Once Upon a Time a Boy Wonder

IT IS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, A BLISTERING sun above us, but Shivaji Park is thrumming with life. Little children and teenagers, all in whites, are pouring in through the ground’s many entrances. They arrive on busses, or on foot or cycles, many of them having taken trains from far-flung areas outside Mumbai to get here. Some are so small that they appear only a little bigger than the cricket kit bags they carry on their shoulders. For the rest of the day, they bat and bowl relentlessly in multiple nets pitched across the ground until the light gradually disappears.

It was on this very ground, at some of these very nets nearly 40 years ago, that Sachin Tendulkar took the first steps to become the Tendulkar we all came to know. Given how rapidly he rose— traversing the route from domestic to international cricket in a few years, making his India debut by 16—it might appear as though Tendulkar was born fully formed as a batsman. And while he did begin playing cricket, like many others, with a tennis ball in his building locality, it was really here at Shivaji Park, under the tutelage of his coach Ramakant Achrekar, that Tendulkar learned to play cricket seriously.

“He was just a little kid,” says Vishaka Dalvi, one of Achrekar’s daughters, now 63 years old. She was in her early 20s, also play­ing cricket for various teams, when the 11-year-old Tendulkar began to visit Achrekar’s camp at Shivaji Park, and occasionally dropped in at his home. “He was exceedingly polite,” she says, “always listening intently to what others had to say.” Dalvi has spent a lifetime in cricket and, later, in cricket administration, serving as a member of Mumbai Cricket Association’s selection committee for various girls’ teams until recently. She has short grey curls and a serious face, but every so often, when she speaks of Tendulkar’s early years, the eyebrows that knit into anxiety unwind themselves and her face breaks into a wide grin. “My daddy was a big believer in him. He knew from the outset that Sachin could achieve big things in cricket. So, he was determined to give Sachin everything he needed to get there,” she says.

Shivaji Park, the sprawling playground in the heart of Mumbai, is arguably the most important cricket maidan in the city. But the ground isn’t just a cricket maidan. It is also the cradle of Marathi culture and politics. While many of the city’s neighbourhoods have undergone dramatic change, the neighbourhood around the park remains distinctly Maharashtrian. Several political leaders have used this venue to mobilise movements, right from the time of the Independence movement when the likes of Mahatma Gandhi addressed massive crowds here, to famously Bal Thackeray in later years, who built his sons-of-the-soil campaign against the perceived injustices towards the Maharashtrian community here. When the Shiv Sena split last year, one of the earliest contests between the two factions was over who would get to host their Dussehra rally here. When Tendulkar first began to play here, the venue of Shivaji Park was as much a space to achieve a cricketing ideal, and as it still probably is today, as an expression of Marathi identity and politics.

By the 1980s, Achrekar, who ran a coaching clinic at Shivaji Park and coached the cricket team of the school Shardashram Vidyamandir nearby, was gaining the reputation of one of the city’s top cricket coaches. It was Ajit, Tendulkar’s elder brother, who, as the story goes, wanting to channel his younger brother’s propensity for mischief and his interest in cricket, first took Tendulkar to Achrekar. Ajit has remained a constant figure by Tendulkar’s side, spotting and helping direct his brother’s early talent, and helping Tendulkar navigate the troughs that invariably came.

According to Achrekar’s grandson Soham Dalvi, his grand­father who died back in 2019, used to play cricket but turned to coaching sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the request of some cricketers and their parents. “He could just spot talent in the way you and I can’t do. He used to spend the whole day on the ground just looking at players,” says Soham, who was also coached by Achrekar, and who pursued a career in cricket before injuries laid him low. Soham today coaches and manages Ka­mat Memorial Cricket Club, for which Tendulkar played under Achrekar, while using his mother Dalvi’s help to run a business repairing and selling computers and accessories. Achrekar’s style of coaching, Soham says, was different from most others. “He did not try to make you into another type of player. He was all about bringing out what is already inside. And making sure, that while picking new things, you never lose what made you good in the first place,” he says.

He brought a special focus to those he thought were more gifted and focused. And Achrekar used to make Tendulkar bat throughout the day, whether at the net sessions in the mornings and evenings or in matches in the period between nets, taking the young Tendulkar on his scooter, from one ground to the next, one team to the next. He even had Tendulkar switch schools to Shar­dashram Vidyamandir, whose cricket team he had built into an unbeatable force in the 1980s and 1990s. Tendulkar even moved into this neighbourhood, to the house of some relatives, for about four years to focus on his cricket.

