interview of an famous sport personality
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Sports icons are rarely good interviews. They’re usually too conscious about their public image to be truly candid, and tend to speak in bland bromides. So when TIME correspondent Nilanjana Bhowmick and I met with India’s cricket star Sachin Tendulkar in Mumbai last month for a magazine profile that will appear in this week’s issue of TIME (available to subscribers here), we were not expecting much. Although he is known as the ‘Master Blaster’ for his swash-buckling batting, Tendulkar is famously reticent off the field. When he has given interviews, he has tended to steer clear of anything remotely controversial. He’s also been careful not to reveal very much about himself, about what goes on in the mind of a man who’s revered by his cricket-crazy countrymen as a kind of divinity.
To our surprise, Tendulkar was in a chatty mood. Although he artfully dodged questions about politics (the interview took place a couple of weeks before he was appointed to the Indian parliament), the world’s greatest batsman opened up about how he copes with the burden of a billion dreams, his mental process on and off the pitch, and even about the anxieties of fatherhood.
On how much attention he pays to the outsize impact he has on his countrymen:
For me there was [always] a simple formula: be focused on cricket and the rest of the things will happen. Let people talk about it; me, I move forward. Right from my school days, I have done that. I know that certain things I do or say have an impact on people; people appreciate certain things that I do. But any active sportsman has to be very focused; you’ve got to be in the right frame of mind. If your energy is diverted in various directions, you do not achieve the results. I need to know when to switch on and switch off: and the rest of the things happen around that. Cricket is in the foreground, the rest is in the background.
On how much attention he pays to media hype around him:
If I get to hear casually about something someone’s said about me, or see something in the papers, that’s fine. I don’t go looking for things. In the last few years, the hype has grown because there is such fierce competition in the media. Earlier, you played 10 shots, and maybe a couple of comments were made; today you play one shot and there are 500 comments. The ball is the player’s court, whether you want to follow every little thing or you want to keep your mind blank and trust your judgment, trust your instincts and take decisions.
I get 0.5 seconds to react to a ball, sometimes even less than that. I can’t be thinking of what XYZ has said about me. I need to surrender myself to my natural instincts. My subconscious mind knows exactly what to do. It is trained to react. At home, my family doesn’t discuss media coverage. It helps because I am able to take my own decisions not influenced by somebody saying something.
Sports icons are rarely good interviews. They’re usually too conscious about their public image to be truly candid, and tend to speak in bland bromides. So when TIME correspondent Nilanjana Bhowmick and I met with India’s cricket star Sachin Tendulkar in Mumbai last month for a magazine profile that will appear in this week’s issue of TIME (available to subscribers here), we were not expecting much. Although he is known as the ‘Master Blaster’ for his swash-buckling batting, Tendulkar is famously reticent off the field. When he has given interviews, he has tended to steer clear of anything remotely controversial. He’s also been careful not to reveal very much about himself, about what goes on in the mind of a man who’s revered by his cricket-crazy countrymen as a kind of divinity.