Commercialized Sports

The mysterious death of Pakistan’s cricket coach Bob Woolmer , the ire of cricket fans in India and the commercialization of World Cup cricket call for a lot of introspection. Woolmer’s death shows the tremendous pressure generated by a wildly competitive sports ethos. And it gets worse in a poor country, ruled by a military dictatorship, where people have little to look forward to except a cricket triumph. And when the team of such a nation makes a quick exit losing both its matches it is hard to face reality. The death would somewhat dull the pain and anger of the fans in Pakistan..

But in India fans have reacted angrily and the homes of the popular long-haired Dhoni and captain Rahul Dravid have to be provided with security. Sachin Tendulkar , the man with money power, has got away without much heat despite his repeated failures while Virender Sehwag has got a lot of flak for his poor form.

Nothing shows the commercialization of players and the game more than the picture last Sunday of Sourav Ganguly pasting a sponsor’s sticker on his bat in the team hotel. Even as a spectator one feels diminished by the way some cricketers demean themselves in advertisements. Particularly when the advertisement involves a player’s diving full length to grab a soft drink as if his life depended on it.

It is to the credit of Pullela Gopichand, the Hyderabad-based former badminton champion, that he resolutely turned down contracts to promote fizz. On the positive side, India and Pakistan should learn from their sad showing in World Cup cricket during the last week. And so should Bangla Desh in its hour of joy over beating India. These neighbouring countries should do some introspection of their obsession with cricket. The game is lovely but too time consuming and expensive and none of the top nations including the US, France, Russia, Germany, Italy and even China play it. In fact, the US has given up the game in which it did well decades ago. The great Bradman played in the US but not in India.

The days of feeling empowered over defeating former colonial masters are gone. That is a small satisfaction and it cannot compensate for our lowly performance in many fields. Cricket like the commercial Hindi cinema is an opium for the masses. We have put all our eggs in one basket, the basket of cricket, neglecting other games and athletics. And with all the investment in cricket, all the sponsorship, all the pampering of cricketers and their stardom we are doing so badly even in this game, not to speak of other sporting events.

Even small and poor African countries do much better than us in sports. Cuba has consistently figured at the top in the medals tally at Olympic Games though it is a small country ,it is not rich but it has a lot of determination, pride, and it has consistently resisted imperialism. Its television has no place for commercialization and has a number of public service- oriented programmes pertaining to health, education and culture.It also has an excellent public health system and literacy. We desperately need to review our sports policy afresh.

The union sports minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, one of our more intelligent political figures, will be able to do something if he is given the scope. A white paper on the sports scene in the country would be in order. We desperately need a proper study of sports revealing all the deep inequalities in the treatment of cricket on the one hand and other sports. We also need to democratize the sports field, giving highest priority to physical fitness and participation in games than to competitive games. It is a pity we have little by way of a sociology of sports which is partly because of widespread lack of social concern. Ramchandra Guha, noted sociologist, is an exception but he is obsessed with cricket.

Commercialized sports induces passivity as the eminent social commentator Noam Chomsky points out. Organised sports and sportspersons have now been reduced to commodities by big money. It is all a question of catching eye balls on television networks so that a particular product’s sales are boosted. So there is widespread fear now that with India’s poor beginning in the World Cup, advertisers may suffer as fewer people will then watch the game on television or visit pubs and hotels and buy television sets.