Kenny Natt to Coach Indian Basketball

India welcomes three world-class coaches for its national teams

This article was first published on SLAMOnline.com on May 18th, 2011

If there’s one thing that you can say with complete surety about Indian culture is that we treat our guests with honor. As a child, when my family had visitors staying over and I refused to give up my bedroom for the guests, my mother would take me to a corner and repeat the old Indian proverb: “Mehmaan Bhagwan Saman Hai” – The Guest is like God.

Yes, guests in India are showered with presents, treated like royalty, and are force-fed meals until their stomachs churn (we consider this a good thing). Anyone who has ever been welcomed into an Indian household knows that, when it comes to food, ‘I’m full’ means ‘I could eat two more rotis, please,’ and a firm ‘No’ means, ‘Yes, I wouldn’t mind that last piece of Butter Chicken.’ From simple households to State Diplomats, the over-welcoming philosophy of the Indian people (mostly) remains.

And this is one of the major reasons why, despite all the teething troubles that have hampered the game of basketball in the past (rampant corruption at the state level, backward infrastructure, little cohesive organization, etc.) the game continues has continued to develop at a good pace. India has welcomed the world of basketball with open arms – from IMG Worldwide to the NBA – and in return, the world of basketball has invested wisely to the growth of the game in India. The welcoming attitude has worked well in our favor, as everything from infrastructure to personnel is now showing promise of progress.

April in particular was especially big for the game in India. Geethu Anna Jose, the former captain of the Indian Women’s team, became the first Indian to get a tryout with the WNBA – she wasn’t accepted, but she left a good impression with the Chicago Sky, the L.A. Sparks, and the San Antonio Silver Stars. Meanwhile, Bucks’ point guard Brandon Jennings made a trip over to our shores, becoming the 16th NBA/WNBA player/legend to visit India over the past three years.

But the biggest piece of news was leaked out this week, as the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) announced that it hired three world-class coaches to lead the Indian Basketball Teams and further the BFI’s grassroots growth of the game in India.

Kenny Natt, who was interim head coach of the Sacramento Kings after the firing of Reggie Theus during the ‘08-09 season, has been brought on board to coach the Indian Senior National Men’s Basketball team. Natt was an assistant coach under Jerry Sloan with the Utah Jazz from 1995-2004, and was part of the team that twice reached the NBA Finals in 1997 and 1998. He then became an assistant coach with the Cleveland Cavaliers from 2004-2007, including the season when the LeBron James-led Cavs reached the NBA Finals.

Natt’s first job will be to work with Indian Men’s team at a camp in Delhi in preparation for the FIBA Asia Basketball Championship set to be held in Wuhan (China) in September. Natt will be taking over the reins of the Men’s team after Coach Bill Harris, formerly head coach of NCAA DIII side Wheaton College, who led the Indian team to the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou (China).

The Indian Senior Women’s National team will be headed by Pete Gaudet, a famous name amongst college instructors. Gaudet has been involved with college hoops for over 40 years, coaching both men’s and women’s basketball in the process, including holding positions at West Point, Duke, Vanderbilt and Ohio State. While at Duke (as mostly an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski), Gaudet won two NCAA Championships and made seven Final Fours, coaching eight All-Americans, three national players of the year, and 12 NBA draft picks.

Like Natt, Gaudet will also be preparing the Women’s side for the FIBA Asia Basketball Championship – the Women’s edition of this competition will be held in Omaru and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of August. Before Gaudet, the Indian Women’s side was coached by WNBA player Tamika Raymond at the 2010 Asian Games.

Lastly, the BFI brought in Zak Penwell as a Strength and Conditioning coach for the national sides in India, the first time that such an appointment has been made for the national level players in the country. In the past, the Indian national teams had been thoroughly exposed by several Asian opponents who were stronger, faster and more durable – even if the skill and talent level was closed, India lagged behind when it came to their physical fitness and performed poorly.

The last bit of news has been especially encouraging for top-level Indian players like Jose, who admitted that she struggled amongst the stronger American players during her WNBA tryouts. And now, with experienced NBA and college coaches being the guiding forces behind some of India’s brightest stars, expectations are high for the country to follow in China’s footsteps and play up to its potential – more than a sixth of the world’s population is over in India, and it is about time that the country ends its historic underperformance in most other sports excluding cricket.

Meanwhile, the other pieces to complete basketball’s jigsaw puzzle are shaping up nicely: Jose may not have qualified for the WNBA, but a tryout in itself was a major step forward. Youngsters have been encouraged by her success and are now confident that they can follow her footsteps to the world’s best leagues.

The biggest contribution comes by the hand of IMG-Worldwide, who in their partnership with India’s Reliance Industries is hell bent to change the face of the game – IMG-Reliance have been behind every major development for the BFI since 2010.

The NBA continues to put a lot of its time and effort in developing grassroots popularity of the game here: Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol, Brandon Jennings and George Gervin, to name a few, have carried the message of hoops to this cricket-crazy country over the last year. The NBA has held inner-city recreational leagues in five major cities around the country, and this year, introduced a Junior Skills Challenge to get the kids started early.

And then of course, there are the players themselves. More than ever, young players are taking basketball seriously as a career option and present stars are hopeful that they will one day participate in India’s own National Basketball League. The biggest (in size and potential) hope comes in the size-22 sneakers of Satnam Singh Bhamara, the 15-year-old, 7-2 inch giant with a rare combination of size and skill who is currently a student-athlete at the world-renowned IMG Academy in Bradenton, FL and is, as we called him on SLAMonline, the ‘Big Indian Basketball Hope.’

So yes, we’re ready to welcome the world of Basketball in India, bring it into our households, treat it with the respect that only a guest deserves, and make sure that we feed it until it’s full and then feed it a little more.

Is the world ready to welcome us?

International Iceman: George Gervin assists with the NBA Cares program in India

I wrote this article for SLAMOnline.com, where it was first published on March 7, 2011. Read it on SLAM.

Surrounded by a group of Indian schoolkids in New Delhi, India, 58-year-old NBA Hall of Famer George ‘The Iceman’ Gervin took a little break from the shooting drills. Beside him was Marty Conlon, former NBA journeyman who had also been involved with NBA programs in India for the last year.

Conlon grabs a microphone and points at Gervin. “His right-hand is a little tired now – it’s scored over 26,000 points.”

The audience, understandably, wasn’t exactly well-versed on Ice. Most of the 15-year-olds are Kobe fans who haven’t been fans long enough to remember that Kobe used to wear #8. And The Iceman, the man who pretty much patented the finger roll, is way old school, emerging as one of the bridges of the era between the ABA and the new NBA. I’m not even close to old enough to having been able watch Gervin or even the legacy that he left behind, but I do have a different type of connection. The Iceman is my favorite player’s favorite player. I grew up idolizing Gary Payton, who himself once said that George Gervin was his favorite player to watch as a kid.

So when the NBA joined hands with the US Department of State to plan a “Sports Diplomacy” trip, The Iceman and two-time WNBA Champion Katie Smith of the Minnesota Lynx were brought to India at the end of February, and it was an opportunity for me to meet a legend.

