The news of the death of an artist called Mohammad Shahid was tragic. He was not a painter or a sculptor. He didn’t write poetry. He didn’t sing or act in a play. But he played a game called hockey and wielded the hockey stick with the same mastery and artistry as a Hussain, a Subbalakshmi or a P G Wodehouse.
For me, Shahid is the metaphor for the rapid death of artistry in sport. Take hockey itself. I never saw the legendary Dhyan Chand of course but did get to peek at his gifted son Ashok Kumar, Ajit Pal Singh, Zafar Iqbal, Ric Charlesworth and Hasan Sardar – Shahid was very much a part of this pantheon! Hockey then was sublime and a visual treat. The Indians and Pakistanis managed to get the ball to stick to their hockey sticks like limpets as they weaved through the opposition, looking to the right and moving to the left, but having a wonderful visualisation of where their own and opposition players and the goal posts were (manned by a goalie who looked human!). And on the unpredictable grass pitch, you had to be magicians to make that happen. Fast forward to now – it resembles ice hockey more than anything else, including goalies dressed as astronauts or aliens and ball whizzing past at a speed of knots, requiring strength and speed but absolutely no skill. If there is ever a game that has not only lost grace but fallen from it, it has to be hockey!
Tennis is, sadly, going the same way. Of course, the move from wooden to steel rackets was the beginning of the end, followed swiftly by the double-fisted backhand. The delicacy and grace of Rod Laver, Evonne Goolagong, Martina Navratilova and Arthur Ashe gave way to robustness of Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovich, Pete Sampras, Steffi Graf and Serena Williams. Of course, it went in stages as you did have the Andre Agassi, Chris Evert and maybe even Boris Becker and Bjorn Borg who combined a workmanlike monotony with the delicate touch but that era lasted a bare two decades before strength trumped artistry. You did have the mavericks who reminded you of the path that tennis could have taken but sadly did not – Ille Nastase, John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, Miloslav Mecir did well but their dominance was short-lived. You have to think of Roger Federer and Martina Hingis before you come to graceful champions who make you love the game again. But only Federer has that backhand to die for!
Coming to the two games that perhaps have the largest viewership globally – football and cricket (the latter thanks to its popularity in India) – the story is no different! For me, Latin American teams produce the greatest amount of magic and they dominated much of the initial decades of global football with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay (in the initial years) being dominant. You had players you remembered not for how many goals they scored but how they played – Pele (of course), Socrates, Zico, Maradona, Messi and Kempes – all conjure greatness wrapped in grace. The European teams that won – Germany and Italy – have to be the most boring purveyors of this great game. For me Germany is the football equivalent of a Rafa Nadal or an Andy Murray – efficient, robust, focused, successful…admirable but frightfully boring!
Cricket has rapidly gone the same way, especially since India’s traditional game of gulli danda was resurrected using a cricket bat as the danda, the cricket ball as the gulli and the field being bound by a rope with advertising on it. This game, also called T-20, is again the triumph of strength over artistry. Gone are Andy Roberts, Michael Holding (appropriately called Whispering Death) and the Dennis Lillees, bowling to a field of 4 slips, 2 gullies, a cover, a mid-wicket and a long leg, moving the ball enough to get the batsman to nick the ball to that ring or the braver ones to mishook the ball to the waiting long leg (new ball bowling is frightening to a batsman but I can assure you as a former purveyor of that profession that there is a lot of art and craft to it)! Gone also are the Bedis and the Warnes, tossing the ball up with incredible control, mesmerising the batsman to play the ball uppishly to a ring of fielders fielding within “hand-shaking distance of the batsman”, as the commentators used to say. Now, it is about the sweeper at the cover or mid-wicket boundary, the reverse sweep or the uppercut, or the huge sixes aided and abetted by bats designed to provide that little bit extra to clear a much shorter boundary rope. Even test cricket does require those kind of fields because the batsmen, bred on T-20, don’t have neither the ability nor the concentration to require so many fielders near the bat and so you might as well have a sweeper. And simply sweep artistry from perhaps the one team game that mirrors the glorious uncertainties of life and provides the opportunity for both an individual and a team to triumph!
Badminton, perhaps, is one of the few sports that I watch which still has art left in it. Smashes have become harder but the incredible reflexes of the modern player means that few smashes are left unanswered. The net dribble and a drop shot, both full of artistry, remain an integral part of the player’s armoury, which perhaps explains why Indians remain relevant in the sport.
But in many ways, there is an inevitability to this dominance of power over art, isn’t it? After all, in the jungle, the strongest survive! The Mohammad Shahids are facing rapid extinction!!
July 2016