Indian in NBA inspires American in IPL.

Meet Freckles 'Fuming' Filaccio from Murphys Village (aka Murphys Estate), the first cricketer from America in the IPL. Way back in late June, 2015, it was just another quiet day in Murphys. Freckles and his friends were idling in front of the TV when his father stormed in - “You kids better watch out or after taking over all yer jobs these Indians will take over all yer sports”. Satnam Singh Bhamara had just become the first-ever basketball player from India to be drafted into the NBA. The Dallas Mavericks had selected him with their 52nd pick.

The similarities between Satnam and Freckles were uncanny. Both were from tiny, almost insignificant villages with populations of less than a 1000.  Basketball was the last sport on anyone's mind in Punjab. Legend has it, the growth of basketball in these parts almost coincided with the growth of Satnam Singh. When he was a day shy of 13 he was already six feet tall. And that was the day when he planted the first makeshift basket – he always took his nani's advice to heart, she would often say, “Reach for the stars, Satnam, reach out for the stars”. Both cricket and hockey had fault in their stars, he was determined to start something new. Baseball was a lost cause as his friends compared it to cricket. One early morning he surfed to a Live NBA telecast. It was then that it dawned upon him why he was much taller than the others. The first basket was planted halfway up a tree. A basketball was procured from the nearest town. Satnam Singh had his friends for company but it was clear he was playing against himself. Every second day, the basket was nailed higher till it reached the tree top. Next a higher tree and then an even higher tree.

The day when his dad barged in, Freckles barged out. His privacy had been invaded. Worse, he didn't understand what his father was fussing about. It was only later when his dad sat him down and planned America's revenge that it became somewhat clear. Freckles would take on a new sport, one he had barely heard of. He was a day shy of 13, already six feet tall, and a baseball bully -he could whack it longer than even the older kids, and hurl it in faster than any pitcher his age. Cricket seemed the obvious choice for Mr Filaccio to plan his revenge.

The route to the IPL was long but completed in less than six years – from Murphys Estate to the California Cricket Academy to South Africa to Ireland to England. Still only 19 (same as when the NBA came calling for Satnam Singh), Freckles signing with CSK though not a lifelong dream had been something of a teenage wet dream. “When I was just 13, I started watchin videos of Dhoni n Raina play for CSK...changed my life it did. Dad made sure I watched Jadeja too, he always say, it's vital to know what not to do”. Overjoyed to be playing with Dhoni, he feels at 39 the captain still has 5-6 good years of cricket in him, followed by another 10-15 years of mentoring youngsters at CSK. “I just can't imagine a CSK side without Dhoni. But a few years down, I reckon Raina will be ready to lead the side”.

It has been learnt that the Mumbai Indians bid of Rs 57 crore for Freckles was disallowed as the player  did not see a future with any side other than CSK and even threatened to withdraw his name from the auctions. An exception was made wherein Freckles was sold for CSK’s last bid of Rs 55.9 crore.

“My Papa always said, ‘IPL was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’”  - Freckles 'Fuming' Filaccio

(However plausible this might sound, this is largely a work of fiction)

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Can West Indies cricket rejoice ?

Is this is renaissance they were waiting for ?

Have their faith in Stanford, which failed them then provided dividends now ?

Is this young little bunch the answer to the collective prayers of a million rum sipping mouths ?

Can all the middle fingers of the islands collectively raise towards the direction of NBA, NFL and other sports including promiscuity, and say “up yours” we’re gonna go upwards ?

I would say it isn’t time yet…

Wait for the next game

You’ve seen the Mr Hyde’s this game

They have a mouth that is known for loose motion, their mind works slow motion

This loss would make them comeback with a vengeance, only till the next match

Yes, they might have a friendly fire in their camp the day after the next match

An invocation of “Mother” and “Sister” and then you see them down the abyss, for a couple of matches of course

And then they have these many jobless ex cricketers in line, waiting for the TV camera. They would either blame the establishment or the establishment on the other side of their fence.

They can’t ever think of scrubbing their back or mending fences, for they only know stroke play

This is one good team which doesn’t be itself, for it is never let to…

They want to be nice because the international media is watching them and play for the twitter trends, then hop fences and play for the fringe press and the popular elements

You don’t get on to the cricket field to make a statement, you get there to enjoy yourself, play your game

And of course return winners

Well played West Indies, you are on the right track

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But hey, we're making money.

