Why sport matters

My earliest memory of sport comes from pleading to be allowed to stay up — unsuccessfully, I may add — to watch the final of the 1983 Prudential World Cup. In the years that followed, I devoured the official World Cup handbook and knew every scorecard and match report by heart. The dream had been seeded, and hours of alone time during the long school summer holidays were filled with simulated cricket, tennis, hockey and football matches, in the backyard and on the street, with any willing participant — human or canine.

Gaining admission to a boys’ school that had produced multiple national hockey and cricket players was a turn of good fortune. My mother placed me in the hands of our school hockey coach, believing this would keep me away from the ‘dangers of youth’. Little did she know that protecting me from chemical substances would plunge me into the world of another addiction. Once sport enters your bloodstream, it is there to stay. There were long sessions of hitting a cricket ball on a rope, batting shadow practice in front of the mirror, and practising the bowling run-up in any open space I could find. I made friends playing with people I didn’t know — or consider — were different. We won and lost, celebrated and commiserated together, building enduring bonds.

Athlete’s mindset

As I progressed as an athlete, I found success brought new questions and moments of introspection. Was I now attracted to the notions of success that sport offered? How does one motor through disappointments and failures? Is it by remembering why one began playing in the first place? Unwittingly, sport became the dominant lens I was using to navigate the world.

Securing admission to the National Law School in Bengaluru was a turning point. It meant I had to make a choice and give up on the dream of a sporting career. I used an athlete’s mindset to approach the challenging academic environment. I have also never forgotten that I had to choose between sport and studies, something I believe no teenager should feel compelled to do.

I soon realised that the more I gave sport the more it gave back. I may have reached the end of the road in my career as a cricketer, but the desire to stay connected to sport never left me. I graduated from universities in the UK and the US. I experienced the deep inroads sport had made into cultural life in both countries. I worked for a few years in the US, but soon enough, I made my way home and immersed myself in Indian sport. With two schoolfriends, I co-founded an NGO to support young athletes, and eventually create a system that might mean that our young people aren’t presented with binary career choices, like I had been. The cynicism we encountered was an early sign of the headwinds we would face, but we motored on. A decade later, we received the National Sports Award for the promotion of sporting talent, having played a part in powering many of the outstanding Indian sporting achievements that are — happily — increasingly common today. 

I believe that sport has a key role to play in helping us decode ourselves, each other and the world we populate together. What are we capable of? How fast can we run? How high can we jump? Sport’s quest for uniform global rules also forces it to confront — and answer — challenging questions. For instance, sport is at the frontier of raging debates around the gender binary and the meaning of ‘fairness’.

Sport also builds culture and fosters communities in powerful ways. There is something magical about half the world’s population watching the FIFA World Cup final together. Sport’s ability to bridge divides and its use in nation-building, diplomacy and peace-making have not been fully explored. Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to unite South Africa across race is a remarkable case study. Gifting a signed Virat Kohli bat to the Australian premier perfectly sets up the success of an Indian delegation’s visit much like a high elbow sets up a classic cover drive that bat had been a participant in.

Sport has many gifts to give. It reinforces the point that skill and hard work — even patience — have rewards. Look no further than Rohan Bopanna’s recent achievements at age 43. It also reminds us that talent is abundant and can land anywhere — profiling the socio-economic backgrounds of India’s highest-achieving athletes will demonstrate this point.

But sport’s offerings aren’t given away easily. They must be earned. They need investment, tending and care. The institutions that make and enforce the rules must be accountable to the public they serve. The integrity of competitions is vital to delivering fair — and fairly earned — rewards. Without public vigilance, the political weaponisation of sport and its use for otherisation and division become real prospects.

Sport can be, if given a chance, a powerful tool of understanding, reflection, reinforcement and change. Whether or not we enjoy sport, keeping it real, keeping it fair, and ensuring that it is well-governed is a project all of us benefit from, and must get behind. There are many more boundaries to be found, crossed and redefined together.

Nandan Kamath

(The writer is the managing trustee of GoSports Foundation. A graduate of NLSIU and a Rhodes Scholar, he is also a Bengaluru-based lawyer working with athletes and federations. He recently authored ‘Boundary Lab’, published by Penguin.)