Pataudi was the the charming player and captain, with a famous film actress wife to boot, when I started following the game in what feels like several lifetimes ago.
Those were the years in Neyveli before television. Test matches were of the old style--five days with a rest-day in between, after the second or the third day of the match. Listening to the radio commentaries, with expert comments by what always sounded as a senile Lala Amarnath, then reading about the day's proceedings in The Hiindu the next morning, and finally talking about it with classmates at school provided way more excitement than I could have ever wanted.
All these despite the fact that I was no good at sports! I was one of those kids who was reluctantly picked last to be on a team in schoolyard or neighborhood games. But, that didn't matter one bit--cricket was exciting.
The much talked about West Indian team came to India to play. I was ten-plus years old and this was my first serious test match series as a cricket-crazy kid. I had read about them: Llyod, Richards, Holding, Roberts, Greenidge, Julien ... as a kid rooting for India, I was convinced that "we" would lose, and lose horribly.
Those were also the years that mom sent us lunch through the maid, "Thayee." Along with the lunch that was packed in "tiffin carriers" mother always included a note on the latest score in the test after play began at about ten in the morning. Perhaps, like most mothers, my mom too followed the game only because of the kids.
As tasty as the food was, it was the cricket score that I waited for whenever the tests were played. If the score indicated that India was not doing well, or if the West Indies were doing great, then it was quite a sad afternoon. I would race back home after school ended in order to catch the final few minutes of the radio commentary.
Thus began my cricket-mania.
(From left) Bishen Singh Bedi, Pataudi, B. Chandrasekar, Anshuman Gaekwad and G. Viswanath run towards the pavilion with joy after India defeated the West Indies in the 1974-75 series
But, soon, the game started changing. It became increasingly competitive. Players engaged in acts that were no longer cricket. As exciting it was when television made cricket matches wonderfully visual spectacles, perhaps it also quickly transformed the game for the worse.
Meanwhile, I, too, was changing, and found intellectual ideas to be way more fascinating than being a passive spectator for the five days of every test match.
Slowly I drifted away from cricket.
Slightly over a decade after that memorable first cricket series, I headed to the US, where I quickly fell in love with the local baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. I had barely figured out the basics of this game, which was so similar to cricket, and yet so different from it, when Kirk Gibson hit that memorable home run, Orel Hershiser was simply unhittable, and the Dodgers won it all.
Hello baseball, and goodbye cricket.
Two more decades have passed by, and now I couldn't care for baseball either. Every morning, while reading the newspaper over breakfast, I do look up the box scores and the standings out of sheer habit, and it makes my day if the damn Yankees are not on top :)
Cricket? Up until a month ago, I didn't even know that the rest-day concept had been abandoned a long time back!
But, Pataudi I remember. And I thank.
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