He has achieved several highlights over his career, including several ABA and NBA All Star appearances, being nominated into NBA’s Top 50 as well as the Basketball Hall of Fame, and most importantly, scoring, scoring, and scoring! He scored 26,595 points in his NBA/ABA career, and averaged 26.2 ppg in the NBA, good for eighth highest of all time. Most impressive, though, might’ve been his field goal average, as The Iceman shot 51.1 percent from the field over the course of his NBA career.

And yet, when I hear ‘George Gervin’, I think of one (and only one) story before I think of any of his other achievements. On April 9, 1978, the last day of the 1977-78 season, Gervin, while with the Spurs, edged David ‘Skywalker’ Thomson, who was playing for the Nuggets, by 0.07 points per game to win the NBA’s scoring title in its tightest race ever.

You have to love an era when the game’s best players are nicknamed ‘Iceman’ and ‘Skywalker’. Most true red-blooded NBA fans know the story from that day: Gervin started the day leading Thompson’s average by 0.2, but Thompson went on to score a spectacular 73 points (the second highest individual score at that point to Wilt’s 100) to take the lead and finish with a season average of 27.15.

Gervin needed 58 to win the crown. He went out and scored 63, pushing up his average to 27.22. And oh yes, he did it in 33 minutes.

So of course, when I got a moment to interview The Iceman himself, the conversation inevitably came back to April 9, 1978. “Take me through that day,” I requested, “Your first scoring title. You know what I’m talking about.”

Luckily for me, The Iceman was as cool off-court as he had once been on it. He had been showing incredibly energy and positivity when interacting with and training the kids, and he showed the same enthusiasm at my question.

So, over to the Iceman:

You see, I had been the leading scorer all season. He [David Thompson] was right behind me, but I was leading.

That day, Thompson had an early afternoon game (against the Pistons). And he went out and scored 73 points on them. I was playing in New Orleans later that night. I knew I needed 59 to win the title. Oh well… The coach came to me and said ‘Ice, we’re here to help you get that title back’.

I told the coach ‘It ain’t a big deal’… But it was!

The game started – I went out there and I missed my first six shots. I had to call a timeout because I was really feeling the pressure. I thought to myself, ‘Forget it, I can’t get it’. But my coach and my teammates had my back.

So I went back in and I started heating up. By the end of the first quarter I had 20 points. In the second quarter I scored 33. That is an NBA record by the way – that is a record that still stands today.

I had 53 points already, before the half, and I only needed six more. Once I got to 59, the coach said ‘Well you’ve got it now, we’re gonna take you out’. But I asked him to keep me in the game. ‘Coach, let me get a couple more just to be sure,’ I asked, ‘What if they didn’t get the calculations right?’

So I played a few more minutes and finished with 63 points. In 33 minutes. See, people talk about the points, but it is the efficiency that you must look at. It is the efficiency – 33 minutes to get 63 points – that is important.

That was The Iceman’s first scoring title: he won two more over the next two years and finished with four in five years between 1979-1982. But what he insisted during our interview was that the number of points weren’t as important as the high-percentage (51.1 percent) with which he scored them.

After his NBA career ended, Gervin played a few years in Europe, featuring in stints with Banco Roma (Rome) and TDK Manresa (Spain). Over 20 years later, the list of NBA players who have started their pro careers overseas (Brandon Jennings), taken a mid-career stint overseas (Josh Childress), or are finishing their careers overseas (Allen Iverson) continues to grow.

“Bob McAdoo and I were probably the first big name players to go overseas and play,” he said, “It was just the beginning then. Now, you see how much things have changed and how amazingly global the NBA has become.”

And the global influence of the game has effected every aspect of it: from foreigners playing in the NBA, to NBA players going to foreign countries to play, to NBA games being held in other countries like the Raptors/Nets games in London last week. More than ever now, NBA-affiliated programs and leagues are spreading over the globe, from Europe, South America, Africa, South-East Asia, and of course, China and India.

“With the NBA Cares program, you now have NBA-related events all over the world to involve kids in basketball,” Gervin added, “We want to use basketball as a tool to make sure that the kids get a good education. I enjoy working with kids a lot and have been doing it at my academy back in San Antonio, but this is the first time I’m doing something like this overseas – hopefully I can come back to India in the future.”

While in India, Gervin and Katie conducted basketball clinics with the Indian youth, met with university students, and participated in local community events in underserved areas. In Delhi and Mumbai, the two attended the finals of the Mahindra NBA Challenge, a recreational, inner-city league organized in several Indian cities in the past two years. Additionally, In Mumbai, they participated in a clinic at the YMCA International Court and held a special Women’s Empowerment Clinic at Sophia College for students from Sophia College and SNDT Women’s University. They also held a basketball clinic with students of Magic Bus, a non-profit organization working with children from marginalized backgrounds.

In Delhi, Gervin and Smith held more clinics at universities, school, and even a special basketball beginner’s clinic for underprivileged children in the outskirts of the city.

It was a great gesture by the two, particularly Gervin, an older legend of the game, to come halfway across the world to share his hoops enthusiasm, even though it was to an audience that were too far-removed from his achievements and his highlight reels. Last year, current All-Stars Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol were in India, and they were obviously treated with louder fanfare. But it would be reckless to forget about legends like Gervin: I found an interview with Austin Kent of ‘The Good Point’ a few years ago, where The Iceman had said “When I played, the media wasn’t as involved, the technology wasn’t there. If the world had a chance to see a lot of the guys – like myself – in this era, we would probably be looked at differently.”

Well, in India, we got to see a very different Iceman; we got to see someone who has a new legend off the court that matches the Hall-of-Fame career he had on it.

Giant Expectations: Satnam Singh Bhamara

It almost seems like Satnam Singh Bhamara is asking to be doubted.

When you’re a teenager from India, 15 years and one month old, already grown to the size of a 7-1 monster, the first reaction is wonder and awe, the second is doubt. People wonder what could go wrong; they wonder what the catch is. When you’re blessed with a unique inside-outside skill set, nimble feet, soft hands and a developing shooting touch, people instead wonder what your weaknesses are. When you begin training at the IMG Basketball academy, which has featured the likes of Kobe, Vince Carter, Chauncey Billups, Joakim Noah and Kevin Martin, the doubters say that it sounds too good to be true.

When you’re the son of a poor farmer in India, a boy from a village separated a long dirt road away from the rest of civilization, who picked up his first basketball less than five years ago, you’re asking for the questionable looks. When you’re the biggest basketball hope (literally and figuratively) for India — a country desperate to make a mark in the basketball world — you’re likely to receive a cynical shrug of the shoulders. “India isn’t there yet,” they say. “The kid isn’t there.”

Not yet. But he might be. If you haven’t yet heard about him, it’s time to converge your respective focuses (or foci) on Satnam Singh Bhamara, the 15-year-old, 7-1 Indian giant, currently on a scholarship at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, FL and attending the Pendleton High School. He is currently in the first year of a potentially four-year scholarship until he graduates from high school.

India has been slowly growing as a basketball market, and Bhamara’s potential might be a zenith of a variety of different efforts taking place to grow the game back home.

Rewind to a year ago: The 14-year-old Bhamara was already a formidable 6-11. Back then, during India’s National Basketball Championship, a yearly tournament pitting the best state teams of India against each other, Bhamara was a wide-eyed spectator, too young to participate, watching as a man-child in a man’s world.

