Sachin Tendulkar 50? For all that we heard it 264 times in international cricket, his half-century of birthdays arrived on Monday with a jolt.
In our mind’s eye, players tend to remain fixed, unchanged and unchanging. Tendulkar, moreover, had an immutable quality, regularity reinforced by his role: 84 per cent of his Test innings began at the fall of the second wicket, at which he emerged as reliably as a cuckoo from a clock announcing the hour.
Not for him the endless prating of more recent cricketers about role (“everyone knows what their role is”; “I’ve discussed my role with the coach/captain/selectors”). Tendulkar grasped his role instantly: his role was to be great.
Still, 50 is 50. And Tendulkar was so young so long. I first saw him, aged 17, in the Lord’s Test of 1990 — too young to vote, to shave, and tiny, cherubic, more closely resembling a jockey than a cricketer.
Under that helmet, though, a hard head, as I came to understand at Old Trafford, where his maiden Test century righted a listing team after his elders had failed.
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Part of him remained that cool-headed, warm-blooded boy too. To the very end of his career, he retained a youthful passion for the game, blending into every training session as though it was his first.
You studied him for signs of boredom, of fatigue, of satiety. Nope, nada, nothing doing. Had it been possible, Tendulkar would have played forever; as it was, it only seemed like he did.
Fifty then — which means that a good many years have passed since the feats that built his stature.
The elapse of time has historicised those feats also. Tendulkar was half as old, of course, when he propelled India to victory in the 1998 Coca-Cola Cup with 134 from 131 balls in Sharjah, having helped them qualify for the final with 143 off 131 balls two days earlier. Both at Australia’s expense.
He had been 18 during 1992’s Perth Test, when he plucked 114 from India’s wrecked first innings; he would be 30 when he dropped anchor in 2004’s Sydney Test, famously abjuring the cover drive for 10 hours as he accumulated an unbeaten 241.
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Tendulkar’s 150s in the 2007-08 Border-Gavaskar Trophy came when he was 34, and whole generations had moved on since his debut, but he had not.
Even then the Indian Premier League was appearing on the horizon, over which he pronounced a kind of benediction by playing in the first half-dozen seasons, even if the format always seemed a little small for him, like trying to compress Mughal-E-Azam into a half-hour with advertisements or the Mahabharata into a haiku.
Think of what most of us are doing at those ages. Usually we are getting started. At best we are collecting the building blocks of success, which we might then hope to pile.
Tendulkar was levelling the site, laying the foundations, erecting the walls, constructing the roof, then doing it again next door, and next door, and next door, until he had laid out a vast, carefully planned city of runs.
Sometimes we talk of the tendency of Test matches in India to suddenly accelerate — to “go into fast-forward”. Thanks to his early precocity, his rapid maturity, his extended eminence and capacity for reinvention, Tendulkar lived his cricket decades at headlong pace, gathering a momentum that has continued carrying him forward in retirement.
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Tendulkar can now be seen, of course, as a foretelling of Indian success, on field and off, by his achieving when it was still uneven, uncertain, unexpected.
With a sense of that, he has discerned in the 2011 World Cup a special defining quality, the culmination, as it were, of a two-decade tournament. “Nothing beats the World Cup final in 2011,” he has said. “That was the best cricketing day of my life.”
Virat Kohli’s tribute after helping to shoulder his elder from the field was so good it sounds apocryphal: “Tendulkar has carried the burden of the nation for 21 years; it was time we carried him. Chak de India.” It is all the more meaningful for being true. But with the passing of time, Tendulkar has also become something of a hostage of his generation.
In India, celebrity is perishable; in modern India, heroes are plentiful. A demographic wave is being inducted in cricket with no independent memory of Tendulkar — the country’s median age is 28. Son Arjun, a 23-year-old left-arm pace bowler last week capped by the Mumbai Indians, is growing up in a very different world.
This generation will be excused wondering how good Tendulkar really could have been, whether fogies like us aren’t just getting a little carried away.
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He’ll increasingly be someone for those who saw him to hold on to, to make claims for, to champion. What was true of The Master, Jack Hobbs, in John Arlott’s poem, is no less true of The Little Master:
The Master — records prove the title true,
Yet fail you for they cannot say
How many men whose names you never knew
Are proud to tell their sons they saw you play.
So 50, which we celebrate, while also sensing it will never be enough. Those who imagined that Bradman would surely live until the age of at least 99.94 will be loath to prophesy. But if ever a cricketer could be backed in the pursuit of a three-figure milestone, by calm, courage and the studious husbandry of energy, it is Sachin Tendulkar.
• This is an extract from Sachin@50 edited by Boris Majumdar (Simon & Schuster), available now from Booktopia
