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Your tumour may not be Sachin Tendulkar, but Virat Kohli it is. He can also be dangerous and… you need to get him out." That is how Yuvraj Singh's doctor tells the cricketer he has cancer, just weeks after he has played a pivotal role in helping India win the cricket World Cup.
The Test of My Life is his tell-all story about how he fought a life-threatening illness and made a comeback. It should be a heart-warming tale yet, oddly, the book does not always evoke the instinctive pathos expected of such a story. That's partly because Singh, better known to fans and team-mates as Yuvi, is a consciously flamboyant personality on and off the field. Boisterous, brash, borderline arrogance are some of the adjectives that come readily to mind. If those qualities helped him achieve on the cricket pitch, they probably also helped him fight a rare germ cell cancer in his lungs.
To give him credit, Singh makes no bones about his personality - certainly not in the first half of the book that talks about his cricketing career. This is Singh in his full glory, so to speak. Once after he made his debut for India in 2000 in the Champions Trophy, he and his friends took a spin in a car and Singh leaned out of the window and yelled, "Hey, I am Yuvraj Singh." This he puts down to being only 21 at that point, and after years of living under his father's strict regime and reputation, no one made "snarky comments".
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Singh refers to his father as Sher or a tiger of whom everyone was scared. "When I played a rash shot, they had seen Dad rip the non-striker's stump out of the ground and fling it at me. Everyone in Chandigarh knew what he was about. No one messed with me because no one wanted to get into an argument with him."
Tough love? Maybe but the bizarre relationship doesn't appear to extend beyond the son becoming a vehicle for his father's thwarted ambitions. Perhaps that's why Singh's father never visited him when his cancer treatment was underway - there is just a mention of one phone call in which the son breaks the news of his illness to his father. Even when Singh writes about returning home from Indianpolis after his treatment, he doesn't say anything about meeting his father.
The book is co-authored by Sharda Ugra, a senior cricket journalist, and Nishant Arora, a former TV journalist who became Singh's manager, and it bears the imprint of their smooth prose. Singh talks in detail about the Indian team claiming the Holy Grail of one-day international cricket and how he battled bouts of illness, which he didn't know was incipient cancer. He took pills, injections, coughed incessantly and vomited blood but the passion to win the World Cup never made him think it could be something serious.
This may sound a bit gratuitous given the subject but The Test of My Life is unlikely to endear Singh to the reader. Maybe that's the result of overkill: there has already been a TV show in which Singh opened his heart and spoke at great length about he overcame his battle with illness.
Of course, the book has its poignant moments. For instance, when he talks about barely being able to walk after chemotherapy sessions. Or when he talks about how he occasionally felt suicidal after chemo. Singh is brutally honest about sharing such thoughts and takes potshots at the media as well for sensationalising reports of his illness. He reserves the highest praise for the BCCI and his fellow teammates for being extremely supportive - but, then, you would expect him to do so since he's back in the running for team selection. One good thing about The Test of My Life is that it doesn't talk too much about his cancer foundation YouWeCan.
It is probably unfair to compare Singh's book with Lance Armstrong's It's Not About The Bike in which the champion cyclist talks about his battle with cancer (now somewhat discredited when it became evident that his story was really All About The Drugs). Both books are somewhat wincingly brash in tone. The other parallel is the closeness to their mothers. Armstrong wrote eloquently about how his mother was the biggest source of inspiration. It's the same for Singh; indeed, cricket fans would not have failed to notice the visible presence of a protective, no less ambitious, mother, long separated from his father.
But overall, Singh's battle with cancer doesn't tell you anything new - for any cancer survivor the experience is indeed an ordeal only a sufferer can understand. If there is curiosity, it is because Singh is a cricketer at the height of his powers. To his credit, few Indian celebrities would be brave enough to share details about their vulnerabilities, and Singh does that. He also talks about his faith in two seers and how "he connects to God through them."
If anything, the truly readable bits are Singh's relationship with his father and how he overcame all the odds -illness, question marks over his fitness (especially his noticeable weight gain) and form - to play a crucial role in India winning the World Cup after 28 years in April 2011. These accounts are genuinely inspiring and give you a sense of an uncertain young man's drive to attain his goal and prove people wrong.
THE TEST OF MY LIFE
FROM CRICKET TO CANCER AND BACK
Author: Yuvraj Singh (with Sharda Ugra and Nishan Jeet Arora)
Publisher: Random House
Pages: xiv+189
Price: Rs 399
