Last year, I read Playing It My Way, Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography. It is a disappointingly dreary book that, I believe, should never have been written. In particular, it offers only a few scraps of insights into Tendulkar, the man.

What was his thinking on the field? How did he prepare to face his most challenging opponents? How did his cricket affect his family? What did it feel like to carry a nation’s hopes on that short frame for so long? Tendulkar must have grappled with such questions. But when you are done with the book, there are few answers.

Still, one episode that Tendulkar does tell us about is the sorry and shameful fuss over his “100th international hundred". (That phrase, deliberately in quotes to emphasize its perversity.) No previous player had had his centuries in Test and limited-overs cricket clubbed together. Mainly because cricket fans knew and understood: these two forms of the game are played differently, with different rules, styles and approaches.

It’s as if someone played both volleyball and beach volleyball, and you added together her statistics from both games. Or hockey and ice hockey. Or rugby league and American football. It would make no sense with those games; it should have made no sense with cricket.

Until sometime in early 2011, when someone of little sense noticed that if you indeed did such clubbing for Tendulkar, he had 99 centuries. What a great thing it would be, this person must have thought, if he scored one more and reached a century of centuries!

The idea promptly went viral, and a nation suddenly found one more burden to pile on its favourite son: when are you going to score that century? Tendulkar already owned pretty much every cricket record there was, but we still wanted him to set one more: this entirely artificial and foolish mark.

The few pages in his autobiography where Tendulkar talks about this episode are wrenching. He believes cricket fans did not “appreciat(e) the impact (their obsession) might have on me". There were comments made that “were sometimes hard to take", “frustrating" and “untrue".

Even apparently well-meaning people saw his various scores after the 99th century not for what they were, but only for how far they fell short of 100. (They were calculating them “backwards from 100", he notes.)

“I began to feel the pressure of the hundred again," he says of one time that he passed 80—surely a recipe for trouble for any cricketer. In fact, in those months, he had Test scores of 56, 91, 76, 94, 73 and 80 (and two fifties in ODIs as well)—and yet after each one of those scores, people would offer sympathies for his “failure".

What we do to our idols!

Tendulkar did finally get the monkey off his back, in an ODI in Bangladesh in March 2012. It was a laboured, careworn innings that got slower as he got closer to the mark. Clearly, the months of manufactured pressure had got to him. The obvious relief on his face at the end only underlined that.

That whole episode featured in a curious sense of déjà vu when I watched Serena Williams play her semifinal at the US Open a week ago. In tennis, Williams occupies much the same kind of exalted place that Tendulkar does in cricket. She is a 21-time singles Grand Slam champion; she has 15 doubles titles to go with those (13 women’s, two mixed).

She has been winning those titles since 1999, that stretch a remarkable testament to her skills and athleticism. Twice in her career, she has held all four Slam titles at the same time—2003 and this year. She is easily one of the game’s all-time greats.

In fact, John McEnroe believes she is “the greatest female player I have ever seen", and, in fact, “one of the all-time greatest athletes, period. Man or woman".

But this year, Williams came into the US Open carrying a burden much like Tendulkar did in 2011. She had won the first three Slams of the year. If she won the last one, she would have accomplished one of the game’s rarest feats: a Grand Slam, meaning winning all four major championships in a single calendar year. Never mind that when she won the Wimbledon title in July, she had actually won four in a row anyway. No, the somewhat artificial constraint of the calendar year defines the Grand Slam, last achieved by Steffi Graf in 1988.

Much like Tendulkar’s fans began focusing on that 100th hundred, Williams had to endure endless questions about the Grand Slam, especially after Wimbledon, when she had “only" to win the US Open to complete it. As she progressed through the rounds in New York, she seemed increasingly weighed down by the monkey: not her usual free-flowing dominant self on the court, morose at her press conferences.

Then came the semifinal, against the inspired, clever but admittedly journeywoman Italian Roberta Vinci. Williams won the first set, but then started to look increasingly desperate and tight. She was a step slow getting to her shots, too often missing them anyway.

She was playing her game much like Tendulkar had played his, that day when he finally made his 100th. There was even one point, late in the third set, when Williams-watchers probably realized she would lose—paradoxically, a point that she actually won. She stood on the court screaming, but with a look on her face of intense pain and frustration.

Not long after that, Vinci served for the match. Williams played a few listless points and it was over. Vinci had won. No US Open title, no Grand Slam for Serena Williams this year.

And I couldn’t swear to it, but I think I detected on Williams’s face, as she came up to congratulate Vinci, the same relief that Tendulkar showed, back in March 2012. Those are heavy monkeys.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

Twitter: @DeathEndsFun

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.

Share Via