Even before he made his first-class debut, Tendulkar began to set Mumbai’s maidans on fire, whether it was for his school cricket team or various clubs. Kaustubh Apte, who played for St Xavier’s School’s cricket team back then, speaks with awe even today when asked about Tendulkar’s prowess. “He was just like you saw on TV later. The same kind of power and touch,” Apte says. “And he was very slightly built back then, but his punches had so much power.” Apte, who batted one down and bowled off-spin for his school team, was part of the team that had played exceedingly well to reach the semi-finals of the 1988 Harris Shield Cup, until they ran into Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli from Shardashram Vidyamandir. “They massacred us,” Apte says.

Tendulkar and Kambli batted for a day-and-a-half, scoring a triple century each and a world record partnership of 664 runs. Balls were hit out of the vast Azad Maidan and into the streets and buildings outside, some of them never to be re­covered. “After a point, only Sairaj Bahutule [who went on to play cricket for India] and I were bowl­ing, since we were spinners, but the two kept at it,” says Apte, who played cricket for a bit, even training under Achrekar, before focusing on his studies, and later, setting up a solar and renew­able energy firm. Tendulkar used to often drop in to train at the Hindu Gymkhana on Marine Drive, and Apte, who also trained there, recalls watching Tendulkar hitting the ball so hard that people who came to the club for walks would re­quest that Tendulkar not be allowed when they were around. “He was very special even back then. Everyone knew he was going to have a big career in cricket,” he says.

As special as Tendulkar was, he was of course a product of an ecosystem that helped nurture him to his potential. Whether it was the middle-class environs of Bandra East’s Sahitya Sahwas, where he was raised, or his academically inclined parents whose value system helped cricket’s biggest superstar remain very much on earth, or his brother who identified his early spark, or the coach who used to take him on his scooter from one game to the next, or the venue of Shivaji Park where Tendulkar found his first ex­pression, Tendulkar became Tendulkar in the alchemy of this unique mix.

It is evening at Shivaji Park when Soham, watching his students bat at the nets, turns to reveal Achrekar’s greatest contribution to his students, one that on the face of it has nothing to do with cricket. “Look at all of them, and some of them went on to become very famous, but not one of them was controversial or did anything that might be considered wrong. Achrekar Sir instilled that in each of them,” he says.

There is of course one noticeable exception—the person bat­ting with Tendulkar in that 664-run partnership. And Kambli’s story is a big temptation to read into what could happen to a su­perlative talent without the ideal ecosystem. According to quite a few, back in school, Kambli was as talented as Tendulkar. But they couldn’t have come from more different worlds. If Tendulkar had grown up in Sahitya Sahwas, a housing society set up for writers and academics, Kambli was living in a shanty at Kanjurmarg; Tendulkar’s father was a poet and professor, Kambli’s worked in a factory, and as he later revealed, used to be physically abusive; and when fame arrived for the two, while Tendulkar remained guarded, Kambli became more flamboyant and reckless. When Kambli finally broke into the Indian team, and ratcheted up con­secutive double centuries, for a time he was even more prolific than Tendulkar. But he fell by the wayside, and even though he made his way back into the team several years later, he could not last long. He was last in the news, a few months ago, for having attacked his wife in a drunken stupor.

It is evening now at Shivaji Park. Cricket has undergone massive changes in the last few years. Mumbai is no longer the cradle of Indian cricket, nor does Shivaji Park enjoy the prominent position it once did in Mumbai cricket. Soham points out that cricketers are emerging from different localities, and clubs and infrastructure are emerging in those localities to cater to them. Running Kamat Memorial Cricket Club is difficult, Soham says, but they would never close it down given the history associated with the club. “Look at the kids,” he says, pointing to the many children and teens practising. “You owe it to them, you can never know where the next big star is going to come from.”

Dusk is gradually approaching, and many kids are now making their way home, the red of the Shivaji Park’s earth everywhere on them—their white clothes and shoes, faces and hair, even their eyebrows.

Also Read

A Portrait of Greatness ~ by Boria Majumdar
The Sachin Sutra ~ by Rajeev Deshpande
Sachin Left it on the Pitch ~ by James Astill

cricketIndian cricketMumbaiRamakant AchrekarSachin TendulkarSachin@50Shardashram VidyamandirShivaji Park