Diary of an Indian female sports fan

02/25/2016

“Oh, you’re a girl, and you watch sports?”

Yes, I get a lot of that. Not always put so blatantly maybe, but still quite a lot.

Now, I am the kind of feminist who would blast someone who says “She is a woman, and she still drives quite well”. But, at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, there are times when these statements make me feel quite smug. Asked out of the blue to write on “anything sportsy under the sun” made me wonder a bit about my relationship with sports.

My earliest memories of sports are of a closed door. I was around four years old, and it was the mother of all face-offs – India vs Pakistan in the 1992 cricket world cup. Baba was watching the match with a room full of friends, Ma was busy sending in a steady supply of snacks, and I was rather bored. I was otherwise a rather shy child, but I banged on the closed door, and demanded to be let in. Baba’s friend told me, half in jest, that I could be allowed to sit if I kept absolutely still for the rest of the match (Pakistan was chasing 216 to win) – if I moved, India would lose. I cannot say how much I complied with this, but I do remember that as the Pakistani tail collapsed, that same Kaku said, “You are surely our lucky charm, I think we won because of you…”

Sports, to me, has been kind of a paradox. I was always an extremely overweight child who hated playing sports of any kind – the kind of girl who fished for excuses to bunk physical training classes in school. When I did play, no one really relished the prospect of having me on the field (unless we were playing “Catch Me if You Can” and I was the catcher). However, at the same time I was also a single child, and Baba was my idol since time immemorial – whatever he did, I had to emulate. He watched cricket, so I obviously had to not only tag along, but also know everything that he did, so that I could watch as a companion and not just an underling.

I still remember those lazy weekend afternoons - Baba and I watching a test match, and Baba explaining the difference between a pull and a hook, or teaching me how to identify reverse swing, or drawing diagrams to demonstrate the various fielding positions, or telling me stories of days when an ordinary middle class household would not have a radio set, and those who could afford one were expected to listen in full volume during important test matches, so that everyone could follow the match.

I watched cricket matches like a starved lion, devouring every detail, memorizing scores, analyzing deliveries, discussing strategies, learning new things every day. I diligently maintained scrapbooks with newspaper cuttings, and wrote down my own match reports. There was no YouTube way back then, so I used to wait for ESPN to show old matches that Baba talked so much about – the picture quality was grainy, there were no replays, one could hardly identify one player from another, but those old matches were like backdate tickets to an ancient world I had been denied entry to simply because I wasn’t born soon enough. It was very much like first love – no ulterior motives, no expectations, just the pure thrill and excitement of discovering another person.

As I grew up, however, adolescence caught up with me. What a pain it is, to be fifteen, and unattractive, and an introvert. I was socially challenged to an extent that I found it difficult to communicate with more than three people at a time, and while my friends thought it was no big deal carrying out a casual conversation with guys at their tuitions, I could not string together two intelligible words outside “Can you pass me the book?” or “What is the sum number?” Looking back, it seems rather a shallow yardstick with which to measure oneself – if guys are talking to me or not – but way back then, it was rather a big deal, and I would sink into bouts of depression and inferiority complex. And hence sneaked in the first shades of selfishness in my love for sports.

By then, football had made a steady entry into my world. Till before that, cricket was so inherently a part of me, that I would consider watching any other sport a kind of betrayal. I still remember that I first realised that there were realms beyond cricket on a tiny TV set in a cake shop. While the world watched in awe as a little known Senegal side defeated the French behemoths, I realised in similar awe that soccer was seducing me. Changing channels casually the very next day, I came upon the Spain vs Ireland match. Watching a barely 20 year old Iker Casillas literally single handedly pull a rather ordinary Spanish side into the quarter finals sort of changed my life forever. Spain was very far from the world conquering side it became much later, way back then, but something made me swear lifelong allegiance to them then and there, even when I did not understand much football - an allegiance that has remained religiously unchanged.

It was quite a new beginning, a sort of old episodes replaying in my life. Baba came into play again, this time explaining free kicks and corner kicks, fouls and red cards, offsides and penalty shootouts, and I was the hungry, greedy, all devouring student all over again.

(The end of the 'Whistlepodu' era - A trip down the memory lane on CSK's eight-year journey)

Sports became rather a parallel world I would escape into whenever the real world became difficult to endure. Immature as I was, I used sports as a weapon to shield my hurt self-confidence, as a rose-tinted glass with which I dealt with peer pressure. “I am not worthless. I am different, because I am a girl who loves sports”, I claimed to myself. I was learning new games, new tactics, devouring statistics, and creating player profiles – but no longer only because I loved it, but because I wanted to feel relevant.

After the selfishness came the betrayal.

I graduated from school, lost some weight, gained some perspective, and as a consequence, made some friends. The enigma associated with “talking to boys” was rendered laughable, and as the real world became interesting, it gradually erased the need for a parallel world into the background. The fact that at about the same time cricket slowly started degenerating into “style over substance” mode did not help either, nor did all my childhood heroes gradually hanging up their boots. As I stepped into professional life, they were replaced by new excuses – stress, deadlines, meetings, schedules, appraisals, promotions and so on. I had no time for my one true companion.

Hell, if this was a Bollywood movie, in the last scene, I would be sitting sprawled on my couch, watching cricket as avidly as before, as some soppy “Happy Ending” song played in the background. It’s not that life does not come full circle like in the movies, but thankfully it does so in more ingenious ways. Somewhere down the line, the passion and ecstasy that comes with watching a sport started seducing me again, if not as potently as before, certainly in a much more realistic way, much like an affair in your late 20s in contrast to a teenage love affair. Much like appreciating that love is more like the “Before trilogy” than like “The Notebook”.

Sports and me, we cannot live without each other. True, cricket does not enthuse me at all anymore, I have concentrated all my attention on soccer. Time (or the lack of it) has come in our way. Stress and exhaustion (heaps of it) mean I am mostly too tired to stay up for late night matches. Plans and responsibilities mean I often need to sacrifice a match I have intended to watch for ages. Slightly failing memory means I cannot rattle off statistics with abundant ease, as I could before. Advent of technology means I do not often make as sincere efforts to remember every match as I did before – if I forget something, I have Google and YouTube and a hundred other apps installed in my smartphone to refresh my memory. On the other hand, maturity and experience of having watched sports for years means I can analyze strategies far more easily, predict results with far more accuracy, and understand tactics much more effortlessly.

One thing, however, remains strictly unchanged. Even now, when Messi makes short work of the opposition’s wall of defense and runs through it with the ball glued to his feet, my mind transports me to some ethereal dimension of awe. When Federer unleashes his classical backhand shot, as though painting a Picasso or writing a Neruda couplet, my hair still stands on its ends in exhilaration. When I watch old footages of Rahul Dravid playing a copybook straight drive, or Sourav Ganguly punishing a full length ball for a sixer over long on, nostalgia threatens to cloud my eyes and choke my throat. That one thing – that pure ecstasy, that frenzy, that trance, that animation that probably cannot be put in words, or even given a name to – it is unparalleled. Years may pass, and I may become an old lady with cataract and without teeth, who cannot walk two paces without support, and someone may score from a 40 yard free kick, and I am sure it will push me to tears, or give me enough kick to do a 10 second jiggly dance before I pass out.

And someone will say, “Grandma, after all this time?”

And I wish I have enough breath left in me to say, “Always…”