Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Greatest Indian Sportsperson Ever

Hi everybody.Once I wrote apropos the greatest sportsperson of all time, the logical sequel to it, me being an Indian, is to write about Indian sports. The Greatest Indian Sportsperson. The one thing about Indian Sports is that if I take popularity into account then I would fail, because Indian media has excessively popularised cricket and made cricketers demi-gods.


The other important thing is that we Indians must acknowledge that we hava not produced greats of the calibre of other greats of the world like Pele, Tiger Woods or Lance Amstrong. I say this with due respect to the Indian greats.


Some of the sportspersons I am going to consider are obvious challengers to the throne like Dhyan Chand, Milkha Singh, Viswanathan Anand, Leander Paes and , of course, cricketers. But there are others out there to whom we have failed to give respect like Prakash Padukone, Geet Sethi, Pankaj Advani and Ramanathan Krishnan.


First lets try to find just two cricketers who could be included in our deliberations. Sachin Tendulkar, Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Ranjit Singhi are the best of the lot. Let other greats forgive me. From these we can eliminate Ranjit Singhi because he never played for India. Sunil Gavaskar was not a successful captain and found it very difficult to adjust to one-day cricket.So its Sachin and Kapil from cricket.


There area a lot of legends surrounding Dhyan Chand. He was too prolific to be true.Milkha Singh is undoubtedly the greatest Indian athlete ever. He owned the Asian Record for the 400 m and broke the Olympic record along with 3 others in the fiercely contested final in Rome 1960.Yet he was never a World Champion.


Prakash Padukone is the greatest Indian Batminton player. He has won the World cup once and the most coveted All England Badminton Championships which is the sport's equivalent of Wimbledon.


Geet Sethi has been carrying the mantle of Billiards in India for the Ppast 20 years and has now been ably joined by Pankaj Advani. Both are multiple World Champions though Pankaj is yet to win the Professional Title.

Ramanathan Krishnan is the greatest singles Tennis player India has produced. He reached the Wimbledon semifinal twice. Leander Paes has won a Bronze for India at the Olympics and is a multiple Grand Slam winner. Yet they both are not world beaters and did not dominate their game at any point of time.


Coming to the two cricketers, they have been the best . Kapil won the World Cup for India and Sachin is God, almost. Both have been prolific. Yet, I vote for Sachin for his longevity, his records, his game and most importantly his commitment, modesty and behavior on and off the field.


Viswanathan Anand has achieved what no other Indain sportsperson has. He is a World Champion in his sport. Anand has won World Championship twice, World Cup twice, World Rapid four times, 4 Chess Oscars and 1000s of international awards and title. He revolutioniosed Chess in India. But is chess actually a Sport?



So finally, to shrink the competition further, I select Dhyan Chand and Sachin Tendulkar. Sachin holds almost every record in one-day cricket and has one of the best averages in Test cricket. He is the Greatest one day player and contends for the NO.2 spot in Test cricket too, next only to the Don.

Dhyan Chand on the other hand came from a humble background and won the Olympic thrice for India. There have been issues that he has some kind of glue attached to his bat. In 1932, India scored 338 goals in 37 matches, 133 being Dhyan Chand's.Once, Don Bradman was so surprised by the number of goals that he quipped: 'Were they made by a hockey player or a batsman?'. He was known the world over as 'the Hockey Wizard'.


Sachin or Dhyan Chand? While Dhyan Chand has dominated the sport which no one till date has emulated, including Teun de Noojier, Taeke Taekama and Sohail Abbas, Tendulkar has performed extremely well under pressure which no Indian has ever experienced. So?

In my view, Dhyan Chand is the Greatest Indian Sportsperson ever because of the way he dominated the game. While Sachin was found to be vulnerable on certain occasions, the Wizard was not, never.



To learn more about the Wizard , search Wikipedia for Dhyan Chand.



Comments are most welcome.





No comments: