Sporting heroes, shared memories: The power of nostalgia in sport

The Hindu

10 hours ago

When the public celebration of RCB's victory began, and before disaster struck, I remembered an occasion when I was among those who had lined up to cheer an Indian champion. This was when Prakash Padukone returned with the All-England badminton trophy A couple of us students stood outside a newspaper office on Bengaluru's M. G. Road, hoping that a photographer's camera might accidentally get our faces into next day's papers. We would have gone anyway, we worshipped Prakash.
Sport, like music, is memory's favourite accomplice. But it has a built-in obsolescence. Players retire. Stadiums change names. The game you grew up with gets new rules, new formats, new millionaires. And yet, something endures. Nostalgia.
My earliest memory of cricket is listening to radio commentary with my parents. I remember the commentator, V. M. Chakrapani, whom I met years later as a journalist. We didn't watch the matches, we listened to them.
There is something deeply democratic about nostalgia in sport. The 1983 World Cup belongs as much to a retired bank clerk in India as it does to Kapil Dev. Just as a young boy hitting 'sixes' over the neighbour's wall can still vibrate with the imagined possibility that he could have been India's answer to Clive Lloyd. Nostalgia makes champions of us all. The goal scored in a school match was as vital, in the mind, as Maradona's in 1986.
And yet nostalgia can deceive. It makes us believe the past was pure, untouched by greed or error. That every contest was noble, every rivalry gentlemanly. It allows us to forgive our heroes, and forget their flaws. We speak of P. T. Usha's near-miss in 1984 as if she were a mythological figure whose tragedy ennobled a nation. Which, in a sense, she was — and did. There is a shared rhythm. Nostalgia calls for a recaller and a listener (or reader) — you have to interact with someone.
The danger, of course, is that it can freeze you. You say things like 'No one came close to _ ' (fill in the blank with any name from Hazare, Gavaskar, Tendulkar, Dravid, or as future nostalgists might say, 'Gill, Pant…..' Every generation believes its glories are unmatched. Even unmatchable. Often more fights break out over the skill of past champions than current ones. But nostalgia need not be a wall against the present. It is a bridge. It reminds us why we fell in love with sport in the first place. Not for the spreadsheets and strike-rates, but for the sense that anything was possible. That a boy from a small town could become Kapil Dev. That a girl running barefoot on a dusty field could become Mary Kom.
Nostalgia connects us to younger versions of ourselves. The boy who believed that form was temporary and class permanent. That defeat was never the end of a story. That tomorrow is another day. As the years rolled by, Prakash became a friend, and the newspaper office I stood outside offered me my first job.