It is better to fade away than burn out

It is clear that Sachin Tendulkar, unlike Kurt Cobain, does not get his life lessons from Neil Young songs. I have always presumed this to be a good thing. At least Tendulkar didn’t end up being a manic depressive dead 27 year old with bad handwriting, very bad hair and the worst wife ever. But almost everyone else seems to disagree. There is nothing he can do today that will not prompt a “Oh, he is a spent force. Remember, 1998 Sharjah! Shit man, he should just retire.”

The constancy of this refrain pisses me off. In this context, Tendulkar’s two hundreds in consecutive Tests gave me hope. I was hoping that the idiots would finally shut up! But, alas, how naive of me.

Nothing has changed as Sidharth Monga proves here with his hogwash-masquerading-as-cricket-journalism. The basic problem Monga has with Tendulkar’s innings is that it was slower than the other three centuries in India’s innings. However, the tone of the article is so reprimanding that one would think that Tendulkar has notched 2 consecutive pairs, taken performance enhancing drugs, head-butted the bowler, tampered with the ball and slept with Percy Sonn’s wife. But that is hardly the case. The poor guy has just scored two freaking centuries in as many games.

The issue is not really with Tendulkar. It is with Monga and all other doofuses who insist that Tendulkar is not what he used to be. It is with the fact that these doofuses have a fixed mental model of Tendulkar. Monga, like a lot of other journalists, seems to go to every match with the same basket of adjectives he hopes to use to describe Tendulkar and his batting – glorious, easy, breathtaking, world’s best, stroke-filled, master-blaster and so on. When Tendulkar plays an innings that does not let him use these adjectives, he is disappointed. Instead of reaching for other adjectives that describe Tendulkar’s innings, he bemoans how Tendulkar does not fit his mental model.

If such an innings were played by Dravid or Steve Waugh, the words typical, gritty and hard-earned would have been generously used because those adjectives fit the predefined mental models these lazy journos have of Dravid and Waugh. But Tendulkar cannot be gritty, he can be either the young master-blaster or the aging legend with slowing reflexes who is struggling and should quit to protect his legacy.

What crap!

And what is with this protection of legacy? If Pete Sampras had bothered about protecting his legacy and retired in 2001 he would not have lost his last Wimbledon game (2002, Round 2) to the unknown George Bastl. But he also would not have won what is, at least to me, his greatest victory – the US Open in 2002. Greatness in sport is not about protecting legacies. It is about overcoming hurdles.

Yes, it is great to see the obvious superiority of the Federers and the Woods of the sporting world. But as a spectator, domination is enjoyable only for so long. The joy of seeing someone overcome hurdles after battling hard is eternal. Yes, Tendulkar is struggling, his game has evolved, he is not what he used to be. That does not mean he cannot be successful. His success will be unfamiliar and perhaps not very aggressive or dominant. But we shouldn’t fail to recognize it because it is cut from a different cloth.

Update your mental models (think of Tendulkar as the new Dravid, if that helps), refresh your adjective list, sit back and enjoy the struggle. Ideally, I’d want him to leave in blaze of glory. If not, I’d rather that he fade away than burn out.