A year later, I meet him at the same championship in New Delhi. This time, he’s back as a famous young man in the country’s basketball circles, garnering attention from other players, media and fans. He’s a spectator again, but only because he has a limited time back in India before he flies back to school in the States. A prominent Indian referee sees him and remembers: “Satnam used to help us set up the scorers’ tables last year. We had nicknamed him Chhotu (Little One). Look at him now!”

“You can still call me Chhotu!” Bhamara jokingly interjects.

But there is nothing ‘little’ about Bhamara, not in height, nor in hype. The first time I met him was back in July 2010, when Bhamara was among 50 other under-14s who were chosen by the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) to appear for IMG scholarship tryouts. IMG, a US-based international sports and media management company, have been investing heavily into sports in India. A year ago, they formed an alliance with Reliance Industries, India’s largest and richest private sector company, and the powerhouse duo of IMG-Reliance signed various sponsorship deals with Indian sports federation. Most notably, IMG-Reliance signed a 30-year agreement with the BFI to assist, finance and promote the growth of basketball in India.

One of their first steps was to choose eight Indian youngsters among the 50 best for scholarship at the IMG Academy. From the moment he walked into the tryouts in New Delhi, Bhamara was a shoo-in.

His fascinating story begins in a little village in India’s north-western state of Punjab: Ballo Ke Village, District Barnala, population 463. The son of a 7-foot farmer, Bhamara spent his early childhood helping out his father on the farm and growing up to 5-9 when he was just 10 years old. It was then that one of his father’s friends recommended that he take the tall youngster to Ludhiana, a nearby town and a major basketball hub of the country. Somewhere lost in translation, Bhamara thought that he was going to play volleyball. He didn’t know a thing about the game when he first stepped on court.

Four years and nearly 15 inches later, he had grown into one of the finest young players in the country. After blazing his way through the Punjab inter-school and junior leagues, Bhamara began to collect his international credentials. He represented India in the FIBA Asia U16 Championships at Malaysia in November 2009. Back home, he took Punjab to the gold medal of the National Youth Championships at Trichy (Tamil Nadu, in South India) in June. He was recommended by the BFI to be part of a three-player contingent of Indian youngsters sent to Singapore for NBA’s Basketball Without Borders (Asia) camp.

It was no surprise then that he was picked by IMG’s Basketball Director Andy Borman and coach Dan Barto for the scholarship. Bhamara was at the perfect age and with the perfect potential skill set, ready to be molded into a basketball monster. To play at the highest level, Bhamara cannot count successes in small Indian championships or Asian tournaments; he had to train with and compete against the best.

But more than a basketball adventure for the youngster, it has been a strange change of lifestyle, too. Bhamara and the rest of the Indian youngsters made their first trip to North America, going to school in a whole new academic system, learning hoops in a way never been taught to them before, focusing more than ever on weight training and fitness, taking extra classes to learn English (seven of the eight, including Bhamara, were virtually alien to the language), getting used to live in a residential school far away from home, and getting used to not eating their Moms’ home-cooked Indian meals.

Four months later, Bhamara makes his first visit back home — he was always built with the body shape of an ideal center, blessed with both height and muscle — but he came back looking even fitter and leaner than ever, thanks to the intense training and exercise regimen that he had gone through with his coaches at IMG. He was given a superstar’s welcome in his little village, when hundreds showed up to catch a glimpse of him coming back home.

And then he was back at the National Championship as a minor celebrity, back at the same event he had been errand-boy a year ago.

“I have changed and improved a lot over the past four months,” says Satnam, “but I want to improve even more. I want be an example for other Indian players so they can come forward and see what is necessary to be a complete player. They need to know the importance of building strength to help improve their game.”

Indian athletes, particularly the basketball players, have faced one major criticism in the past: They may have the shooting and running skills, but their athletic ability and strength leaves much more to be desired. More than basketball, the coaches at IMG have focused their early interest in making sure that Bhamara gets into shape to hang with the toughest. Bhamara has followed suit, becoming a gym rat, working on everything from exercises to help improve his forward and lateral speed, jumping ability, shoulder exercises, and lifting weights to get into tougher shape.

But his basketball training hasn’t been left behind. Bhamara notes how his current regime involves focusing on movement — a lot of movement — so that his size can be complemented with speed to make a momentum nightmare for opponents. Bhamara, who is part of IMG’s youth team, doesn’t hesitate to talk about how his improving inside game and movement has helped his team get some big results.

“My game is basketball,” he says. “The media in America has asked me why I don’t play other games, but I’m only interested in basketball. This is the game that has given me everything I have, taken me from a village to a good education in America. I love playing this game and owe everything to it. That’s why I keep working hard to improve.”

Satnam says that there are two players he looks ‘up’ to, even though both of them are shorter than him. One of them is Punjab State and Indian Senior team star Jagdeep Singh. The other, curiously, is Kobe Bryant.

You can credit (or blame) the over-Lakerisation that NBA audiences in India have been subjected to in the past. Over the last decade, most games NBA games broadcasted in India have involved either the Lakers, Celtics, Spurs and whichever franchise LeBron James shares his talents with. I ask him, Why, despite the difference in size and gameplay, does he idolize the Black Mamba? He answers, “Kobe plays like he has no problems on court; he works hard, but he dominates smoothly, with ease. That is the kind of mentality I want to have.”

And this is exactly the kind of mentality that India, and all those holding a stake for the development of basketball in India, are hoping that Bhamara develops. In an interview with an Indian newspaper a few weeks ago, Harish Sharma, the Secretary-General of the BFI, said, “He is a great prospect. I am sure he will do what Yao Ming did for China. Indian basketball will change in case one of our boys makes it to the NBA.”

And although one talented, tall, teenager alone cannot change the basketball culture in India, the NBA will be hoping that with an idol to look up to, young Indians, just like young Chinese a decade ago, will start believing in basketball. The game is never going to challenge India’s premier game, cricket, but for basketball to score even a minor percentage of the market in a 1.2 billion population will be a heavy number.

Troy Justice, who has been the director of basketball operations of the NBA in India, has been working with Indian talent for several years now, and has kept a keen eye on Bhamara’s ascension. “He is blessed with three things that, combined, have made him into a very special prospect globally — a young age, his height, and his skill set,” said Justice. “He has natural basketball instincts, a strong work ethic, and has become a focused student of the game. I have enjoyed working with him and look forward to seeing his growth as a person and player over the next few years.

“I think he has tremendous potential and a bright future in basketball.”

But Bhamara is adamant that his focus is on the present before anything else. “I’m not thinking too far ahead right now,” he says, “I’m in IMG’s youth team, so I want to play well enough to play for the juniors. After that, I will think about qualifying for the Senior team, and after that, I can think further.”

“If I get a chance to, of course I want to play in the NBA.” Bhamara adds, “If I can make it there, I will be able to do more for other Indians dreaming of making it to the NBA. But I will have no problem if it doesn’t work out. I will come back to India to play for Punjab and contribute to the Indian national basketball system.”

“Right now, I’m only concerned with improving my own game. After five years, we’ll see what happens. Right now, my priority is working on my strength — I know I’ll be playing tougher competition and have two or three players guarding me, and I have to get stronger to face that.”

