BackBook Review | Playing It My Way: My Autobiography
The cricket star's account of his own life is like a half-hearted prod outside the off stump
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What happens when a batsman pokes at a ball outside the off stump without going either forward or back? He misses or at best gets a nick, and is out caught at slip. Ironically for a man whose sure-footed batting was the highlight of his career, Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography appears like a half-hearted prod at telling his life’s story.
An athlete’s autobiography, at its very best, is about struggles and sacrifices. It relives the greatest sporting moments from a personal point of view and peels away the public avatar to reveal the person inside. The task is difficult for someone like Tendulkar, who has been in the spotlight since a tender age, and who shouldered the burden of a billion souls.
The autobiography breaks little fresh ground. Most of the stories narrated here have been well documented. We already know that Sunil Gavaskar presented a pair of his batting pads to Tendulkar, and how the great man got Laxman Sivaramakrishnan to bowl to him at nets in Chennai to counter Shane Warne. Yes, Yuvraj Singh’s ignorance about wasabi, and that someone once pulled a gun on Sourav Ganguly and Navjot Singh Sidhu in a London tube, are interesting sidelights, but the book fails to satisfy when it comes to analyses of series, matches, even players (except for Warne, in one instance). After all, Tendulkar had a much closer perspective than any cricket writer or commentator.
Tendulkar walks on eggshells when it comes to cricket’s greatest scourge, match-fixing, which hit the headlines twice during his career. Merely saying he found it “repulsive" is lip service coming from a man who dedicated his life to the game. Didn’t he feel the need to find out more? How did he tackle it at a personal level?
He also doesn’t quite open up on the tax issue on his Ferrari import or the relationship with his childhood friend and batting partner, Vinod Kambli. There are few references to the all-powerful Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), except when it obliged him by shifting his last Test to hometown Mumbai, or the fact that the selectors weren’t always sympathetic when he was captain, denying him the players he wanted. The decision review system (DRS), an ongoing debate in international cricket, merits only a paragraph.
So it has few things controversial—apart from references to former coach Greg Chappell, a pre-launch excerpt release of this book that went viral, and his anger at Rahul Dravid’s innings declaration when he was batting at 194 in the Multan Test against Pakistan in 2004. “If Rahul was so keen on showing intent (to win) here in Multan, he should have done the same in Sydney," Tendulkar writes. That is in reference to the January 2004 Sydney Test when Dravid was batting on 91 and Tendulkar felt the team should have declared earlier. Although Tendulkar is at pains to emphasize that Dravid and he “remain good friends", this paragraph hints at their strained relationship.
What shines through is the man’s sheer focus and dedication to the game. We already know that from statistics. But little details like the hours of practice from cut-out golf balls at a young age, or reaching the cricket ground much before his team- mates to train, are among the better parts of the book. One was truly amazed by the extent and number of injuries he carried in the second half of his long career—Tendulkar being the man who introduced the phrase tennis elbow into everyday Indian conversation.
But in the midst of those long tours and injuries, the journey of boy wonder to man doesn’t quite come out. In the acknowledgements section, Tendulkar writes that the book is a product of interview and discussion sessions with co-writer Boria Majumdar over three years. But the output reads more like they went through a list of series and matches and wrote down what the great man remembered about each of those.
It fails to do justice to arguably the greatest sporting career of an Indian. Fans would rather pick up a DVD of Tendulkar’s greatest innings.
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