite category of overpaid, arrogant superstars at the cost of domestic cricket? Will the new cricket corporate czars have any emotional attachment to the sport? Importantly, will substance become the first casualty of the hoopla and hype of the auctioning? Will it widen the gap between cricket and other sports? 

True, the BCCI and IPL promoters dismiss these fears as much ado about nothing. Why is everyone raving and ranting about the cricketers earnings? What about other sports like Golf, tennis and car racing. The Jeeva Singh’s, Sania Mirza and Kartikhen, they assert. Besides, money raised would be spent to improve the standard of sports in India and also to promote other sports, specially at the grassroot-level.

How one wonders will paying Messers Dhoni, Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly, who already earn crores for playing a year's cricket for India and more from sponsorships, raise the standard of the sport? Rather, wouldn’t it widen the gap between the haves and have-nots in cricket and other sports?

Besides, the American experience, on which the IPL is based, clearly shows that players more often than not prefer their club over country thanks to the money being bank-rolled by it. In addition, club owners too become possessive as they want to protect their investments at any cost. And, more often than not refuse to release the players for matches played for the country. Besides, the recall value of club teams is more. People identify with the Chicago Bulls rather than the US Olympic basketball team or the New York Yankees instead of the US baseball team. 

Sadly, the auction has once again underscored the ugly reality that cricket has ceased to be a sport. It has become a mammoth corporate conglomerate which lacks transparency and is all about wielding power and money. Worse, it has become another pocket borough of our netagan. Wherein crores are spent in deals over-the-table and under-the-table in keenly fought elections for the control over the BCCI. Imagine, its kitty is virtually the same as the budget allocation of a Union Ministry.

Not just cricket, Indian sports as a whole is controlled by politicians and vested interests. The justification trotted out is that netagan are ‘experts’ in raising funds, even for khel-kood!  If the truth be told, sports today has per se degenerated from purely a sporting activity, physical prowess and competitiveness to downright object of a nexus between politics and bodies controlling it.   

The entry of paid sponsors for games and sportsmen has added an ugly dimension to an already murky arena. The decline of standards in sports is in direct proportion to the increase in the players’ affluence. Plainly, a sport gets corrupted when money is involved. From harmless betting in schools and colleges, it today has an international pattern. The racket is like a business between players, managers and bookies. They initiate betting, running into crores of rupees and funneled abroad via the hawala channel. The high-stake punting on winning teams has increased the greed and led to collecting inside information on a team’s strategy, forecasting the outcome to match fixing.

This all pervasive malady has grown to monstrous proportions and is now being referred to as a full-fledged industry and trade with a turn-over running into hundreds of crores.  With big money and bigger events, sports stars get big sponsors. With the IPL auctioning, celebrity endorsement of sports is simply mind-boggling.  

Some will argue that India is only following the ground rules set in the international arena. Where David Beckham and Michael Jordan, the world’s best football and basketball players respectively, made history with multi-million dollar tie-ups. Major sports goods manufacturers like Reebok, Adidas and Nike outbid each other to sponsor anything and everything from caps, footwear, T-shirts and balls etc they wore. And, the ‘sacred’ Wimbledon, the Australian, the US and French Open tennis tournaments and football, hockey and baseball competitions are simply following suit.

In this free-for-all vicious circle of avarice lies the forgotten Greek philosophy of sports: The health of a nation depends upon the proficiency of its youth in sports and games.  It led to the start of the Olympic movement in 1884, which won the support of even Hitler, who went out of his way to make it a grand spectacle in 1936 in Berlin.

It took wings in India under Nehru’s patronage who conceptualized the Asian Games Federation and organized the first “regional Olympiad” (Asian Games) in New Delhi in 1951.  His message was clear: “Play the game in the spirit of the game”.  The National Sports Federations too adhered to the Olympic ideals of amateur sports, namely, anyone found guilty of monetary benefit from sports was disqualified from participation in international competitions.  In fact, way back in the early 1960s, a woman athlete and a swimmer from Kolkata were disqualified for appearing in a Bata advertisement for sports shoes.

Tragically, all is forgotten.  Most of our sports bodies today are controlled and headed by ambitious people with powerful connections and clout: Varying from industrialists, businessmen, politicians to small-time managers.  They have little to contribute, but a lot to gain. Unlike the past, where sports patrons like the princely rulers of Patiala, Bikaner, Jaipur and Jodhpur graciously spent time and money for the healthy promotion of sports.

Sadly, the ball game started changing once black money started increasing with each passing year. So did the Government’s contribution, with budgets spiraling from Rs.13 crores during the Second Plan to about Rs.300 crores in the Ninth Plan. Sports, is now controlled by a Ministry at the Centre and in the States. But sports management continues to falter at all levels.

Finally, the million dollar question: How is the Government going to stall the domino effect? The day crores replaces honour as a player’s driving force Indian sport might as well say set-game-match. Let’s face it, rescuing sport from the Octopus-like grip of deceit and money will be a lot of sweat and tears. We need to stem the rot. Time to win and do a Chak De India! ---- INFA

(Copyright , India News & Feature Alliance)