Bhamara is still too young, and perhaps, still too unaware, to fully understand the implications of his rise as a basketball star. Just like China, who have gone hysterical about hoops over the past decade, India will eventually become a serious basketball market. It is a question of who and when — Yao may have been the biggest star, but he wasn’t the first Chinese to make it to the League (that honor goes to Wang Zhizhi). Bhamara’s potential improvement will determine if he can even make it to that level, much less survive once he gets there.

Right now, he’s just a 15-year-old, except that he’s blessed with a little more size, a little more talent, and a little better training support than the rest of us. He carries a load of expectations a little heavier than the rest of us, too.

So go ahead and doubt him all you want: not good enough, too much hype, too weak, too slow, too soft, too foreign. I doubt if Satnam Singh Bhamara will hear any of it: Right now, he’s just a kid addicted to hoops. And all he wants to do is get better.

Right now, he’s just a 15-year-old, except that he’s blessed with a little more size, a little more talent, and a little better training support than the rest of us. He carries a load of expectations a little heavier than the rest of us, too.

So go ahead and doubt him all you want.

This article was first published on SLAMOnline.com on January 13th, 2011.

The NBA-wallahs are here: Will India echo with the sound of bounce?

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This article was first published on SLAMOnline on June 4, 2010.

Does India need basketball?

As an Indian would say, the NBA-wallahs are coming. The Basketball-wallahs are here. (wallah: Hindi & Urdu – a person who is associated with a particular work or who performs a specific duty or service -- usually used in combination [with another word]: Merriam-Webster) For the past few years, the NBA has accelerated its interest in promoting basketball in India – it seems a logical step at a huge Asian market after the NBA’s successes in China. I got a chance to interview NBA’s Director of Basketball Operations in India, Troy Justice, and as I sat down to write and share the NBA’s vision through him, this most basic of questions struck me.

Does India really need basketball?

India has long been a ‘one-sport’ nation, a nation where the majority of our money, talent, TV spots, sponsorships, results, superstars, loyal fans, crazed fans, media, scandals, congratulations, criticisms, successes, failures, hard work, corruption, headlines, breaking news, scoreboards, painted faces, flags, idols, Facebook status updates, Twitter Trending Topics, and heated conversations in chai-shops and in train compartments involve cricket and only cricket. Every other sport in the country has been overshadowed by cricket…

… And when it hasn’t, there still doesn’t seem to be space for basketball in our history. When an Indian sports magazine released a special list of 101 Milestones in Indian Sporting History, nowhere amongst the “good, bad, and ugly” of events in our history is there sign of basketball, amongst a list that included Cricket, Field Hockey, Football, Shooting, Chess, Billiards, Badminton, Tennis, Track & Field, Wrestling, Mountaineering, Swimming, Golf, Volleyball, Snooker, Cycling, Weightlifting, Boxing, Table-Tennis, and Formula One Racing.

Yes, Table friggin Tennis.

Not to say that basketball in India hasn’t had its own memorable milestones – they have just been insignificant when compared to other sports. Particularly cricket.

But the more I spoke to Troy Justice, the more I began to believe that this was about to change. In all my years as a basketball fan, player, and recently, as a writer, I have never felt more optimistic about the future of basketball in India. And this movement towards change is ready to take-off astronomically with the arrival of Justice and the NBA-wallahs. The time that basketball scores a major milestone in Indian sports history is not too far off…

Justice has been involved with bringing basketball to India in different capacities for nearly two decades. For 15 years, he worked for ‘Athletes in Action – Basketball’ in various capacities as a professional international player, head coach, and Director of Basketball. In the early 90s, he brought a team from the US to India to compete against the national team, clubs, and universities. He has been returning to India over the past 19 years with teams from the USA to play competitive games, run coaching clinics and basketball camps. When he began working with the NBA, it made perfect sense for the association to choose him to lead basketball operations in India.

“India has been giving signals of its development globally,” said Justice, “Not just in sport, but in terms of its expanding economy and infrastructure. The world understands the country’s growth, and it is a natural process for the NBA to come here as the league continues to develop a global platform.”

“India is a sport loving and passionate country – Basketball can and will be successful here.”

The biggest venture that the NBA is involved with in India is the Mahindra-NBA Challenge – a multi-city, community-based, recreational league. The league began in Mumbai on April 17th, and after seven weeks, will be concluding this weekend with its playoffs, an All-Star game, Shooting Competitions, and the Championship Games. It involves a youth and an adult division has and attracted more than 1000 basketball enthusiasts in Mumbai.

What is perhaps more important in the programme are the training through which Justice and others have been teaching basketball fundamentals to the participants. Justice will next be overseeing similar Mahindra-NBA challenge programmes in two more Indian cities in the coming months: Bangalore and Ludhiana.

Justice has been involved in holding coaching clinics throughout the country, through which he is looking to train and develop NBA coaches at the grassroots level. He was in the city of Nagpur most recently holding a clinic with around 50 coaches. Coaching development is an important issue that the NBA is hoping to engage with deeper – India has no shortage of basketball coaches, but a constant complaint has always been that the coaching styles, tactics, and philosophy hasn’t evolved positively over the years.

In terms of player development, the NBA is looking to be involved through clinics, camps, and via the country’s academic structure. “We will be working with all the age ranges and basketball ability,” said Justice, “From children in the grassroots to schools, colleges, and then working with the elite players in the national team.”

The above initiative is an important one – basketball’s stature may be dubious in India in terms of milestone events, but there is no shortage of opportunity. Most of the schools in the country have basketball courts and most communities have access to a court. If the will is there, a basketball court is never too far for the average Indian child.

“The current basketball community in India is very passionate about the sport and committed to seeing it grow,” Justice continues, “People are willing to engage and help us. The coaches, players, are all enthusiastic about learning and maximising their opportunities.”

But there are trials and tribulations to working with a country like India – a country which is so rich and yet so poor, so fat and yet so hungry, with the most modern of technological infrastructures but in many ways still living in the 18th century. India presents a bizarre gamut of variety every day, something that is as much a challenge as it is an opportunity.

Despite steady growth, Justice admits that the biggest challenge for the NBA in India right now is still the infrastructure. “There are hardly any good indoor basketball courts in the country, and because get so hot here, we can’t hold games or clinics in the afternoons in the outdoors,” he says. It is a simple yet important point – for the players to play and train more, they need to play in better, indoor, cooler facilities. The NBA has lent a hand in improving infrastructure in India over the past two years: four new courts have been refurbished through the NBA-Cares programme.

The other issue which Justice calls more “manageable” is of scale. A famous Indian saying to describe the country’s massive size as “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari”, alluding to the more than three thousand kilometres from the northernmost to the southernmost point of the nation. “The number of participants is large and we have a lot of ground to cover!”

Justice believes that to eventually cover this ground and to be able to truly make a difference, the NBA’s relationship with the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) will be extremely important. “We will need to work alongside them, and work alongside the coaches and managers in India. We are bringing our own information and expertise to the Indian coaches, and it will help if they continue to receive us with an open-mind.”

For the future, the NBA hope to continue the development of the Mahindra Challenge, which in 5-10 years, they see as an initiative that could grow drastically across the country. “We want to make this programme the best that it can be,” said Justice, “I want to see more and more coaching clinics and player training camps around India.”

Off the court, the NBA will be marketing itself, and thus, promoting the game of basketball in various ways. Keeping up with their reputation as being one of the forerunners in promotion through social media, the NBA introduced the NBA-India website several months ago along with the fast-growing NBA-India fan page on Facebook.

Justice knows that fan interest will follow if the NBA can send marquee players such as legends of the game and current all stars to India. Over the past few years, Baron Davis, Dominique Wilkins, Sam Perkins, Kyle Korver, Ronny Turiaf, Linton Johnson, Pat Garrity, AC Green, Dikembe Mutumbo, and Kevin Garnett have visited the country, and Justice hopes that the visits continue.

Another dream of any fan would be to actually see an NBA exhibition game in India. Asia is no stranger to NBA pre-season action. The NBA has played six games in Japan since the 1990s, and has held pre-season games in China since 2004, after Chinese star Yao Ming joined the Houston Rockets in 2002: the first game obviously featured the Yao-powered Rockets against the Kings. In 2009, when the Nuggets met the Pacers in Taipei, it became the eight Asian city to host either an NBA regular season or preseason game, along with Tokyo, Yokohama, and Saitama in Japan; Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in China; and Macau.

But what do these countries have that India doesn’t? You guessed it… Infrastructure! “We would love to hold an exhibition game here,” said Justice, “But these are big events, and they require proper venue and timing – infrastructure is a key component and is still a challenge in India.”

The NBA have a long-term plan in India, and as infrastructure grows, exposure, popularity, and participation increases, and the country has more coaches equipped to teach the game to players from elementary school to pros, Justice believes that basketball can truly become the #2 sport here. It will obviously be a fool’s ambition to even pretend that the game has any chance against the maniacal popularity of cricket, but if basketball is able to gain a small percentage niche following in the country, that small percentage of a country of 1.2 billion can make a huge difference.

“In the future, I see the Indian national team definitely improving in the FIBA rankings,” said Justice. Currently, the Indian Men’s team, dubbed ‘Young Cagers’, lie 52nd in the FIBA world rankings and the Women rank 43rd – nothing to shout out loud from Himalayan mountaintops, but Justice believes that the potential is there. “In the future, I can envision top level Indian players playing in foreign pro leagues.”

Ultimately, the question that all Indian fans want answered is how soon the country can have our own NBA-inspired all-India basketball league. When I interviewed BFI’s secretary general Harish Sharma, he told me that India could potentially have a full professional league in two-three years. Justice added that the NBA will be doing everything it can to support the BFI’s plans.

“I have been well received in India – I love the heart of the Indian people who have gracious, humble and hospitable,” said Justice, “Now that I’m living and working here, this country has been everything I expected and more. It is very rewarding to go to work daily and give to the basketball community in India.”

“I can’t wait to see the day when the sounds of bouncing basketballs echoes all over the country.”

As we ended our conversation, I remembered something – India, its people, its variety, its culture, and its passion are damn near impossible to replicate. I’m not going to pretend and ignore the corruption and the mismanagement and the passiveness that plagues the mentalities of many of my fellow Indians, but eventually, there is a faint light at the end of the tunnel. Just like Justice and NBA have discovered, the country can offer as much to the game as the game can offer the country. Basketball is the fastest-growing sport in the world, and India is perfect platform for the game’s next big spurt.

So does India need basketball? There may not be an easy response to that particular question, but I know one thing for sure - basketball needs India.

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An International Assist: American coaches hold coaching clinics and camps in India

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India's untapped potential for a basketball revolution has long been realized around the world - a country of nearly 1.2 billion people must surely have at least a respectable starting 5 to step out on any court and face any opponent, right? Surely?
But potential is one thing, its realisation another. India is still a country where most sports, excluding cricket, aren't taken too seriously. While other Asian countries like China, Iran, South Korea, and Kazakhstan have improved their level of basketball dramatically over the last decade, India still lay 52nd on the last Men/Women combined FIBA rankings.

But there is the potential, and although it may be difficult to make a change overnight, there are several who are chipping away every day, hoping one day to carve out a space for basketball in this cricket crazy country. After spending several years holding training camps and coaching in India, American basketball coach JD Walsh recently teamed up with Dr. Bob Baker (Head of Sports Management at George Mason University) and Craig Esherick (former head coach of Georgetown University) to hold combined coaching clinics and youth basketball camps in South India. The initiative was sponsored by the International Sports Initiative grant, awarded through the SportsUnited Division of the US state department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Walsh, Baker, and Esherick spent around 10 days in India, holding basketball clinics and camps in Chennai and more intriguingly, getting a chance to work with a few members of the Indian Men's National team in the city of Bangalore. Only seven of the 21 total members of the Indian squad, nicknamed 'The Young Cagers', showed up for the training camps, but they were accompanied by dozens of interested basketball coaches from around India who came to pick up coaching skills from the American coaches. I was lucky to speak to all three of them before they boarded their flight (and beat volcanic ash) to get back to the US last week.
"Some of the boys we worked with were pretty good," said Esherick, who helped in organisation practice drills for the players that attended, "But it will take a lot of hard work and organisation on the part of the basketball federation here to make a decent team."

Esherick should know - currently the assistant professor of sports management at George Mason, one of the highlight's of Esherick's coaching career was playing the role of assistant coach and scout of the US Men's Basketball Team that won bronze in the 1988 Olympics in South Korea.
The trio of American coaches also worked with Alexsander Bucan, the Serbian head coach of the Indian team. "We have tried to help Alexsander demonstrate basketball fundamentals to the players," Esherick added, "This is a young team with a good nucleas, and their hard work will pay dividends later on. They need to play together, train together, and stay together to form a good squad. They must travel together and get some more exposure. But all these things won't be possible without a stable structure and the right amount of financial assistance from the federation."
The current national team is indeed a young squad, with most of their players under the age of 24. At the recently concluded South Asian Games in Bangladesh, India was captained by 18 year old Vishesh Bhriguvanshi. Vishesh is one of the brighest young Indian talents, first making his name when he won the MVP award at the Basketball Without Borders (BWB) Asia camp two years ago. He also won praise for his hard work at the camp in Bangalore.
"He's a good shooter and has a strong inside game, too," says Esherick. Walsh adds, "Vishesh has good size and he works hard - but more importantly, he really wants to be a better player." Apart from Vishesh, Walsh had warm words for a few other Indian guards too, particularly praising their shooting ability.
I take special, biased pride in Vishesh's successes - he is one of the many hoop talents rooted from my hometown in Varanasi. A city known more for its spirituality than its sports, Varanasi has surprinsingly been able to produce talent after talent for both the Indian men and women's teams. I interviewed Vishesh for the first time when he was just 17, fresh after his BWB MVP award - in two years he seems to have build on that potenial.
Potential. And it seems like that word never seems to leave my mind when I think about Indian basketball. No, potential isn't good enough. Far from it.
Bob Baker, who also spoke about his experience and welcome so far in India, agrees that the country can do a lot more in the world of hoops. "It is important for India as a big player in the global community to make a strong commitment to the sport of basketball," feels Baker, "There needs to be a strategic approach to the whole organisation of basketball here. The federation and other organisers need to work on how to keep the players together, what other things to teach them, how to get them to play more games..."
"But I'm confident that these players will develop," he adds, "That is the best way for the sport to be visible to the audiences and popular in Indian culture."
Baker was also encouraged during this camp by the enthusiasm of the attending coaches from around India. "The coaches really cared about developing their knowledge of the game," he said, "They absorbed our teaching, asked great questions, and we spent a lot of time discussing basketball teaching and strategy with the coaches. It was neccessary to talk to both the coaches and the players about the importance of fundamentals."
Walsh added: "The coaches were really interested and asked a lot of questions. We worked with them on various offensive and defensive sets - motion offense, press, etc. It is disappointing that only seven players of the team showed up, because we would have obviously liked to see the entire team. I would love to come and work with the national team on a more regular level."

Apart from their camps in Chennai and Bangalore, Walsh, Esherick, and Baker also got a chance to see another side of basketball in India when they visited Subhash Mahajan and his Sumpoorna camp at the village of Tumkur. Mahajan has been working for several years to support India's grassroots basketball movement. After deciding to synchronise their efforts, Walsh and the others visited Mahajan during their trip where they interacted with young hoop lovers.
Many of the kids who play in the village camps are from underpriviliged backgrounds, sent from an NGO called Shishu Mandir in Bangalore. "The kids here are now gaining more awareness about basketball now that JD has been visiting and helping out," said Mahajan, "They were just awestruck just to see the tall Americans! Some of them asked the JD and the others if they could pass on LeBron James' e-mail ID!"
Mahajan admits that cultural challenges in India make it difficult for people to take sports seriously, but he was glad that the children got to know that there is more to the game than just casual shootarounds on the court. "They have to learn about a serious world of basketball, that they have to persist regularly and practice hard to make a life out of it."

The USA's assist to aiding basketball in India has continued in another form - NBA-India has recently launched the Mumbai edition of the Mahindra-NBA Challenge, which features a recreational basketball league and training camps for hoops enthusiasts in the city. Laker legend AC Green was in town along with former WNBA player Teresa Edwards to tip-off the tournament. Green has since been to Bangalore to help out in an Indian national training camp for under-18 girls. This iniative was taken in the form of a pact that the NBA has entered with the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) to provide world-class training to the Indian players and coaches.
Green said at the event: "Indian women players have lot of potential and they are no less than anyone in the field. What they need is an opportunity to prove themselves."
Potential. There seems to be hell of a lot of that going around our 1.2 billion isn't it?
There is still a long way to go to fix the untailored and casual culture towards sports in India. Federations have to be organised, players have to be provided incentives, accountability has to be asked for, media hype to be created, and most of all, the game has to be loved. But basketball, if anything, is a hell of a lovable game. There are various efforts offering the game an assist here - let's just hope that we can finish the play.

*First published on SLAMONline.com on April 22, 2010.

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Living the Game: The need for a grassroots basketball movement in India

In large pockets of America, basketball is more than a sport — it is a part of everyday life. A basketball court is a social center, basketball shoes are essential fashion accessories, and hip-hop music/culture remains eternally intertwined with the game. In such cultures, “playing ball” is more than being in a professional league, a college tournament, or as part of a fitness regime — “playing ball” starts from the grassroots, it’s a recreational activity, just something to do, something embedded deeply in the lifestyle.

The English, and other Europeans, and South Americans have football — the soccer kind of football — it is for them a recreation, a get-together with friends, the perfect pastime.

In India, our favorite pastime is cricket. Every thin lane, or gullie in India is a cricket pitch, every wooden stick a bat, every round object a ball. It is deeply embedded in modern Indian culture — the majority of Indian societies see children having impromptu cricket matches in their neighborhood, by the ghats of the Ganga, every barren field is a stadium, cricket references and metaphors have become part of everyday speak in the country, and get-togethers in roadside tea-shops only discuss cricket scores.

The result of our addiction with cricket is that it has become the biggest thing in India since Butter Chicken. Cricket apparel rules in athletic stores across the country, the majority of sport news in India is about cricket, and every Indian from every strata of society unites under the banner of cricket. That is why India is now one of the strongest cricket teams in the world, Indian players the world’s best, and the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket the world’s richest.

So when the NBA decided to tap the 1.2 billion strong Indian market to popularize basketball, they knew they were up against some tough competition. After launching an NBA-India website, their most recent development has been a deal with rich industrial conglomerate Mahindra Group to launch a recreational league in three Indian cities: Mumbai, Bangalore, and Ludhiana. The league will tip off in a month’s time and will last for seven weeks.

Eventually the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) plans to launch school and college leagues with the NBA’s guidance to promote the sport amongst the youth. When I spoke to BFI president Harish Sharma, he said the idea is to use the school, college, and city recreational league as a launch-pad to eventually develop a professional basketball league in India in three years time.

Yes, these efforts are going to increase urban interest for basketball in India, but will it really influence more people to love basketball the same way they love cricket? Everyone interested in the development of basketball in India (BFI, NBA, and those working for the game on a local level) admit their eventual goal is to make it the second favorite sport in the country, but even for that to happen, the game has to be more culturally ingrained into our lifestyles.

I believe what is really needed is a grassroots movement, a movement to make basketball more than a game but a culture. Why does the NBA, for example, sell so easily in a country like the Philippines? NBA players have created waves in the Philippines for years, including the famous Gilbert Arenas trip a few years ago. The answer: So influenced by Americanism, basketball is part of everyday lifestyle in the Philippines, bringing with it its swagger, the hip-hop culture, and NBA fanaticism.

For India, one such movement to popularize basketball into rural and grassroots lifestyle is the Sumpoorna Basketball School. Sumpoorna is the name of a basketball camp — or like its founder Subhash Mahajan likes to call “a grassroots basketball revolution” — that has been slowly growing in small, rural town of Tumkur in Southern India over the past five years. Driven by a lifelong love of basketball, Mahajan has set up this basketball camp mostly for small town and village youth, which has grown over the years to have taught basketball basics to up to 6,000 youngsters around the rural area, and launched the Sumpoorna Basketball Tournament where dozens of small school and recreational teams compete against each other.

Mahajan, who is from Kapurthala in Punjab, spent nearly three decades as a basketball coach before setting up the Sumpoorna School in 2005. He chose Tumkur, which is a village near the much-larger and richer city of Bangalore, in Karnataka.

“In India, sports and money are not compatible,” Mahajan said, “Unless of course, that sport is cricket. Selling the game of basketball amongst city kids in posh schools might change the commercial culture, but the love of the sport has to come from the grassroots level — it seems that I’m fighting this battle alone.”

“In India, kids below Grade 9 can still be engaged in basketball and taught the basics — unfortunately, after that, they have to turn toward their ‘real life’, their studies, their other career, and basketball fades away.”

Mahajan’s camp is a unique concept for India — it is a summer camp of basketball skills in a rural area. He has spent his own money into a large basketball campus, where he already has three courts and is now investing for 13 more. Kids who join the camp for around five days, where they stay in residence and play ball, all day.

As the awareness and interest for the game has spread, Mahajan has been able to organize large tournaments, and is looking to get larger. “We want to tie up with more schools, especially from the bigger cities, so that they can learn basics. I want them to live the game and not just play it.” A major step that Mahajan is looking to take with Sumpoorna is to invite senior basketball players in India to oversee and promote the Sumpoorna tournaments.

