Unsporting media

Before the current crop of big achievers came in, badminton did not get wide publicity in the media. One exceptional phase, of course, was when Prakash Padukone won the All England Championship in 1980 and a string of other major victories, including at the Commonwealth Games in the late 1970s. For this burst of stupendous success, Sunil Gavaskar called him India’s “greatest sports personality ever”. Then we had to wait more than 20 years for our next big success in the game to happen — P Gopichand in 2001, again All England — and now we get to hear a lot about international badminton tournaments when Indians participate, with some degree of good performance on each occasion. We even hear of them winning, but never mind the media shuts off all coverage after our challengers go down gallantly to a Chinese or a Malaysian. A general follower of badminton would never know who won the Badminton World Federation title last year or the All England this year. One has to perforce take the help of Google. While rightly celebrating our national badminton stars, we are blissfully unaware of the most dominant players in the game internationally. 

The same is true for table tennis. Our players did superbly at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games and we rightly applauded them. But the team world championship — the Swaythling Cup for men and the Corbillion Cup for women — took place immediately after that and our media behaved in the way it always does: No Indian, no coverage. 

Maybe one reason for this is that in both table tennis and badminton, the world has ceded ground to China, though the Danes, with Victor Axelson winning last year in the Badminton World Federation and in the process becoming the top badminton player in the world, now seem to be making a feeble attempt at regaining their premier position. 

Giving intolerably high publicity to perversities such as the Indian Premier League is easy to appreciate because commercial considerations predominate in them. But the media’s news coverage seems to be totally tethered to pecuniary factors. Lionising a Kidambi Srikanth or a PV Sindhu when they are, by dubious patriotic logic, national icons is bound up with advertisements or sponsorships. Industry chases them and so do the media buyers. But they walk into sunset once form deserts them because badminton does not have the same heft as cricket or tennis. A player’s capital depreciates very fast and the game suffers in the process.

But India’s future in sport lies in indoor games such as badminton or table tennis. As any urban dweller knows, the loss of public space in our cities and towns is playing havoc with the development of our children, physical and mental. I am half inclined to suspect that the amazing increase in the number of rapes, committed by young people in the 20-30 age group, is on account of their limited exposure to sports and games and their liberating aspect. Here schools can take the initiative by encouraging children to take up games that do not require much space. China possibly realised that 50-60 years ago.

This is one aspect of the story. But why should a youngster take up badminton or table tennis if she or he gets the niggling feeling that our society, and, by extension, the media, do not value those games at all? A promising tennis player who aspires to reach high spots has a Roger Federer as his idol. But how many of us know who Federer’s equivalents in badminton and table tennis are? ‘Not many’ would not be an unrealistic surmise. And this can be demotivating for a beginner in such sports.

It is not as though the achievements of a nation in sport or its decline go in tandem with which way the media turns. Take the example of the West Indies. When Clive Lloyd’s men in the 1980s had every other opponent in the game grovelling before them, the media called them the world’s greatest side ever, even better than Don Bradman’s team of 1948. But did anyone have an inkling that the young boys in Caribbean Islands, in the age group 10-15, had virtually given up the game then? Colin Cowdrey had remarked that parents in England, right from the early 1960s, egged on their children to take up football rather than cricket and that resulted in England having few good cricketers in later years. The media had little to do with either of these. 

But our media can help itself by just doing its job. If it acknowledges the performance of sports personalities in their respective spheres, which it rightly does, it should acknowledge the sports as well, nationally and internationally. Not doing so would be asymmetrical and a self-defeating exercise.

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