Book review: Hero - A biography of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar

Hero is a collection of pleasing remembrances that admirably explores all things Sachin Tendulkar

“Well, this little man is the nearest thing to Bradman there’s ever been. What a player he is… what a player!”

Even today, every now and then, Tony Greig’s frenzied voice poetically pierces through my ears and brain, unearthing a spine-tingling mix of euphoria and wonderment. Euphoria, because nothing in the past 20 years can perhaps match the manner and significance of what India achieved at Sharjah in 1998, and wonderment, since most of us still abjectly fail to fully comprehend how Australia were annihilated for two games running by the one-man assault squad that was Sachin Tendulkar.

Over the course of those two torrid Arabian nights, Tendulkar put on a show of unswerving belief and batting barbarism seldom seen in the limited-overs game before. Shane Warne started seeing him in his dreams; Steve Waugh was left to forlornly wonder how one man could be so savagely good, and Michael Kasprowicz was left so deeply scarred that he was never the same bowler again. And, no one enjoyed this more than Greig.

In fact, the Greig-Tendulkar bromance is now a part of modern cricket folklore. So much so that humourist Vikram Sathaye, who also authored How Sachin Destroyed My Life (Popular Prakashan, 2014), once funnily exclaimed how he often thought that half of Tendulkar’s success was purely down to Greig’s commentary.

But even Greig, in his archetypal fanboy avatar, failed to exhaustively dissect Tendulkar’s genius mind. He’s not alone. Over the past two decades, Tendulkar has been a beguiling object of probe and analysis    — easily the most written-about sportsperson in the world. And, the results have been largely drab. Even his own autobiography, Playing It My Way (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014), managed to reveal only stodgy and sanitised specifics about an otherwise remarkable life and career.

Photo: Reuters

The latest attempt to successfully uncover the Tendulkar phenomenon comes from serial cricket biographer Devendra Prabhudesai, whose latest book, Hero: A Biography of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, was released last month. Prabhudesai chronicles Tendulkar’s life through three different sections in the book, paying ample obeisance to the hackneyed yet somewhat true “if cricket is a religion, then Sachin is god” adage along the way.

The book’s first 40-odd pages — apart from strikingly recalling Tendulkar’s early life — read like a mini history of Bombay cricket itself: the ever-changing landscape of the city, the contrasting styles of young batsmen from its two prime cricket nurseries, Shivaji Park and Matunga Maidan, and stories from the Kanga League. At times, Prabhudesai’s writing and descriptive powers put Makarand Waingakar’s A Million Broken Windows: The Magic and Mystique of Bombay Cricket (HarperCollins, 2015) — a quite splendid account of the city’s cricket pedigree — in the shade.

Some of the lesser-known anecdotes, like the one when a sub-editor from a Bengali Daily fudged up Tendulkar’s Harris Shield batting average (he left out the zero in 1,025 thinking that no 15-year-old schoolboy could possibly average that much), and how Sunil Gavaskar penned a letter to the youngster asking to keep his spirits high after he was snubbed for the Mumbai Cricket Association Best Young Cricketer award in 1987, add a certain newness to the Tendulkar legend. Other oft-repeated ones, such as the one where Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli blissfully ignored all calls for a declaration during that epochal Harris Shield game in 1988, raise the question as to why Prabhudesai decided to take the pain to explore the banalities of a life already fairly well-known. 

Where Hero sparkles, however, is in its detail. At almost 500 pages, Prabhudesai manages to recall almost all of Tendulkar’s major school, first-class and international batting performances. 

None was arguably more crucial than the one that catapulted him to the status of the world’s most feared ball-belter, against New Zealand at Auckland’s Eden Park in 1994; an innings inclusive of the boyish temerity and impetuousness that typified most of Tendulkar’s career — intrepid qualities that were never dimmed by the heat of battle. 

Hero

A Biography of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar

Author: Devendra Prabhudesai

Publisher: Rupa

Pages: 496

Price: Rs 500

With extensive research — much of it second-hand, however — Prabhudesai manages to cull out the true persona of Tendulkar, the cricketer: impassioned, dedicated and obsessed with being the best. Some of the less glorious passages in the book include Tendulkar’s helplessness in dealing with pressures of captaincy and the sacking that followed, and the match-fixing scandal that irreversibly smeared the image of Indian cricket in the early 2000s. Almost expectedly and disappointingly, the space allotted for such abominable events is puny compared to the one reserved for some of Tendulkar’s lofty accomplishments.

Even the World Cup triumph of 2011 — the grandiosity and sentimentality of which seemingly feature at the centre of an upcoming film on the master — is highlighted in insufficient detail. Once you manage to detach the romantic nostalgia from Prabhudesai’s writing, Hero merely skips from one match to another, leaving you with very little to dwell on Tendulkar, the ordinary human being. 

In a mere cricketing sense, Hero is a collection of pleasing remembrances that admirably explores all things Tendulkar. As a biography, it stumbles because it adds inadequate fresh detail and offers only a perfunctory peek into Tendulkar’s life. In parts, it makes you fall in love with the cricketer again, only for you to quickly realise that you’ve been here before.