But hey, we're making money The biggest thrill in the world is entertaining the public, there is no bigger thrill than that - Vince Mcmahon

Tell that to Shahid Afridi. Afridi is a victim. Of his own intelligence primarily, but also to a lesser level, to the losing battle that sport as combat is fighting with sport as entertainment. Let me elaborate. Pretty much every organized sport in the world is doing what long haired Bangalore metalhead machas refer to in fits of righteous spite as “that Metallica thing.” Put simply, sports administrators everywhere are trying to bring the crowds in. In purists’ language, this amounts to “selling out”. The question of how much the “laws” of cricket allow tampering with the ball is ultimately a particular reformulation of the question “How much should sport be looked at as a form of entertainment?”

Cricket’s doing it as well. A lot of it. In fact they have been so good at this that even KISS might learn a lesson or two from them. The boundaries have gotten smaller, the pitches are made dead to demand, and despite the advent of adequate protection, anything thrown by a fast bowler that the batsman cant hit easily is generally re-bowled, with a free run thrown in for good measure. Let’s face it. The general audience likes to see boundaries. The same argument made in favour of Britney Spears being a brilliant musician because she sold albums by the millions can be made to justify this death blow being served to the art of bowling. On the face of it, the logic seems to be quite unimpeachable. If most people like it, it should be good for the game right?

Wrong. It could very well backfire. And it’s happened before. The 80’s were an exciting time for the NBA. Bird, Isiah and Magic were still fighting it out and the genius that would be soon acclaimed as the greatest of them all had made his appearance in Chicago. The dunk became a highpoint of the basketball game and people thronged in to see it. It wasn’t long before the league realized that making it easier for the players to dunk would increase ticket sales and television ratings. It wasn’t that the NBA was not a moneymaking enterprise. Basketball was already a game that favoured the offence heavily in the rules.

The NBA had already outlawed most tight zone defenses and converted a two half game into a four quarter game for more commercial breaks (those watching the IPL will know what I’m talking about here). Now it introduced another rule called he defensive three second violation by which one couldn’t even stand in own’s own D for more than three seconds. This effectively killed all forms of zone defense, and made NBA much more popular in the short run. But over the years, it’s killed the game. Its become very hard to play good defense in the NBA and as a result, from having a dream team that beat everyone else by at least 30 points in the Olympics in 1992, the USA went to a place where its superstar laden national teams were getting beaten by Serbia, Greece, Spain and even Puerto Rico. They simply couldn’t play against a well organized zone defense. One reason why a lot of people don’t think Kobe or Lebron could have played as well as Jordan did is because these guys haven’t achieved their superstardom playing against the bruising defense of the 80s.

Volleyball, on the other hand, presents a slightly different picture. It also decided to sell itself better and got the table tennis scoring system introduced a few years ago, replacing the service change system to make gameplay faster and more exciting. At the same time, it also brought in the concept of the Libero, which was a player who could only pick and set and not attack. When in the frontline, the Libero could be substituted freely with an attacker. The first rule is almost universally cursed. Instead of making games more exciting, it made it duller. Earlier, each point had to be won on your own serve, and I’ve witnessed rallies of up to 30 service changes without a single point being scored. Now the team which gets a slight lead in the beginning keeps on winning points off the opposing team’s serve till the set is over. The libero rule on the other hand, is widely praised.

It gave a fillip to the defense. Basically, you had a really agile guy on your backcourt who could pick balls better and this made for longer and more interesting rallies. When his turn came for forecourt duty, he could be easily replaced with an attacker, thus not taking away from the game, but also truly adding to it. On the whole, the changes didn’t do as much damage as they could have done.

Cricket that way, is slightly strange. Every other game glorifies the attack, and negates the defense. Cricket is perhaps the only game where the defense (the bastman is defending his stumps from the bowler who’s attacking them) is favoured over the offense by the crowds. But that still does not justify favouring one set of skills over the other. Bowling as an art is being systematically strangled. Look at it this particular example. Technology has advanced enough for a batsman to have all the protection he needs from the cricket ball without materially affecting his freedom of motion. And yet, the short ball is still penalized. The fielding rules in cricket are a direct parallel to the 3 second defensive violation in basketball. What’s the powerplay if not a device to achieve more of the cricket equivalent to the slamdunk in basketball (a boundary)? Smaller fields are effectively making spin bowling an obsolete tactic. When Pakistan came up with reverse swing, the cricketing equivalent to the planned urban settlements of Harappa, there always were “cheater” whispers all round. Perhaps the only bowler friendly decision taken by the ICC in recent times has been allowing Murali to bowl legally. And even that had everyone up in arms.

Where’s the balance guys? What happened to fair competition? A team game in best enjoyed when one team’s offense battles the other’s defense. If I am not horribly mistaken, the 2011 World Cup is going to be a battle between the batting sides of participating teams. It’s going to be such a pity. But hey, I just heard on Sportscenter that Sepp Blatter is thinking of abolishing the offside rule in football. Why not? Lets keep changing the rules till every sport becomes the philosophical equivalent of the WWE. Lots of people watch the WWE. So what if it’s scripted? It makes money, doesn’t it?

