Playing It My Way: No big sixes here

Sachin Tendulkar's autobiography, quite unlike his batting, progresses too softly and serenely to be entertaining

“I don’t march in step. I don’t ask people to trample all over me just because it might make them feel better. That’s not who I am… I don’t set out to go against the flow... I won’t sit down and be told to bat this way or train that way without asking why.”

No, these defiant lines are not from Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar’s autobiography, Playing It My Way. They are, in fact, from the opening pages of KP: The Autobiography by England batsman Kevin Pietersen. The lines define what the cricketer is all about and we aren’t surprised to read in the pages that follow of the man’s run-ins with the English cricket establishment. The lines grab you and keep you engrossed in his story.

“As a parent, I would be happier hearing people say, ‘Sachin is a good human being’ than ‘Sachin is a great cricketer’ any day.” This is how Tendulkar begins the retelling of his life. Quite a contrast from Pietersen’s opening thoughts. So be prepared to read a treatise of an essentially good human being who was also a cricketer. And if being good requires a bit of sanitising, so be it. You won’t find much of quarrels and rebellions in the book, less of ruminations about the unsavoury aspects of cricket.

The most pungent portions of Tendulkar’s book have already made news and there isn't much beyond them. The two pages on Greg Chappell’s tenure as coach of India have already been discussed for each nuance the words carry. There also is India’s final word on Harbhajan Singh’s skirmish with Andrew Symonds: Tendulkar categorically states the spinner did not use a term of racist abuse against the Australian, only a common north Indian cussword. As for match-fixing, there are two passing references. Writing about the series against Australia in 2001, he says, “… I found the revelations about matches being thrown for money distasteful and disgusting. The whole thing was repulsive.” Then on the chapter on the Indian Premier League, he says: “I was disappointed, shocked and angry at the goings-on, and said so in a press release at the time.” I am sure everyone expected someone of Tendulkar’s stature to say more than just, “There has to be a complete zero-tolerance policy against corruption and more should be done to educate the player.”

But that is Tendulkar, the good human being, skirting all possible confrontations — strange for a man who revelled in taking on the fiercest of rivals and proving he was better than them. If you are hoping to see how the gears in his brain meshed, then you will be disappointed. Maybe it is the sheer impossibility of recalling details of how events panned out over to over in the 200 Test matches and 463 one-day internationals that he played, but his story offers few insights into how he planned his battles en route to conquering the world.

Sachin Tendulkar: The Man Cricket Loved Back, a compilation of observations of sports writers and the cricketer’s contemporaries published by ESPN Cricinfo-Viking soon after his retirement, did a better job of revealing a Tendulkar shorn of his infallibility. In that book, both Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly, for instance, had spoken of how Tendulkar would sometimes ask them to play a particular bowler in the overs leading to stumps because he wanted to avoid facing him in fading light. Such nuggets are missing from the maestro’s own narrative. He does occasionally tell us how he correctly read the way a certain bowler would bowl, but wouldn’t most batsmen at that level do the same? Doesn’t Virat Kohli? Doesn’t Ajinkya Rahane? There isn’t a moment when you read something in the 486 pages and say, “Wow, so that’s how the mind of a champion works.”

Where does the book leave us then? I thought the best pieces were the ingenuous passages that tell of Tendulkar as a regular Joe. Of course, because the Mumbai batsman is one of the most written about, there isn’t anything really new in all that he reveals. But he brings parts and pieces into a whole. From a stubborn, sulking child who, when he did not get the bicycle he wanted, went and got his head stuck between the iron rails on the balcony to a boy cricketer who, having scored just 24, connived with a reporter to have his score changed to 30 so that his name could be printed in the newspaper (apparently, only scorers of 30 runs or more were mentioned in the city sports columns) is a delightful look at the rise of a colossus.

Some interesting anecdotes about him as a player have nothing to do with his craft. There is, for instance, the tack he opted for to silence South African fast bowler Allan Donald, who was constantly ribbing Dodda Ganesh batting with Tendulkar in the 1997 Cape Town Test. “Allan, Dodda only knows a local Indian language called Kannada,” Tendulkar apparently told the bowler. “I find it difficult enough to communicate with him myself, so how can he understand your abuse in English?” Suffice to say, this left Donald seething silently. Another tale tells of how when the problems with his elbow seemed to relapse despite surgery, Tendulkar visited his doctor who ordered some scans. “I did not want to fuel more speculations in the media about my injury, so when I went to get the scans done, I resorted to wearing a burkha,” he says. And contrary to lore, he wasn’t quite above boasting. In the West Indies in 1997, a waiter predicted that India, then being captained by Tendulkar, would lose. The master batsman retorted by pointing to the fridge and telling the waiter to put in a bottle of champagne there to celebrate an Indian win. In the event, India collapsed for 81 to lose the match miserably. Presumably, the waiter polished off the champagne!

He talks of some emotions in his final Test at Mumbai. The circus around the event has already become the content of a very readable book by Dilip D’Souza, Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar. There is no gain in going over the same territory, but Tendulkar tells of one touching moment. He was sitting in the dressing room alone, teary eyed, when Kohli walked in. The Delhi batsman held a ritual string in his hand left by his late father, the sort you wear around your wrist after a puja. Kohli wanted to tie it on Tendulkar’s wrist. He first bent down and touched the senior batsman’s feet. Tendulkar remonstrated and told Kohli he should be giving him a hug, not touching his feet. And then he chased Kohli out of the room, afraid to dissolve into tears in front of his junior.

These little glimpses into the person of Tendulkar are the book’s highlight, not the cricket, which is mostly a perfunctory recalling of matches. So in the final analysis, Tendulkar may be God, but Playing It My Way is certainly no Bible of cricket writing.