Free You Must Like Cricket? by Soumya Bhattacharya Page B

him for at all. That is the way with heroes, or at least the heroes we find in our childhood. It’s impossible to be objective about them. As I have grown older and more cynical, I pretend that I am above the banalities of hero worship. Nowadays, when things go wrong for a player I like, I try to get criticisms in first before someone can call me on it; I try to see things for what they are: a bad shot is a bad shot, a lean trot a lean trot, it happens to the best of us. I have learnt to assume an expression of weary resignation, to develop a disdainful shrug and turn-up of the lips.
    But I know I am being disingenuous, trying to disown my childlike devotion. The difference is, when you are a kid and someone is running your idol down, you wipe his face in the dirt with a ferocity that you reserve for little else in life. Or you smudge his name from a block of vanilla and gulp it down as your eyes sting with tears.
    It was not that Viswanath did not give me reason to cheer.
    The bat, for him, was not so much bludgeon as brush. Some of his strokes will stay with me for ever. One of my most unforgettable images of him is from the first day of the Eden Gardens Test against Pakistan in February 1980. He came to the wicket with one ball left before lunch. Instead of patting it back, the little man cracked an audacious square cut that raced away to the boundary, the silly-point fielder looking both silly and pointless as he ducked for cover. It had been a good-length delivery; Viswanath made it look like a half-volley.
    He gave us more substantial, more conventional gifts too. There was his double century against England in Chennai in 1981–2 (the first and last time he made a double hundred in Test cricket). His fighting ninety-seven against a rampaging Andy Roberts when the West Indies came to India in 1974–5. (I’d been too young to appreciate it but I took pride in the memory.) His match-winning 112 during India’s fourth-innings chase of 403 against the West Indies in Port of Spain in 1976.
    There was one incident which tells you all you need to know about Viswanath. During the 1980 Jubilee Test against England in Mumbai – his only Test as captain of India – he recalled Bob Taylor, whom the umpire had given out caught behind, back to the wicket. Taylor and Botham went on to add 171 runs. India lost the game.
    But he had done what he thought was right. He was always humble, polite, he eschewed controversy, he wasn’t driven or ambitious – in short, he seemed a throwback to another era. By the closing years of his career, a time in which cricket was beginning to acquire a ruthless, competitive edge, he seemed positively anachronistic.
    I can’t even imagine him in today’s professional sporting world. Viswanath communicated such a sense of sheer joy through his play, such elegance and good nature that it is impossible to imagine him fettered by a mundane commercial world of image, endorsements and politicking.
    And that was why we loved him. We sensed that he conformed to our
notion
of the game; he epitomised the schoolboy’s idea of what cricket should be. Cricket is not all about heroism, sacrifice, nobility, artistry and joy. It wasn’t even when Viswanath was playing. But how could we fail to adore someone who made it look as though it was?
    * * *
    For many of us, sportsmen become prisoners of a particular image. Whenever I think of Bjorn Borg now, it’s of him on his knees on Centre Court, in his striped Fila shirt, clenched fists raised towards the sky after yet another Wimbledon victory. My image of John McEnroe is not of the graying, balding commentator (nor of the graying, balding player of the late 1980s and early 1990s) but of a scowling teenager, hair erupting from beneath a flaming headband, racket in tailspin as his foot readies to connect with it. I see Diego Maradona amid a shower of confetti, biceps bulging as he holds aloft the Jules Rimet trophy.
    Ever