Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar was born on April 24, 1973, in Bombay, the city now called Mumbai, into a middle class Maharashtrian family. His father, Ramesh Tendulkar, was a Marathi novelist and poet who taught at a city college, and he named his son after the music director Sachin Dev Burman ^[1]. The family lived in the Sahitya Sahawas housing colony in Bandra East, where Sachin, the youngest of four siblings, was by his own account a boisterous child more interested in street games than schoolwork.

His elder half brother Ajit noticed the boy's unusual hand-eye coordination and, in 1984, took him to Ramakant Achrekar, a coach who ran cricket camps at Shivaji Park in Dadar. Achrekar became the defining influence on his technique and temperament. To keep the boy close to practice, the family moved him to Sharadashram Vidyamandir, a school known for its cricket program, and he often trained in morning and evening sessions on either side of classes ^[2].

The results arrived quickly. In February 1988, playing in the Harris Shield inter-school tournament, the fourteen year old Tendulkar put on an unbroken partnership of 664 runs with his schoolmate Vinod Kambli, a stand so large that the opposing schoolboys reportedly wept. The feat made newspapers across India and marked him, well before adulthood, as the most watched young batsman in the country ^[2].

At fifteen, Tendulkar scored a century on his first-class debut for Bombay in the Ranji Trophy during the 1988-89 season, an early sign that his schoolboy numbers would translate to senior cricket ^[3]. Selection for India followed within a year. On November 15, 1989, aged sixteen years and 205 days, he walked out for his first Test match against Pakistan in Karachi, facing an attack that included Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, and Waqar Younis ^[1].

The tour tested him physically. Struck on the nose by a rising ball from Waqar Younis in a later match, he waved away assistance and continued batting, an episode that Indian fans still retell. His maiden Test century came in August 1990 at Old Trafford in Manchester, an unbeaten 119 that saved the match for India when he was just seventeen ^[3]. Two hundreds in Australia during the 1991-92 series, at Sydney and on the fast pitch at Perth, convinced observers outside India that the teenager was a batsman of rare class.

In 1992 Tendulkar also became the first overseas player signed by Yorkshire, a county that had until then fielded only cricketers born within its borders, a small but telling measure of his growing standing ^[1]. By the mid 1990s, promoted to open the batting in one day internationals, he had become the centrepiece of India's lineup and, increasingly, of its television audience. Wisden named him one of its Cricketers of the Year in 1997 ^[4].

The career statistics remain the plainest way to state Sachin Tendulkar's achievements. Across 200 Test matches between 1989 and 2013 he scored 15,921 runs with 51 centuries, and in 463 one day internationals he added 18,426 runs with 49 centuries. Both run totals and both century counts are records that no other player has approached ^[3]. His hundredth international hundred, scored against Bangladesh in March 2012, completed a milestone that had never before existed as a category.

Certain innings acquired their own fame. His back to back centuries against Australia in Sharjah in April 1998, played partly through a desert sandstorm, carried India to a tournament title and are remembered simply as the Desert Storm innings. On February 24, 2010, in Gwalior, he made an unbeaten 200 against South Africa, the first double century in the history of men's one day internationals ^[3]. Bowlers of every kind, from Shane Warne's leg spin to the pace of Glenn McGrath, found him the wicket that mattered most.

The achievement he valued above the rest came late. Tendulkar played in six World Cups, and was the leading run scorer at the 1996 and 2003 editions, but a title eluded him until April 2, 2011, when India beat Sri Lanka in the final at the Wankhede Stadium in his home city. His teammates carried him on their shoulders around the ground, and Virat Kohli told reporters that Tendulkar had carried Indian cricket for twenty one years, so it was time the team carried him ^[5]. Among his honours are the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna in 1998, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008 ^[1].

In 1995 Tendulkar married Anjali Mehta, a paediatrician six years his senior whom he had first met at Mumbai airport in 1990. Anjali gave up her medical practice to manage the household while he toured, a decision both have discussed openly in interviews. The couple have two children: a daughter, Sara, born in 1997, and a son, Arjun, born in 1999, who later became a professional cricketer himself and appeared in the Indian Premier League for Mumbai Indians ^[6].

For a man watched by hundreds of millions, Tendulkar guarded an unusually quiet private life. He was known to drive his sports cars through Mumbai in the small hours of the morning to avoid crowds, and he wrote in his autobiography, Playing It My Way, published in 2014, about the strain of being unable to take his family to a cinema or a restaurant without security planning ^[6]. Off the field his interests ran to music, watches, and food, and he invested in restaurants and a range of business and endorsement ventures that made him among the wealthiest athletes of his era ^[1].

Age and injury shaped the final decade of his career. A serious tennis elbow condition around 2004 and 2005 required surgery and forced him to remodel parts of his batting, yet he returned to some of his most productive years: in 2010, at thirty seven, he scored 1,562 Test runs, the best calendar year of his career ^[3]. He retired from one day internationals in December 2012 and played his 200th and final Test in November 2013 against the West Indies at the Wankhede Stadium, ending with a farewell speech that left much of the crowd, and many watching on television, in tears ^[5].

Hours after that last match, the Government of India announced that Tendulkar would receive the Bharat Ratna, the country's highest civilian award. When it was conferred in February 2014 he became, at forty, its youngest recipient and the first sportsperson honoured ^[1]. In 2012 he had already been nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's Parliament, serving a six year term as a nominated member, which is why official records list him as both cricketer and politician; his attendance drew criticism, and he donated his parliamentary salary to charitable causes ^[7].

Since retirement he has remained close to the game as a mentor for the Mumbai Indians franchise, a commentator on occasion, and an ambassador for cricket ventures worldwide. His autobiography became one of the fastest selling adult hardbacks in Indian publishing history, and a biographical film, Sachin: A Billion Dreams, reached cinemas in 2017 ^[6].

Anyone asking who was Sachin Tendulkar at the crease can start with the sound of Indian stadiums chanting his name between deliveries. For a generation that came of age after India's 1991 economic liberalisation, he was the country's first truly national celebrity of the satellite television era, and economists and editors only half joked that Indian productivity dipped when he batted. The Australian batsman Donald Bradman remarked that Tendulkar's style reminded him of his own, a comparison repeated so often that the two names became permanently linked ^[1].

His influence on the sport outlasted his records. A wave of Indian batsmen, Virat Kohli chief among them, grew up copying his stance and citing him as the reason they picked up a bat. In 2010 the International Cricket Council named him the Cricketer of the Year, and in 2019 he was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame ^[3]. Time magazine placed him on its 2012 list of the hundred most influential people in the world.

The most repeated Sachin Tendulkar facts, the hundred hundreds, the 34,357 international runs, the twenty four year career, explain his place in record books but not quite his place in India. Supporters called him the God of Cricket, a title he consistently deflected, saying he was a mortal who made mistakes. Fittingly, the Wankhede Stadium where he ended his career now has a stand bearing his name, and Shivaji Park, where Achrekar first threw him a ball, still fills each morning with children chasing the same beginning ^[2].