A few years ago, a journalist contacted Rohan Gavaskar for his father’s number. After he got it, he sent Gavaskar Senior a text with the appropriate pleasantries, requesting a chat when he was free. Within minutes, he got a reply. “Wrong number,” it said. The journalist was flummoxed. A while later, just as he was messaging Rohan to check whether he had got the digits wrong, another message popped up from Sunny. “Ha! Got you, didn’t I? I should have been a leg-spinner!”
That little anecdote tells you a little about Gavaskar’s penchant for leg-pulling and humour. Anyone who has ever shared the media space with him could tell you about his jokes and ability to mimic his peers. The impersonation of Javed Miandad asking a puzzled Dilip Doshi what his room number was has reduced many a journalist to tears of mirth.
On the tour of Australia in 2003-04, the opening Test in Brisbane was hit by tropical storms that ruined any chance of a result. There was barely any play on the second and third days, and the fairly sizeable Indian media contingent spent its time hanging on to every word shared by the many greats in the commentary box. Gavaskar, Greg Chappell and Geoffrey Boycott were all there, and it was fascinating to listen to their different perspectives on batting and the game in general.
Gavaskar is a terrific raconteur, and also not shy of flying the flag when on alien shores. Some of the hopelessly biased coverage in the local media during that series infuriated him, and he made no effort to hide his displeasure. Whether it was through the columns he wrote then or on air, he would get his point across with conviction and clarity.
And as Atreyo Mukhopadhyay has alluded to elsewhere on these pages, he took his writing very seriously. There are some players who won’t even know what columns go under their name. Others give their ghostwriters a line or two, and ask them to stretch it to 500 or 700 words. Such unprofessionalism was never the Gavaskar way.
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In those days, nearly 20 years ago, stadiums didn’t have Wi-Fi connectivity. Each press box had one or two desktop computers connected to the Internet. Even if you were carrying your own laptop, you would have to save your work on a storage device so it could be transferred to the desktop and then emailed to your office. At lunch, tea and close of play, there would be fairly long queues in front of these machines.
Gavaskar wasn’t carrying a laptop. When he had to write his column, he would log in to his Hotmail, open a mail window and start typing. After a few minutes, one of the production assistants would come running to tell him that he was expected back on commentary soon. He would then leave the terminal, and someone else would sign him out of his account while sending their copy.
This continued for over a day, and you could gradually see his mood darkening. After a point, he just exploded. “What rubbish is this?” he wondered out loud. One of the younger, slightly more tech-savvy, journalists went up to him and asked what was wrong. When Gavaskar told him that he had had to start his article from scratch on at least three occasions, the journalist told him that he could save whatever he had typed as a draft before leaving the terminal. It would then be there in the draft folder when he returned.
By that evening, Sunny was back to his jokey, wise-cracking self. He also told the journalist with a beaming smile that he hadn’t had to duplicate his work again. At the time, he was in his mid-50s and already a legend of the game. But such was his perfectionist streak that he wanted to master new technology and stay relevant. Too many old pros have the tendency to lapse into in-our-day mode. When Gavaskar does, it’s usually in the form of witty anecdotes and vignettes. Not for him the mindless comparisons between old and new.
It was also on that tour that Rohan made his debut in the ODI series. He would play only 11 games across four different series, but Gavaskar Senior’s pride when he made his only half-century, against Zimbabwe in Adelaide, was palpable. Rohan was nearly 28 by then, and had moved across the country to Bengal to find his own way. From the time he made runs as a junior, the same snide remarks that Arjun Tendulkar faces now had kept coming his way.
If anything, Gavaskar Senior was more proud of the fact that Rohan had charted his own course, away from the Mumbai cricket crucible that had moulded his father. But on another level, he was just another parent rejoicing in his child taking another step. When we put our heroes on pedestals, we often forget that they’re really no different from you and I.
Happy birthday, Sunny. May you always shine as you have for 50 years and more.
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