Ashwini Ponappa, who has teamed up with Jwala Gutta for the doubles category in badminton championships for four years, has decided to go with a new partner. When the media tried to contact Gutta to get a reaction, guess where she was? She was shooting for a Telugu film, Gunde Jaari Gallanthayyinde. Gutta isn't the only sports star to be allured by the shining lights of tinsel town. Leander Paes made his debut in 2012 in a disastrous movie called Rajdhani Express. Paes served a double fault of epic proportions and was terrible in the movie. Rajdhani Express was derailed even before the audience could board the movie halls.
Before Paes, it was the cricketers who tried their hand at acting and they were as much as at sea in front of the camera as in front of West Indian and Australian pacers. Saleem Durrani, the sex symbol of Indian cricket in the 1960s, did Charithra with Parveen Babi in 1973. Sunil Gavaskar played the lead in Marathi film Premachi Saavli (1980) . Sandeep Patil, the current chairman of selectors with Board for Cricket Control in India (BCCI), played the leading role in a movie titled Kabhi Ajnabi Thhe (1985) opposite Poonam Dhillon. IMDB, the biggest online database of movies, almost certainly has plotlines of all movies on their website. When you search Kabhi Ajnabi Thhe, the plotline doesn't exist. Perhaps, no one apart from the actors actually saw the movie to know the plotline.
Maybe it's the role of chairman of selectors which has something to do with movies. Patil's teammate and member of the 1983 World Cup winning team, Syed Kirmani, incidentally played the villain in the same movie. Fortunately, that was the last time we saw Kirmani (he was the chairman of selectors in the previous decade) on the big screen. Another teammate of theirs, Mohinder Amarnath, didn't try his luck in movies but couldn't help keep the dancer inside in him hidden for too long. Amarnath appeared on the dance reality show Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa in 2009 and nobody was surprised to see that he didn't last long on the show.
The "bad boy" of Indian cricket, Vinod Kambli, has had his moments of infamy both on the big and the small screen. In 2002, he made his first - and mercifully last - appearance on the big screen in Sanjay Dutt-starrer Annarth. The title of the movie translated into English means disaster. Never before has the title of a movie so aptly described the acting prowess of its actors. Not one to let critics deter him, Kambli tried his luck again, this time on the small screen, when he appeared on the reality show Bigg Boss two years ago. On this show, a platform for has-beens and people looking to gain short-lived fame, Kambli was a perfect fit. Even Navjot Singh Sidhu tried his luck in the last edition of the show.
Salil Ankola is perhaps the only cricketer to have made a decent career out of films, if you consider three movies a career. He made his debut in Sanjay Dutt-starrer Kurukshetra (2000) and was seen in another Dutt-starrer, Pitaah (2003). He also acted in a Zayed Khan and Esha Deol movie called Churaa Liya Hai Tumne (2003). Ankola acted in several TV shows as well, including a few by Balaji Telefilms, but failed to make the cut on the big screen.
Gutta and Paes aren't the only non-cricketers who have flirted with the movie industry. Track and field athlete Ashwini Nachappa acted in two Telugu films in the 1990s, one was not-so-creatively titled Inspector Ashwini and other was coincidentally called Big Boss. Wrestler Sushil Kumar's coach and former Asian Games medalist, Satpal Singh "Mahabali", had a brief stint in filmdom as well. He played the lead in a 1985 Haryanvi film called Premi Ramphal but soon found that dancing around trees wasn't exactly his cup of tea. Whether Gutta makes an exception and makes a career in films is something we will come to know only after April 11 when her movie releases. But history tells us, swapping your sporting shoes for dancing shoes isn't exactly a rewarding experience - Mohinder Amarnath will vouch for it.
