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POLITICAL DIARY
Sports Goes For A Six!
ALL ABOUT MILLION DOLLAR BABIES
By Poonam I Kaushish
New Delhi, February 26, 2008
It was billed as the mother of all auctions. Where 77 ‘men in
blue’ were paraded as prized bulls. And Corporate India’s
Mukesh Ambani, Vijay Mallya and Ness Wadia jostled with
Bollywood stars Shahrukh Khan and Preity Zinta to get a slice
of the action and own the czars of cricket. Each cricketer
went under the hammer ranging anywhere from Rs 20 lakhs to Rs
6 crores. An auction which has clean bowled the way we play
cricket for ever. All in a matter of seconds. Paisa phek
tamasha dekh!
Welcome to the Great Indian Bazaar of Indian cricket. Of big
bucks and million dollar boys. Who could’ve imagined that the
auctioning of 77 players for the five Indian Premier League
teams would result in mass hysteria. Never mind, that the true
blue-blooded sportsmen are horrified by this brazen gambling
and commercialization at its crassest best.
In addition, it has kicked off a political controversy with
the Left Front, Janata Dal President and Union Cabinet
Minister Sharad Yadav and Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray
lambasting the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI)
and the Indian Premier League (IPL) as "a gambling game of
industrialists and a shameless, obscene demonstration of
money-power."
Think. The eight franchisees of the IPL forked out a combined
Rs 7000-plus crore first to buy the team franchises. Then,
they spent a whopping Rs.160 crore on purchasing players at
the auction. Before this, the telecast rights were sold for a
huge Rs.3,672 crore for 10 years and the title sponsorship for
another Rs 200 crore for a five-year period.
Raising a moot point: when money becomes the driving force of
the sixes, bumper, silly mid-off, first slip, LBW, googly et
al what happens to the “desh ki izzat?” Will Team India give
its heart and soul to play for the country? Will being
selected on it continue to be treated as the ultimate honour
in the life of a cricketer? Or, will club identities come to
replace national loyalties? After all, whoever pays the bucks
gets the loyalty.
Has cricket in India entered the age of sponsored gambling
where its stake-holders are abdicating their responsibility
and letting the 'free-market' forces take control of the
sport? Will it only create a super-elite category of overpaid,
arrogant superstars at the cost of domestic cricket? Will the
new cricket corporate czars have any emotional attachment to
the sport? Importantly, will substance become the first
casualty of the hoopla and hype of the auctioning? Will it
widen the gap between cricket and other sports?
True, the BCCI and IPL promoters dismiss these fears as much
ado about nothing. Why is everyone raving and ranting about
the cricketers earnings? What about other sports like Golf,
tennis and car racing. The Jeeva Singh’s, Sania Mirza and
Kartikhen, they assert. Besides, money raised would be spent
to improve the standard of sports in India and also to promote
other sports, specially at the grassroot-level.
How one wonders will paying Messers Dhoni, Tendulkar, Dravid
and Ganguly, who already earn crores for playing a year's
cricket for India and more from sponsorships, raise the
standard of the sport? Rather, wouldn’t it widen the gap
between the haves and have-nots in cricket and other sports?
Besides, the American experience, on which the IPL is based,
clearly shows that players more often than not prefer their
club over country thanks to the money being bank-rolled by it.
In addition, club owners too become possessive as they want to
protect their investments at any cost. And, more often than
not refuse to release the players for matches played for the
country. Besides, the recall value of club teams is more.
People identify with the Chicago Bulls rather than the US
Olympic basketball team or the New York Yankees instead of the
US baseball team.
Sadly, the auction has once again underscored the ugly reality
that cricket has ceased to be a sport. It has become a mammoth
corporate conglomerate which lacks transparency and is all
about wielding power and money. Worse, it has become another
pocket borough of our netagan. Wherein crores are spent in
deals over-the-table and under-the-table in keenly fought
elections for the control over the BCCI. Imagine, its kitty is
virtually the same as the budget allocation of a Union
Ministry.
Not just cricket, Indian sports as a whole is controlled by
politicians and vested interests. The justification trotted
out is that netagan are ‘experts’ in raising funds, even for
khel-kood! If the truth be told, sports today has per se
degenerated from purely a sporting activity, physical prowess
and competitiveness to downright object of a nexus between
politics and bodies controlling it.
The entry of paid sponsors for games and sportsmen has added
an ugly dimension to an already murky arena. The decline of
standards in sports is in direct proportion to the increase in
the players’ affluence. Plainly, a sport gets corrupted when
money is involved. From harmless betting in schools and
colleges, it today has an international pattern. The racket is
like a business between players, managers and bookies. They
initiate betting, running into crores of rupees and funneled
abroad via the hawala channel. The high-stake punting on
winning teams has increased the greed and led to collecting
inside information on a team’s strategy, forecasting the
outcome to match fixing.
This all pervasive malady has grown to monstrous proportions
and is now being referred to as a full-fledged industry and
trade with a turn-over running into hundreds of crores. With
big money and bigger events, sports stars get big sponsors.
With the IPL auctioning, celebrity endorsement of sports is
simply mind-boggling.
Some will argue that India is only following the ground rules
set in the international arena. Where David Beckham and
Michael Jordan, the world’s best football and basketball
players respectively, made history with multi-million dollar
tie-ups. Major sports goods manufacturers like Reebok, Adidas
and Nike outbid each other to sponsor anything and everything
from caps, footwear, T-shirts and balls etc they wore. And,
the ‘sacred’ Wimbledon, the Australian, the US and French Open
tennis tournaments and football, hockey and baseball
competitions are simply following suit.
In this free-for-all vicious circle of avarice lies the
forgotten Greek philosophy of sports: The health of a nation
depends upon the proficiency of its youth in sports and games.
It led to the start of the Olympic movement in 1884, which won
the support of even Hitler, who went out of his way to make it
a grand spectacle in 1936 in Berlin.
It took wings in India under Nehru’s patronage who
conceptualized the Asian Games Federation and organized the
first “regional Olympiad” (Asian Games) in New Delhi in 1951.
His message was clear: “Play the game in the spirit of the
game”. The National Sports Federations too adhered to the
Olympic ideals of amateur sports, namely, anyone found guilty
of monetary benefit from sports was disqualified from
participation in international competitions. In fact, way back
in the early 1960s, a woman athlete and a swimmer from Kolkata
were disqualified for appearing in a Bata advertisement for
sports shoes.
Tragically, all is forgotten. Most of our sports bodies today
are controlled and headed by ambitious people with powerful
connections and clout: Varying from industrialists,
businessmen, politicians to small-time managers. They have
little to contribute, but a lot to gain. Unlike the past,
where sports patrons like the princely rulers of Patiala,
Bikaner, Jaipur and Jodhpur graciously spent time and money
for the healthy promotion of sports.
Sadly, the ball game started changing once black money started
increasing with each passing year. So did the Government’s
contribution, with budgets spiraling from Rs.13 crores during
the Second Plan to about Rs.300 crores in the Ninth Plan.
Sports, is now controlled by a Ministry at the Centre and in
the States. But sports management continues to falter at all
levels.
Finally, the million dollar question: How is the Government
going to stall the domino effect? The day crores replaces
honour as a player’s driving force Indian sport might as well
say set-game-match. Let’s face it, rescuing sport from the
Octopus-like grip of deceit and money will be a lot of sweat
and tears. We need to stem the rot. Time to win and do a Chak
De India! ---- INFA
(Copyright India News & Feature Alliance)
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