BFI: It wasn't me

Following basketball star Geethu Anna Jose's "ban" from being able to in a professional league in Australia (as reported on TimesNow.tv), I wrote an article on my blog protesting against Geethu's plight, called How to suppress your superstars - 101. This article was also published on SportsKeeda.com.

The TimesNow.tv article mentioned this: "... the Indian Olympic Association has denied permission since Geethu is also the captain of the Indian women's Basketball team. According to the explanation given by the IOA, the Basketball Federation of India is supposed to organise a National camp during the same time."



It didn't take long for a response to my article: the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) made a press release just three days later refuting the blame for denying Geethu from playing in Australia.

The release, posted by former women's national team captain Divya Singh reads something like this:

Basketball federation of India refutes the blame of denying their National player for playing in Australia.
One of the recently published articles stated that Geethu Anna Jose, an outstanding and highly reputed International Basketball Player of the country was denied the opportunity to train and play in the Big V Women’s program in Australia from 15th February to mid August, 2010 by the Ringwood Basketball Association, Victoria, Australia by the Basketball Federation of India.
BFI clarifies that Jose sent her E-mail to the Federation at 8:42 PM on 25th January, 2010. The 26th January, 2010 being a National Holiday the office was closed. Her permission to participate in the above program in Australia was given on 27th January, 2010 addressed to Head Women’s Coach Ringwood Basketball Association Inc, Australia by Email and a copy of the letter was also forwarded to Geethu by Email.

“We never deny any player, until unless it comes to our commitment towards the nation” says, Harish Sharma, Genl secy BFI.
In few months Geethu, a member of the Indian team, will be representing at the reputed Asian Games. Basketball Federation of India is planning the National Coaching Camp and Foreign Exposure for the Men & Women teams in order to prepare Indian teams for the Asian Games this year where it is mandatory for the selected players to participate in the Coaching Camps & Foreign Exposure prior to their respective International participation and the Asian Games.
In such cases, BFI always considers National interest, and it is expected of every player selected, to attend the National Coaching Camps for the preparation of International events. Basketball is a team game and the whole team needs to practice together for the work-outs on offensive as well as defensive strategies & team coordination.

I applaud the BFI if they really did give permission to Geethu to join the team in Australia. But if the BFI isn't stopping her, then why is she still here?

I wholeheartedly agree that national interest should stand above all, but it shouldn't come in the way of player progress if possible. Geethu had been quoted saying that her league season in Australia would end three months before the Asian Games, giving her ample time to practice with the team. In situations like these, doesn't she deserve to go and improve her skills abroad?

I was finally able to contact Geethu and get her side of the story.

This is what Geethu said about the issue: "... About the Australian league: What really happened was, finally [the BFI] gave me the permission to go, but also they said i have to be back for this Asian games camp going to be held at next month."

What she means is this: the BFI did allow Geethu to go, but expected her back much too early, and for her to return in a month would mean that she misses a large part of her professional season with the Ringwood Hawks in Australia.

Geethu was, after all, the top scorer in all of Asia (!!) during the FIBA Women's Asian Basketball Championships in Chennai in November. Pardon me for thinking that she deserves a lot more respect and recognition for her efforts.

These questions remain to be answered for the conflict to be fully resolved. But this is just a start of such conflicts - if we are hoping that Indian players improve their quality of play, then they will eventually be wooed by better basketball leagues in other countries - Australia, Europe, and hopefully in my lifetime, the NBA. Will this be a reoccuring situation every time our players want to head out of India?

Indian federations / associations need to learn from incidents such as those of Geethu and, of course, from the problems faced by our only Olympic individual gold medalist Abhinav Bindra, who was involved in a tussle with the NRAI.

Based on the opinion of most of the players and coaches I have spoken to, the BFI's General Secretary Harish Sharma seems to be determined in helping promote basketball in India the right way. He should be thanked for his swift response to this issue, but I feel that there is a long way to go before we have a smooth system of dealing with these complicated issues.

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.