Another unique feature of the Sumpoorna tournaments has been that the games are played without refs. Indian sport has an unfortunate reputation of being shrouded in corruption and bias — and the referees have regularly been the ones footing the blame for unfair calls and pre-meditated results. The injustice was highlighted a little more than a month ago, when the referees and officials were accused of helping the home team at a major national university tournament. At Sumpoorna, the players are expected to resolve the calls amongst themselves, and more often than not, the system works.

“The players from the age 9 onwards are taught to self referee and agree on consensual play,” he said, “It is basketball at its best — the way we played it here forty years ago.”

Mahajan is from an old-school brand of hoop lovers who played the game because they were addicted to the game, and even after his prime, he could never leave the game behind. With Sumpoorna, he has been able to provide a platform through which youngsters can become hoop addicts from an early age, and as they grow, basketball becomes part of their cultural upbringing.

If these efforts are complemented by the popularization of the game in urban India, we could be heading toward a future where basketball could become a more common pastime, and as the number of players grows, the quality of basketball will eventually improve, too.

*First published on SLAMONline.com on March 25, 2010.

Basketball at Gunpoint: The harsh realities of corruption in Indian basketball

Here's an article of mine that was recently published of SLAMOnline.com. It is a modified version of my article Farceketball: Indian basketball's rotten core.

Sport is supposed to be different. Sport is supposed to be a platform where a combination of talent, practice, and luck mesh together to create an alternative reality. In a vast and culturally dense country like India, the population is divided amongst millions of subgroups by state, language, caste, color, profession, and politics.


But sports, and in our case, basketball, is supposed to be different — when basketball players step on to the court, something in their nature changes. They are no longer the desk clerk, the IT technician, the law-student, the father of two, the Hindu, the Muslim, the Marxist, or the liberal. They become basketball players. All the other staples of community division go out the window — the rich man doesn’t always win, the darker one isn’t discriminated against, the educated holds no advantage over the illiterate.

Well, all that is supposed to happen, anyways.

There are not many who take the sport seriously in India, but for the small population who do, basketball is their lifeline, their way out of dreaded pigeonholing in everyday society, where a boy in the service class will take a government job just like his father and a girl — any girl — will be married off sooner than she can learn to pronounce “Independence”. This is obviously not the trend in the modern, urban, upper-class Indian society; but the majority of middle and lower class ball players prefer to live in the alternative reality where their jump shot is more valuable to the world than the caste they were born into.

For these serious ball players, the basketball court is held in reverence, respected like a temple, where all other realities become blurred away leaving room for something that puts them on a common playing field, something that is fair.

But what is the point of reverence when it is nothing but a farce? When games are played not to win but to pave way for the ‘natural order’ of sport in the country; when results are determined not by the team with the more talent but the team with the stronger voice?

Here is the latest example: Last month, the All India Inter University Basketball tournament, featuring the best college-level talent in the country, concluded in my hometown of Varanasi. Hosted by the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), this tournament featured the best four teams from each of the four zones in the country. 16 teams took part in this exciting competition, which featured two local teams in the final — the hosts BHU versus the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapeeth (MGKV). BHU beat MGKV 63-56 to lift the trophy in front of their home fans, and thus became the best university basketball team in the country.

But the result is far from the complete truth. Players from visiting Delhi and Rajasthan universities alleged that they had to forfeit or lose their games over threats at gunpoint!


To everyone’s shock (or perhaps not), the entire starting five of the MGKV squad didn’t play a single minute in the tournament’s final against the BHU. These included 23-year-old Vikram ‘Dicky’ Parmar, the best player in the tournament, and one of the most talented young players in the country. The excuses for this ranged from “mild injuries” to “protecting the players from future injuries”.

Really? Why would you protect your players in the FINAL of the most important basketball tournament of their time in university?

The truth is this: It had been agreed from before that the MGKV coach would only play his reserves against BHU in the final, so that BHU could win their hometown tournament and BHU’s longtime revered coach KN Rai would be given a victorious retirement party.

The game itself exposed this charade further — after trailing for most of the three quarters, MGKV reserves actually made an amazing comeback in the fourth and took a one-point lead against BHU in the final two minutes. At this point, the MGKV coach had a word with his second squad, and subsequently, MGKV players practically gave up, loosening up their defense and standing around as the BHU scored freely to pick up a victory.

The most shocking fact about this farce isn’t that the above mentioned incidents took place; it is that everyone involved with the tournament and the teams taking part in the finals silently let it happen. The crowd, although uncomfortable with the happenings on court, simply sat back and watched. The media made a soft whimper about it on the following days, but the organizing associations turned a blind eye. Even the coaches and players of MGKV could only respond with a sigh, agreeing “these things just happen.”


They just happen. When I spoke to former UP player and Varanasi-based basketball coach Jitendar Kumar about this incident, his only response was that these things are “natural” in such tournaments — everyone from the referees, gun-toting bullies, and even opposing coaches and players get involved in making sure the home squads take the trophy. The teams agree to the result: That is what is supposed to happen because it always does.

Let me also add Varanasi has had a reputation of being uniquely illustrious in churning out national-level basketball talents. Unfortunately, this ancient city, also known for attracting pilgrims and tourists from around the world, happens to be in one of India’s major crime belts across Eastern Uttar Pradesh.

In the days following this story, I received a range of reactions from the fans. Subhash Mahajan, who is a basketball coach in rural parts of India, shared that he wasn’t surprised with the result, adding the sport is tainted on every district, state, or institution level in the country.

Players from the other teams who took part in the competition also complained of how the atrocities could take place under the nose of some of the event’s organizers. I can’t think of an apt NBA equivalent — how about Gilbert Arenas threatening the Lakers at gunpoint to lose the NBA Finals, right under David Stern’s eye. The gunpoint thing may not be completely unimaginable in Arenas’ case, although the thought of the Wizards in the Finals may be a bit too farfetched.

A reader of my blog, Vivek Taterway, once shared this tragic story: “My brother, who had mistakenly scored a goal at a University Football Tournament many summers ago at their rival’s home ground, barely escaped with his life. He actually ran off before the game ended! Today that event is recalled at family gatherings with loads of laughter but the irony cannot be missed.”

If the biggest university-level championship is treated under such conditions, we are doing nothing but corrupting the very core of what will shape our national sport teams in the future. What is the point of being true to basketball when those who run it won’t be true to you? If Indian authorities are really serious about promoting basketball as a major sport in India, it should first clean out such practices in all levels — a task much easier said than done, and for as long as our authorities remain corrupt, there is no chance of any serious attempt at this.

Basketball (and sport) is supposed to be an escape from the harsh realities from life’s other trends and professions, but we have unfortunately become used to accepting a corrupt system as the only reality. We need a united effort in the fans, players, and federation to fight against this. Let’s not convince our players to corrupt the one thing in life they love most: basketball.

*First published on SLAMOnline.com on March 9, 2010.

The Cricket Delusion: How Indian basketball can learn from the recent field hockey debacle

Let me start with my thesis: Sport in India is a joke.