By Jian Johnson
Before he grasped the importance of money, Jian aspired to be a professional athlete. Currently, he thinks about sports during cigarette breaks at work. You can read Jian's Live Journal at www.3xsoncalvary.livejournal.com

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A bond with sport.

A curious coincidence occurred on a weekend this month that set me thinking. Up late night with nothing much to do, surfing the sports channels on Tata Sky late after midnight presented me with a spectacle that set my mind racing. Two sports channels (I think they were TEN Sports and Star Sports but I could be mistaken) were showing reruns of matches that had already happened. One was a Twenty20 match between New Zeeland and Pakistan and the other was an NBA regular season matchup between the Lakers and the Suns.

The first match I watched was the NBA one. Kobe was as usual putting up a show, and young Andrew Bynum was burning it up too while Amare looked like he was never injured, dunking with impunity. In between all this, anyone would be forgiven for not noticing a 37 year old veteran (37 in NBA basketball is very very very old) playing for the Suns. But this was just not any other journeyman. This was Grant Hill.

For those who didn’t follow the NBA in the tumultuous 90’s, Grant Hill was one of the greatest collegiate basketball players ever, who came into the NBA and was immediately seen as the potential successor to Michael Jordan in terms of what he represented for the league. Hill was an intelligent and superbly talented all round player of exceptional capacity, and was an A list superstar in his years at the Detroit Pistons. A measure of his genius can be found in the statistic that he is only one of two NBA players who have led their teams in points, rebounds and assists for three seasons, the only other player to have done it being the venerable Wilt Chamberlain.

Tragedy struck in 2000 when he injured his ankle and since then cruel jokes have abounded, most of them comparing Hill’s left ankle to an overused mine, alluding to the number of surgeries he had between 2000 and 2007. Having lost the peak years of his career to injury, Hill moved to the Suns in 2007 and has been performing steadily ever since. On that day I saw Andrew Bynum, a young Laker star almost exactly half Hill’s age turn him around easily and go for a dunk.

The unfairness of it all prompted me to change the channel, only to see (what I thought was) the sad end of another drama being played out. New Zeeland was playing Pakistan in a series of Twenty20s in Dubai, and Shane Bond was being carted around the park by the Paki batsmen. Already in the what-could-have-been mindset, this depressed me further. Again, this was Shane Bond.

I first noticed Shane Bond in 2001-2002 and what I saw astounded me. Here was a fast bowler, genuine fast, and had both control and pace. He was intimidating and everything you could ask for in a fast bowler. But it wasn’t just that. Brett Lee and Akhtar could bowl as fast and faster. It was the way Bond generated his pace. With all the other leading fast bowlers of his era, there was the criticism, warranted or not, that they were benders, that they chucked. With Bond, there was not the slightest question of any doubt. There was, and still is, a certain honesty about Bond’s bowling action that put him a cut above the rest. I guess the reason why Shane Bond and perhaps Dale Steyn are special, lies in the undeniable honesty of their bowling. When Akthar hit Dada on the ribs, the Indian fan in me automatically and unfairly consoled myself that he was a chucker and that it was ok. When Bond took 6 wickets for 19 against India, I didn’t have that consolation, because Bond was unimpeachable.

Over the years, as a back injury and participation in the ICL converted Bond into an unfortunate footnote in the annals of international cricket, the parallel with Grant Hill seemed appropriate. Both were immensely talented and both almost realized that talent and potential. Yet, even after their best years were taken away by circumstances beyond their control, they are still there, hanging on at the highest levels of their respective sports by sheer grit and determination.

In sport the champions are often celebrated to a point where we don’t often notice or acknowledge people like Hill or Bond. Yet, for me, these athletes represent the core value of sport itself. Their love for the game and the determination to play it at the highest levels despite all the trials and tribulations they have gone through make them the champions they are. The tragedy of Shane Bond and Grant Hill wont be noticed or talked about as much as the achievements of Sachin or Jordan, but these are also the people who make it all worth it. As I write this, Bond has just taken 8 wickets in his comeback test and Gill had edged his way into the starting five at Phoenix at the age of 37. Their little victories might seem trivial when compared to the feats of reigning superstars, but make no mistake, without them, sport just wouldn’t be what it is.

Here’s to hoping against hope and the triumph of determination and hard work against the formidable odds of battered bodies and old age. Here’s to Shane Bond and Grant Hill and Graham Alexander and all the others who make it worth it.

By Jian Johnson

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