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When Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan bought the Kolkata Knight Riders team during the first edition of Indian Premier League in 2008, he got cricketer Sourav Ganguly to lead the team. But after three seasons of less than mediocre results, it was time for KKR to bid adieu to Ganguly. For Ganguly, this was a big blow as the cricketer had been friends with SRK for a long time. In his autobiography, A Century is not Enough: My Roller-coaster Ride to Success, Ganguly recalled his time with SRK in KKR and shared his thoughts about the rumours that someone had “poisoned Shah Rukh’s ears against me.” He also shared how SRK was gracious enough to extend a hand of friendship even when Ganguly played for a rival team.
Ganguly shared before the start of IPL 4, there were speculations about his future with KKR and soon enough, CEO of the team, Venky Mysore told him that they won’t retain him as a player, and offered him a job as a mentor. Ganguly believed that he had more batting left in him and wondered if he should call Shah Rukh to have a direct chat with him, but he stopped himself. “I had known Shah Rukh for a long time and enjoyed a friendship with him. But it was not rocket science to deduce that the offer must have had his approval,” he wrote as he reminisced their friendship that first started in the year 2000.
As KKR went through one loss after another during their third season, Ganguly said that he would consult with Shah Rukh about their playing eleven. “I used to be in constant touch with him and in season three, more than once took his opinion while deciding upon the final eleven – something I had never done while picking an Indian eleven. But as I said, the IPL was managed and played in a completely different way,” he wrote.
Ganguly agreed that the team’s decision to remove him from captaincy was “quite justified” but he felt that to leave him out as a batsman was “unjustified.” This was the time when many people asked Ganguly if someone had been bad-mouthing him to SRK. “I was also asked many times if someone had poisoned Shah Rukh’s ears against me. My answer has been the same: I don’t think so. There was a theory doing the rounds that my chest-thumping in a particular match against Deccan Chargers at Eden Gardens had angered the KKR management,” he wrote.
Even though Ganguly left KKR and joined Pune Warriors but “KKR’s decision not to retain me did not come in the way of my personal friendship with Shah Rukh.” He shared that he played his last IPL match from Pune’s side, and it just so happened that he was playing against KKR at Eden Gardens. Shah Rukh was present in the stadium on that day and to show his respect for Ganguly, SRK performed a beautiful gesture. Ganguly recalled, “After the match, Shah Rukh came to our dressing room and suggested we go for a walk around the stadium and thank the crowd. He would always do that when we worked together. I readily said yes. We had just lost a close match and I was understandably upset. But Shah Rukh was kind. He said, ‘Dada, I can see they really love you in Kolkata’.”
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