I write this article as I watch my favourite ever sportsmen devastate the Bangladesh bowling attack with another spectacular performance. He has just completed his 45th Test century (half a dozen more than his nearest competitor), and would go on to make a breathtaking 143 runs.



It’s been 20 years since Sachin Tendulkar first gripped India’s emotions as a talented 16-year-old, and up to this day, he remains in the eye of the Indian public the one untouchable, uniting figure in the country. Globally, he’s ranked as one of the greatest to ever play the game. I don’t exaggerate when I say that there has been no more unanimously loved Indian since that Gandhi character.

Sport can’t be a problem in India when an athlete is the nation’s more powerful icon, can it? Sport can’t be a problem when the Indian Premier League (IPL), a competition of cricket’s newest format, the Twenty-20, is Asia’s first billion dollar sporting league , and one of the richest sporting leagues around the world? Of the top-10 most earning cricketers in the world, spots 1-4 and 6 are occupied by Indians. Number one is the captain of our national cricket team, MS Dhoni, and although his 2009 earnings of approximately 10 million USD are Lilliputian compared to the amount of money that superstar athletes make in other sports worldwide, these cricketers aren’t exactly fighting to feed their kids.

How can sport be a problem when India is ranked the number 1 Test Cricket team in the world? How can sport be a problem when our cricketers are as famous as our much-revered film stars? How can I call sport a joke in India, when millions keep their eyes glued to their TV sets, the housewives offering prayers to our pick of a hundred thousand gods for another victory, the fathers ditching work and the sons ditching school to sit home and watch another India international cricket match?

The problem, obviously, is the fact that all the glorious stories and figures in India belong to cricket, and if we do strike lucky and succeed in another sport, the successes are either quickly forgotten, or the newspapers find it tough to squeeze in the news amongst the barrage of daily cricket stories that the Indian audiences are overdosed with.

There are, of course, a few exceptions. Field Hockey, officially our ‘national sport’ has been headline material twice over the past few years. The first time was in August 2007, when Bollywood came to temporarily save the day (and earn a lot of money) as the blockbuster film Chak De India on the story of India’s women’s hockey team made the sport the flavour of the month.

The second time was a few weeks ago, when the members of the Indian hockey team boycotted a national camp in Pune, demanding their unpaid dues. The news wouldn’t have made as much noise as it did but for the fact that India is set to host the Hockey world cup in a month. There was suddenly the ridiculous danger of the home team fielding a B-squad for the greatest stage of their so-called national sport.



The stand-off between the players and the hockey federation stretched for several days, with everyone from state ministers and movie stars (After Chak De India, superstar actor Shahrukh Khan became the self-appointed ad-hoc spokesperson for Indian hockey) pitching in their opinion.There were debates on national TV, front page articles in the newspapers, and more editorials written about the sport nationwide than those accumulated in the last ten years. The Hockey Federation seemed to have the sponsor money with them, so when news broadcasters asked the federation’s bigwigs in a live telecast about where the money went, they got bumbling, anxious responses. The audiences were glued: we smelled corruption and couldn’t look away.

Cricket must have watched jealously for a week. Well, finally, a resolution was reached: the players got their money, and India began another cricket series. The media’s attention shifted away and order was restored in the universe.

Most of the sport fans in India didn’t even know that the hockey world cup was imminent, and what more, that it was being hosted by India. The general public only became interested when hockey went wrong, and we suddenly had the federation to throw our verbal rotten apples at, and Shahrukh and the media had us showering our sympathy on our poor professionals who never get what they deserve, and the facilities are appalling, and the money is bad, and now, it is the women’s hockey team turn to start asking for their money and so on and so forth.

The problem is that, with all the attention and finances thrown around by the broadcasters, promoters, media, and government authorities to make cricket the most lucrative business in India, there is little left room left to share with other sports in the country. It is perhaps no surprise then, that India, a country of a billion and a half people, has won a staggering ONE (1) individual gold in the history of the Olympic Games, and that too went to the shooter Abhinav Bindra at Beijing 2008, who was rich enough to self-finance his training, equipment, and success, free from the meddling hands of the government. The Olympics, obviously, don’t feature cricket, or India would have be raking in the medals and the positive vibes.

Team sports in India, such as football, basketball, and hockey, are forever stifled by age-old bureaucratic traditions, where a young talent finds it near improbable to climb up the ranks without politicking with the authorities on the side. Football has managed to thrive a little more than the others because of the century old tradition in the country and the marginally successful I-League. Even they have complaints: International superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Leo Messi are far better known than the members of our own national team.

The hockey debacle has once again exposed India’s monomaniacal obsession with cricket. A cricket international would never be treated the way the hockey internationals were. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is obviously the country’s richest sporting body. Compared to it, other sports, and particularly basketball, is still miles behind. Basketball even lacks the ‘national sport’ sentiment that hockey is often credited (or burdened) with or the historical significance of football.

Ayaz Memon, one of India’s most respected sport’s journalist and a columnist for NBA.com/India, writes in his article ‘The Changing Face of Sports’ that, “…NBA can be of help to India: not necessarily because of the sport it represents, but more because of the way it has gone about conducting its business. I used the last word of the previous sentence deliberately, because in India, sport has hardly been seen as business, more as pastime: the government provides some grant, officials hang on to office for power rather than passion for the sport, and players fight heavy odds to eke out a living or at least some glory.”

The NBA business model relies a lot on individual marketing of players to deepen their fan base. Would a basketball star in India ever be marketed this way? Would another sport’s star ever be held in the kind of reverence that is showered on cricketers like Tendulkar or Dhoni? The Basketball Federation of India (BFI) has been pondering bringing in a NBA-inspired league system to basketball here, and although it would generate a little more excitement and hope for the sport, it would only be a modest first step.

Compared to a few of the other sports, Basketball has a relatively cleaner reputation in terms of corruption or embezzlement in India, but I believe that the trend of seniority-based preferential treatment and unfair team selections would have to be cleaned out from the sport’s culture. When I spoke to India’s former women’s national captain Divya Singh, she said, “I don’t like cricket very much, but I admire the way that it is managed. It’s possible for basketball to grow in India. There is a court in most of the schools in India, and kids play the game regularly at a young age. Their talent needs to be channelized in the right way.”



The other good news is that, as time has passed, the attention level of your average viewer is diminishing by the day. Half a century ago, cricket started off as a five-day marathon, and in the 70s morphed into a day-long game. Now, the most recent form of the game (the Twenty-20) only lasts around three hours and has taken cricket hysteria to new heights. If projected as a shorter, faster, and more athletically appealing sport, basketball has the perfect opening to carve out a space for itself in the public's consciousness.

In recent years, Leander Paes, Sania Mirza, Viswanathan Anand, Bhaichung Bhutia, Saina Nehwal, Abhinav Bindra, Vijay Singh, and others have had relative successes in their respective sports, gaining a little bit of fame and commercial value. We are still a long way away before the successes of non-cricket athletes are taken by the majority of Indians seriously. The mainstream media’s regular interest in hockey’s darkest day shouldn’t be just some one-off fling with other sports in India. Like hockey, sports like basketball should be put under the scrutinizing media spotlight, making the structure behind the system accountable as well as help in promoting the game.

*First published on SLAMOnline.com on January 28, 2010.