The Wankhede Stadium, November 14-16 2013, marked the end of an era in Indian sports. Not out on 38 at the end of the first day, Sachin Tendulkar set the stadium alight with some breath-taking shots first thing in the morning on day 2. A trademark straight drive for four to bring up his fifty, and ‘Sachin, Sachin’ chants were going through the roof in the packed stadium.
The only question doing the rounds was whether he would get a century in his last innings? He couldn’t. But what he did was no less of an achievement. His vintage batsmanship gave his fans something they will cherish forever. The walk back to the pavilion one final time, the turn around to absorb the applause, the tears that flowed the next day and that incredible farewell speech – Sachin could not have finished off any better.
The speech, a spontaneous one from the heart, will rank as one of the best delivered by a sports icon. Not many could have imagined Sachin was capable of such word play and rendition, which spanned a good twenty-plus minutes. Meeting Sourav Ganguly on the way out, greeting Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman when they were shown on screen and bidding a final goodbye to his fans from inside the team bus, it was as if the Gods had scripted the perfect swansong for the best Indian batsman of all time.
I did have the opportunity to meet Sachin in the evening on the day it all came to an end. By then, he was Bharat Ratna, the ultimate recognition he could have asked for, and the first Indian sportsperson to have been given the honour. In his nineteenth-floor room at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, the legend was calm and collected while those around him were getting emotional.
Ajit Tendulkar, his brother and more, was with me when we met up in his room at 7 or so in the evening. Sachin presented me with a box of dark chocolates, and signed the match ticket with the words ‘Bharat Ratna’ to mark the end of what had been an incredible journey. Amid all the emotional outpouring around him, he was still playing the perfect host.
As his biographer, it still seems just yesterday. Brand Tendulkar, despite the failure to score a hundred in his last innings, was at its most powerful. The final 74 had, in fact, added a tinge of mortality to his immortality. He, too, could fail. He was human. Sri Donald Bradman had scored a duck in his last innings, while Diego Maradona finished second-best to West Germany with Andreas Brehme netting the decisive penalty in 1990.
Roger Federer and Michael Phelps also didn’t get the fairy-tale ending. Usain Bolt finished third in the final individual race of his life. And Tendulkar scored 74. But just like the others mentioned here, he too is the greatest. From being a great champion to being labelled the greatest—every accolade possible was shared by us all on social media. The truth is, even a decade later, we continue to do the same.
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