At his temples, his neatly-cut grey hair tells a tale. It’s the product of age (51) and the offspring of tension. Coaching India in cricket is the cousin of managing England in football. It’s victory or nothing. He got victory a month ago and he left.
Rahul Dravid is picking at his salad over dinner in a Parisian cafe. He does this carefully if not quite as studiously as he once decided which ball to hit. The subject is Rafael Nadal and he says “people want to remember athletes at their best. They don’t want to see champions struggle”.
“But,” says Dravid, who himself had a degree in endeavour and overcoming, “there’s a beauty in struggle.”
This dinner was not the original plan. The plan was to accompany a retired legend from one sport to see an almost retired legend in another. What do they see? Is a champion intrinsically a fan? Do they feel awe yet also empathy?
Dravid, whose last assignment was head coach when India won the men’s T20 World Cup in June, is the right man to chat with about Nadal. He understands endings as all athletes do. He played for India for 16 years so he knows the discipline of longevity but also that elasticity expires and feet slow. You can’t be what you were if you are not where the ball is.
But the plan failed. Dravid went to see Nadal v Novak Djokovic, both men he admires, at Roland Garros and I got busy with another story. Scheduling, you understand.
So I get the second-best thing, a reluctant debrief on Nadal-Djokovic over dinner. Dravid’s not too keen on this because he’s spent a life buried under questions. But I’m persistent and we’ve known each other for nearly 30 years and he acquiesces with a sigh.
Athletes might travel the world but they do so with a narrow focus. When you play – or coach – you barely see anything beyond your own world. Dravid, an interested man with a reading habit, has never spent so long at an Olympics. Never seen Nadal at Roland Garros even as he understands the idea of gods and holy grounds.
At the Olympic hockey as India play he’s transfixed. “I now know what fans feel like,” he says. But when I ask if he likes this distance from sport, which is where the rest of us live, he’s uneasy. No, he wants to be inside a sport, feeling its rhythms and its edginess. Not just watch a game but affect it. “I couldn’t watch cricket without being involved.”
The French wander by our cafe table, oblivious to him, though in 1900, here in Paris, cricket was held at the Olympics and only two teams participated. England, represented by a club from Devon and, gulp, France, aided by members of the British embassy.
Cricket wants to be at these Games, this “celebration of sport” as Dravid puts it. “You have to wait four years,” he says in wonder at the Olympian’s wait for another chance. Cricket has its own four-yearly World Cup but it can’t compare. “A lot of important cricket happens around the Cup,” he says. It’s not, as usually happens for many athletes at the Olympics, the only place to become a legend.
Nadal v Djokovic is two men fighting each other, as they ward off time. The Serb is sharp, the Spaniard is searching his memory for who he was. Still, Dravid says, shaking his head in disbelief, “the level of skill on certain points, the level of fight”.
Everything ends, but Dravid doesn’t buy the chatter which surrounds ageing athletes. Retire? Who says? “People say retire at your best, but you play because you love it.” And Nadal still loves it. He’ll struggle till he doesn’t want to struggle. At 0-4 down in the second set, he makes it 4-4.
“He never gave up,” Dravid smiles. He, obdurate himself once, admires this type of athlete who comes to work with a pickaxe. Dig, dig, dig, till you’re empty.
These Olympics consist mostly of the shining young, but also of greatness that is slowly rusting. Talent always leaks away. We see this but we never know what it feels like. “When you have it,” explains Dravid, “then you can get yourself out of trouble.”
He pauses.
“When you’re great, you’re not hopeful.”
No, talent just confidently flows.
Inside the cafe, a waiter from Bangladesh recognises Dravid. He arrives wearing a shy smile and asks for a wefie. The dinner’s over and Dravid poses politely. In some small ways, fan and legend are the same. At Roland Garros, he saw Nadal like people once saw him. An enduring part of our lives.
“So many people stood,” he says when Nadal lost and left.
“I stood as well.”
Rohit Brijnath
The Straits Times
