IN THE 1930s, if you’d spoken
of a Gavaskar playing cricket for Mumbai (then Bombay, of course), guess whom you’d be
referring to? Manohar Gavaskar, the Indian cricket legend’s father, who was a
popular club cricketer.
Cricket ran in the family,
quite naturally. By the time Sunil was born, his uncle Madhav Mantri had
already played for India.
Early in life, Mantri taught
Sunil a very important lesson. Whenever young Sunil visited his uncle’s house,
he’d caress his Test pullovers with great longing. Months later, he picked up
enough courage to ask Mantri if he could take one.
Mantri replied, “You have to
sweat and earn the India
colours. They do not come easily. There is no short cut to the top.” That’s
when Sunil decided that he had to work hard to earn his own India pullover.
But I must tell you about the
famous mix-up first. When Sunil was born on July 10, 1949, a sharp-eyed uncle
named Narayan Masurekar noticed that the baby had a tiny hole near the top of
his left ear-lobe. When Masurekar returned the next day, the hole was missing!
How could that be? The nurses found that there had been a mix-up while the
babies in the hospital nursery were being bathed. Soon, Sunil was found, fast asleep
beside a fisherwoman!
If it hadn’t been for that
observant uncle, Sunil Manohar Gavaskar might have been just another fisherman
today!
Sunil’s mother loved cricket
so much that she regularly bowled a tennis ball at her little son at home. One
day, the boy drove a ball back at her. His strong shot broke her nose. Did Sunil get a scolding? Not at all. His
mother just washed away the blood, and returned to bowl!
As a schoolboy, Sunil decided
that he wanted to be a batsman. His refusal to get out, which the world watched
while he was at the crease, was obvious from the very beginning. When he played
with his friends, he’d get so furious when he was declared out that he would
stomp away with the bat and ball. Imagine the
fights this caused because he was the only child in his group to have
either!
As they grew older, his
friends planned another way to get him out. They would all appeal at a
particular ball they had agreed on earlier ~ and Sunil would be given out by
popular demand!
How did Sunil get to play in
his first Harris Shield inter-school tournament? His friend Milind Rege, who
later became a Ranji Trophy player, went down with chickenpox. And who do you
think took his place? Sunil, of course, who scored an unbeaten 30 runs.
The next morning, excited at
the thought of seeing his name in the papers, Sunil woke up at the crack of
dawn. Can you imagine how sad he felt when his name appeared as ‘G. Sunil’?
At first, Sunil’s poor
fielding kept him out of the regular school team. But he decided to train
himself to do better. He chose to concentrate in the slips, where catches come
swift and hard. This finally earned him a place in the exclusive club of
cricketers who have taken over a hundred catches in Test cricket!
In the 1965-66 season, the Sunil
Gavaskar of the tall scores arrived. In the quarter-finals of the Cooch Behar
Trophy for schools, he scored 246 not out, and added 421 for the first wicket
with Anwar Qureshi. In the semi-finals he made 222, and 85 in the final. He was
later selected to play for the All India Schoolboys team in London.
In his first ‘test’ against
the London Schoolboys, Sunil made 116. In all, he totted up 309 from four
‘tests,’ though he missed the last one because of his final examinations.
His proud parents had an arrangement
with Sunil. They gave him Rs. 10 for every century he scored. Would you like a
deal like that?
But he wasn’t allowed to
neglect his lessons at school. Once, after a poor report, Sunil was refused
permission to play in an inter-school tournament. His parents changed their
minds only after the principal of the school personally promised to look after
Sunil’s studies. There were no major problems after that.
That’s how the legend named
Sunil Gavaskar took his first steps on the road that was to fetch him over
10,000 runs in Test cricket.
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