Eternal Sunshine of the Athletic Mind
Where Sidin protects his goal with the effectiveness of India's vaccine policy and Ashok beats a TDC at an 800m race using a column from Sportstar
Josekuttan Louisettan Chilavert
Hello and welcome to his extremely delayed edition of the Salem Junction newsletter. Not Krish’s fault. Entirely my fault. (Ashok: Of course, it’s also not my fault because KRISH IS MY FATHER’S NAME). Not so much my fault as the Euro 2020 tournament’s fault. But let’s not point fingers at anyone.
Without further adoor gopalakrishnan: A few months into my first year of B.E. Metallurgical Engineering at REC Trichy I was picked to play for the college football team. As the third goalkeeper. This was not only because our football coach was a man with great vision who expected me to mature into First Goalie in a few years’ time. No. It was also because:
1. Our best goalkeeper, Snehanshu, was also our best striker. (Ha ha insert ‘Bengalis are good at striking’ joke here). Which meant that often we had to use our second goalie during tournaments.
2. Which means the team needed someone who was happy to be third goalie a lot of the time, and second goalie some of the time. And nothing at all for like 90% of the time. And I like nothing better than to be nothing at all.
And then one day our coach came and said: “Hello friends I have registered two teams for a local village football tournament. Sidin you are goalkeeper of REC B team.” And I was overjoyed. Not only would I finally get to play IRL, but also surely a village tournament in Tanjavur can’t be overly… challenging?
Narrator: “It was an overly challenging tournament.”
Except that we landed up at the venue and lined up against us was some sort of TATA football academy-type outfit. Like fully grown men with shin guards and cleats and an actual uniform for the goalkeeper.
Over the next 90 minutes, we proceeded to get thrashed 12-1. Which is all fun and games for you reader, but I was the goalie picking the ball out of his net an average of once every 7 minutes or so. By the end, a few hundred locals were lined up behind my goalpost loudly and joyously counting the number of goals going in.
ETTTTTUUU. OMBOOOTHUUUUU. PATTHUUUU.
Rascals.
This is why when Brazil was getting their Copacabana handed to them by Germany in that world cup match I merely watched in solidarity. In that moment I knew exactly what the Seleção were going through. I knew exactly. Sad.
Ok Krish you tell one story.
On running an 800m race like Venkatesh Prasad
In the mid-1990s, I was a bespectacled nerd, pretty much the only acceptable look for any teenager in my extended family at that point. South Indian boys studying in Delhi schools were just simply expected to excel at Maths, speak Hindi in a funny accent, and possess zero athletic ability, so when I decided to enroll myself in the 800m race at the annual school sports day, eyebrows were raised across the board. My parents were like - “Is everything OK at school? Is this some new-age expression of teenage rage?” and so on. My teachers were like - “Please don’t injure yourself because you are an important cog in our diabolical plan to increase the average marks attained in the upcoming board exam and use it to justify charging several arms and legs in school fees” and so on.
Despite the universal chorus of eyebrow elevation, I went ahead because I knew something none of them did. I had read columns about Sebastian Coe in the venerable Sportstar, a magazine that folks in my family studied with the intensity of ML Khanna’s bicep development course on engineering mathematics. We didn’t play much sport, but we sure as hell read a fuck ton about it. And in my mind, 800m was all about strategy and honestly, all those middle distance athletes seemed to look like me - generally lacking in nourishment and devoid of any visible muscle. With that overweening overconfidence, I found myself at the starting line, only to be startled by the presence of a (not very) gentleman named X who was the quintessential, organic, single-source, artisanal TDC (and for the purposes of politeness, we shall refrain from expanding that acronym about Typical Delhi rhymes-with-beauteous).
Mr. X was one of these 6 ft 4 types who ate lean poultry three times a day, had a gym in his house, and had just won the 100m and 200m races at the sports day. He had, for some reason, missed out on the 400m, so he was desirous of completing his triple crown by running the 800m. He was all swagger, taunts, and other impolite inquiries about female siblings. All par for the TDC course. Of course, the one thing I was certain he hadn’t done - read Sportstar columns on Seb Coe and the criticality of conserving one's energy in middle distance races, and reading as an activity didn’t quite sit well with his testosterone-fuelled image and Banganapalli mango calf muscles. I then did something that would turn out to be critical to my performance in this race. I took my glasses off and gave them to a friend, and I looked straight ahead at the incredibly blurry world in front of my extremely myopic eyes. So when the starting gun (ok, it was a starting whistle) went off, he took off like a Gurgaon SUV driver when the traffic lights turned amber.
