As Sachin Tendulkar turns 50 today, I want to draw your attention to something that seems to be about him but is about everything else. Every region has its “greats” who are usually old, or dead, or both. There is a reason for this and it cannot be honorable.
The term ‘greatest’ is commonly used to refer to Sachin Tendulkar, but in a manner that is contrary to what it is meant to convey. He is regarded as “one of the greatest batsmen” in the history of cricket, which is also a way of saying that he is not the greatest. In the middle of his career, he has been called “one of the greatest batsmen of all time”. Many of his peers who shared that position, who were once considered equal to him, did not tolerate this.
I do not deny wisdom in the expression ‘one of the greatest’. It suggests that there are only greats, and then some immortal giants, and that these giants are equal because at their level, objective measures of ranks collapse. There can only be artistic ambiguity. I accept that. But then there is one man who is regarded as “the greatest batsman in the history of the game” – Don Bradman. By whom is it believed? by cricketers and sports intellectuals; And consequently by cricket fans who may not have seen a single ball faced. It has become a courtesy to call Bradman the best. He has been described as “the greatest” for his journalistic rigor alone.
In many areas, the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) has that quality. He belongs to some other time, very old or dead. Pele is in football. Rod Laver in Tennis. Every country has its own literature and films.
They are “the greatest” not because people know their craft intimately. They are the greatest because they are not relevant to a generation that has been asked to form an opinion about who the goat is. What happens is that in every generation, athletes do not have the heart to believe any one of them is greater than them all, so they believe in an old faraway legend, well past competition, the GOAT, and It carries on with every generation, reinforcing an ancient time mascot “the greatest that ever lived”, a stunning historical fallacy that belies the envy of peers, the romanticism of distance and the young for the old and the condolence of the living for the dead. Everlasting since.
That is why when “Indian writers in English” are asked who is the “greatest Indian writer in English”, they say RK Narayan. Because RK Narayan is not a Peer, he is beyond competition. It’s safe to vote him the GOAT. In fact, I think most contemporary Indian writers haven’t even read him. Some writers used to claim that the GOAT is Kiran Nagarkar, which is also a safe option. Language writers in every region of India have their GOATs and it’s never their peers, but there are grand oldies who don’t compete. If you were to poll contemporary Indian filmmakers to find the ‘Greatest Indian Film Director of all time’, we know that the winner would be Satyajit Ray.
It is like that political phenomenon where “senior leaders” of the Congress want the Gandhi family to lead the party alone because they do not have the heart to support one of their contemporaries. There are ways of assessing how great the greats of the game were. Time. Statistician Charles Davis compared the performance of giants with that of their peers and expressed their outliers as one standard deviation. Standard deviation is roughly a measure of how far a statistical reading is from the average of its range. In basketball, when points per game are considered, Michael Jordan’s standard deviation from the average performance of his era was 3.4. In football, when goals per game were considered, Pele stood at 3.7. Don Bradman was the most exceptional when all major sports were taken into account – his batting average made him stand apart from his peers, with a standard deviation measurement of 4.4.
But then, it doesn’t tell the whole story. GOATs may be exceptional compared to their peers, but that does not assure their greatness compared to contemporary greats. There are a few ways to argue this point. For example, we can say that Bradman never faced the kind of bowling that Tendulkar had to deal with, or that Bradman never made difficult tours to unfamiliar pitches, such as in India where he The average average would have fallen. Furthermore, even though it is a myth that there was no off-side rule in Pele’s time, versions of that rule in his time favored strikers, and he might not have scored as many goals if he played today. But all these arguments are pointless because we cannot be sure about all the factors. While there is one indicator that suggests GOATs of another era, in some sports if not all, they may be more common than we think.
Consider the extraordinary feat of Roger Bannister who in 1954 became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, or at least the first to do so. This was the final frontier of middle-distance running, but soon after his achievement, many ran a mile in under four minutes. Today, the world record is about 17 seconds faster. It is not just a result of ‘motivation’, training and nurture. Instead, what it suggests is that one-time sporting achievement is the result of earlier social privilege. As more people get opportunities to participate in sports, true talents are born. And they show that the greats of old were best only in their own little circles.
Is Tendulkar bigger than Bradman is an interesting question. The most interesting question in every sport never gets asked: Who is second best?
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and producer of the Netflix series ‘Decoupled’.
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