Making every ball count

One of the earliest shocks that I suffered upon coming to America was to find that cricket was not the national game in every country. I mean talk about being uprooted. Every kid in India grows up with one of two career aspirations – becoming a batsman or a bowler. One typically spends the first twenty years of life learning to play cricket, only to find that there are 11 openings and a billion applicants. Not great odds, you must admit. At which point, the remaining billion minus eleven become doctors, engineers and software professionals. Still, the dream lives on. We are all experts of the game, ardent followers and ruthless critics. We spend hours watching a game and then days debating the technicalities. Movie releases and election campaigns are timed so as not to interfere with the big games. Even the gods are not spared. The stars are summoned and heavens bribed to positively influence the outcome. Winning leads to wild dancing on the streets and losing to riots. Anyway, you get the picture. We are enthusiastic about the game.

And so it hurt when I had to explain the game to my fellow graduate students. Some who remotely knew the game dismissed it as “just like baseball”. It is so not like baseball. I mean yes, there is a ball and bat and there is hitting and running around the ground, but which sport does not have some version of that? I thought I should have better luck with the Chinese, given the Asian connection and all. After explaining the game for 20 minutes or so, my friend exclaimed “Ah! So it’s like ping-pong?” I’ve never tried explaining cricket ever since.

Watching sports is so much like following a religion. You subscribe to your favorite team or faith, maintain an irrational position that it is the best, chant slogans or prayers trying to convince the other side that they suck. (Playing sports is a different matter, and is close to practicing a religion. Requires practice, very few show commitment, and fewer still perform.) Not having a sport/religion creates a vacuum that is unnerving and difficult to sustain. You want to believe in something higher than everyday life. The vacuum gets filled quickly, especially with so many choices.

And so mine did, with American football. But then making a change is never easy, is it. Initially, there were significant challenges. It was difficult just to follow the ball, what with its propensity to get quickly buried under a dozen oversized guys. Not knowing any players (who by the way look exactly identical with the helmets on) did not help. Cheering for the opposing team through most of the game was not uncommon.

Ten years later, and I’m still learning the rules. I’ve overcome some of those early barriers now, understand the game better and even know some players. But looking back I realize that it was never about the game. It’s about getting together with a bunch of loud friends, cheering and cursing the players, having good (read junk) food, staying up till late and then talking all about it the next day. That’s what makes learning a new game so totally worth it. What the hell, I may even watch golf someday.