Here is what then transpired. All my fellow runners minus one tall Coorgi guy looked at Mr. X racing down the track and committed what would turn out to be a fatal mistake - they accelerated to try and keep up with him. 300 meters into the race, Mr. X realized that there was more lactic acid in his mango calves than he expected there to be and just collapsed on the track. Well, running an 800m race like a 100m race is, it turns out, not a smart idea. The other runners used up most of their energy by 600m and slowed to a crawl. I ran like Venkatesh Prasad steaming in to bowl a slow leg cutter, and rather critically, I had no idea where the other runners were thanks to my myopia. So that helped me just stick to how fast I wanted to run at the start of the race.
By the time I had completed 600m, I found myself overtaking 20 other exhausted runners who had made the cardinal mistake of matching the speed of Mr. X upfront, and I ended up finishing the race second. The tall Coorgi guy with natural middle distance running genetics? He won. When I came home with a silver-coloured medal, much to the surprise and mild consternation in family circles, they went “There aren’t many career prospects in athletics” etc.
The school then selected me to represent them at the regional track meet, where I proceeded to finally appreciate the hard fact that one could do well in one race on the basis of some Sportstar articles and the stupidity of beefy Mr. X, but at the next level, the athletes had significantly more training and common sense than Mr. X and I placed second from last, and that too only because one chap dropped out due to injury halfway.
The India Cultural League
Hi, Sidin here. Super short one for this story. Mostly because there is remarkably little written about this. In fact, let me just copy-paste the excerpt from Ronojoy Sen’s outstanding book:
“But it was left to the curiously named India Cultural League, a team backed by Bengalis associated with the Bombay film industry such as Ashok Kumar, Sachin Deb Burman, and Manna Dey, to become the first Bombay team to annex the IFA Shield in 1953. The India Cultural League, with the well-known actor Pran Krishan Sikand, or simply Pran as he was better known (who made his name playing a villain in Bollywood films), as the manager, beat Mohun Bagan in the semifinal to set up a final against East Bengal. The final was played three times, resulting in a tie on each occasion. The India Cultural League was, however, declared the winner after East Bengal was penalized for playing with two Pakistani recruits, Masood Fakhri and Niaz Ahmed, who had been suspended by the Pakistan Football Federation.”
Sen, Ronojoy. Nation at Play (Contemporary Asia in the World) (pp. 235-236). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
The Athlete and The Athlete
And Bollywood provides us the connection to the upcoming 2 stories. These two Indian athletes had lives that intersected with each other and yet couldn’t be more divergent. One was born in what is now Punjab in Pakistan and saw his parents and siblings be slaughtered in a Partition riot after which he was a refugee for many years in camps around Delhi. After being jailed for ticketless train travel and almost becoming a dacoit, he decided to try and join the Indian army. On his 4th attempt, he succeeded and was posted in Secunderabad where his superior officers noted his running abilities. He went on to win several medals for India at the National, Commonwealth, and Asian games and famously almost won a bronze model at the 1960 Rome Olympics. He later said that he always remembers the one instruction his father gave him during the riots - “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag”
The other man was born in a relatively impoverished segment of a large land-owning family in Gwalior and decided to join the army, and his running skills were discovered when he was being disciplined by a commanding officer for insubordination. He went on to represent India at the steeplechase and was part of the Indian contingent to the India-Pakistan Friendship games in 1962 along with…Milkha Singh. Once he retired from the army to go and settle a land dispute in his family, he ended up killing his nephew to avenge the death of his mother and went on to become one of the most feared dacoits in the Chambal valley - his name was Paan Singh Tomar.
The last piece could be a legitimate quiz question with both names being Mr.X and Mr.Y
Super funny :) Loved it