Shuttle King

Shuttle King

Some time ago Pullela Gopichand was provoked enough into voicing a very old lament. Shuttling his way through the National Championships in Jaipur, he protested against the ``obsession with cricket coverage'' in India. Now, on the day after his greatest hour thus far, as he contemplates the reaction back home to his spectacular run to the All England Badminton title in Birmingham, he may be tempted to repeat the charge. At first glance, he would be entitled to do so. Take a look. An Indian sportsperson brings glory to his country and his sport by scalping the toughest array of challengers possible -- an extremely rare milestone for a country still struggling to make it past the lone bronze at the Olympics -- and look what's expected of him. Instead of a few moments to flash his toothy grin and bow to a round of applause for him, and him alone, he is supposed to share centrestage with a tweaker. Gopichand, that most wonderful of sporting phenomena -- the underdog who romances pundits and laypersons bytriumphing against all odds -- must be part of a twin act with Harbhajan Singh, who may have produced a hat-trick for the record books but whose exploits in no way set his team on the path to victory. Yes, on first glance, the 27-year-old shuttler would appear to have no grounds for amending the allegation he levelled in Jaipur.

On second glance, however, Gopichand must banish any such grievance. By holding aloft badminton's shiniest, most coveted trophy, he has ensured that now his country will have something more to think about than just its 11 flanneled fools pathetically reduced to lamb-hood at home. If cricket has monopolised the attentions of Indians in recent decades, the reasons go beyond its addictive rhythm and the cultural parallels it invites with life in the subcontinent. The main reason is that it is the only game in which India seem to be in the big league, in which they seem to be capable of battling it out with the best. Every spectator loves a victory, or at least the chimera of one. And by raising his game to be counted among the best in a sport that took shape in a Pune cantonment in the mid-nineteenth century, Gopichand has joined that tiny club of non-cricketing icons with Viswanathan Anand, K. Malleswari, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi.

In doing so, Gopichand has not only raised his own game, he has raised the bar in badminton as such by returning to it the delicate touch and the feline strokeplay Indian shuttlers were reputed for decades ago before the Danes, Chinese, Indonesians and Malaysians smashed them out to the sidelines with their power games. Nervous unforced errors aside, the shuttler from Andhra Pradesh demonstrated an ability to play on his own terms to exploit his strength in net play -- not only in the final, but in earlier rounds too against world number one Peter Gade and Olympic champion Ji Xinpeng. One incident stands out, when he threw his racquet on the ground during his tie with Gade, and later confessed that since he was not naturally inclined to showing anger, he took the extreme step to unnerve the top seed. Clearly, Pullela Gopichand has become what his country's cricketers can only aspire to be, a tiger abroad.