In many ways, Shivnarine Chanderpaul was the quintessential professional. A couple of years ago, I met him in Philadelphia. I was on holiday, he was playing in the US city’s annual tournament.
“So you play cricket professionally, and to relax you play some more cricket?” I asked him. He didn’t see the irony. He was a cricketer and he would play whenever and wherever possible. During a period of turmoil for West Indies cricket, he was the one constant, confusing bowler and spectator alike with his stance and style, which alternated between nudge-and-poke batsmanship and classical drives.
Yet, the discussion around his retirement seems to revolve around individual selfishness in a team game. It happened to another great contemporary cricketer, Jacques Kallis too.
Fact is, great players are, by nature, selfish. They have to be. Richard Dawkins did not extend his theory of the selfish gene to include sportsmen and their approach to sport, but greats, from W.G. Grace (“they have come to see me bat, not you bowl..”) to Don Bradman and from di Stefano to Roger Federer and Tiger Woods would have achieved far less without the impetus of selfishness.
The question of selfishness often pops up in sport, especially in relation to its best performers.
Great players get that way by their ability to focus on the job, by their self-denial, their ability to wear blinkers and shut out the rest of the world, their obsession — this monk-like approach focuses on the self and on increasing the value of the self in the context of the competition. It is easier to understand this in individual sport — the great tennis player or golfer has to be selfish in order to succeed.
In team sport too, selfishness is intrinsic to greatness. A Bradman who knew he would struggle on wet tracks, for instance, played as little on such tracks as possible. His logic was irrefutable — his value to the team as its main batsman would be diminished, and there were better batsmen in such conditions anyway; on one occasion, he even reversed his batting order and sent out the bowlers to open the innings on a dodgy track.
Habits of a lifetimeTrained from an early age to be selfish, the Gavaskars and Tendulkars, the Boycotts and Chanderpauls knew that when they got out, something went out of their team’s challenge. The great sportsman cannot change the habits of a lifetime. Anyway, who is to decide (except after the event) whether selfishness was in the team cause or the individual cause?
Patterns become clear only in hindsight, which means occasionally the obsession to make hundreds (which is usually in the interests of the team) falls overboard into the sea of mere individual greed rather than team need. Such is the nature of sport. In soccer, the final passes find their way to the leader of the attack. The Peles and Maradonas stood out even in team sport; it was their vision that made the difference between victory and defeat. They had to necessarily treat their teammates as the supporting cast in this choreographed but selfish dance.
The difference thus, is between creative selfishness, which adds to the team effort and destructive selfishness that harms it.
The Indian batting was criticised during the ODIs in Australia for the latter. As milestones approached, batsmen tended to get self-conscious and excessively cautious. This, as the Australians were quick to point out, was the essential difference between the teams.
That says as much about the individuals as about the system. India’s selection often tends to make players negatively selfish. A good example is Manish Pandey. He is picked for the second ODI, plays just five deliveries and is then dropped. Reinstated for the final match, he makes an unbeaten century and sees India home. He is 26, has been around for a while, is one of the best fielders in the country, has an excellent first-class record (he averages over 50) and was the first Indian to score a century in the IPL. When he ticks so many boxes, why the reluctance to give him a good run?
When talent comes up against frustration, it fosters selfishness (not that Pandey was selfish in any way). Batsmen play for themselves, bowlers keep an eye on averages. When players are picked not just on averages but on selfless contributions to team efforts too, then selfishness can be used creatively.
Among the highest scorers in the game, Chanderpaul has remained unbeaten the most number of times, 49. Much is being made of this. Kallis was unbeaten 40 times. Such things don’t mean anything. Steve Waugh was unbeaten 46 times and Allan Border 44 — but no one accused them of being destructively selfish.
Like cholesterol, there is good selfishness and bad selfishness. The former is in the team’s cause, the latter in the individual’s. It is as simple as that.
