Borg, Willis, Agassi, Beckham8230; Dhoni?

To anyone looking out for fashion statements, Indian sportsmen offer the equivalent of a 8216;8216;no comment8217;8217;. And so the exceptions really stand out. Syed Kirmani with his 8216;8216;Kojak8217;8217; tribute, Vinod Kambli with his Kirmani tribute, Leander Paes with his pony-tail, Jugraj and Prabhjot, and now Dhoni.

As for the rest, well, they stick to the crowd. Sania, too, actually makes no fashion statement; Even her glasses are from Preity Zinta in Kal Ho Na Ho. The West is wowed less by what she wears, more by what she represents.

Many years ago Sachin Tendulkar got a makeover done. It consisted of a short cut8212;the better, perhaps, to emphasise his determined jaw8212;and liberal use of hair gel. Ditto Sourav Ganguly, who was given the additional benefit of glasses. Result: They both looked like high-maintenance techies which, in fact, is what they are/were. Rahul Dravid hasn8217;t had a makeover; he8217;s always resembled a techie.

Their fashion statements stem from their deeply rooted urban middle-class conservatism. Dhoni, bless him, has none of those pretensions, ergo the decision to let his hair down. Nor did Sehwag but, somewhere along the way, he realised that to live in Delhi one must do as Delhi8217;ites do.

Fashion statements have been part of modern sport almost since it first began, with the dawn of the 20th century. Poor old Wimbledon, with its strict all-white, ladies-and-gentlemen dress code, was just asking for outrageous styles and it copped the lot. Gussie Moran8217;s lace panties in 1949 are the most famous but Suzanne Lenglen wore short skirts in 1922 and Alice Marble shorts a decade later.

The men were more restrained they would be, wouldn8217;t they! but their turn would come. One of sport8217;s key 8216;clash of generations8217; moments, similar to Elvis8217;s first TV appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show and the Nixon-Kennedy debates, was the Wimbledon final of 1974. Here Ken Rosewall, short back-and-sides in place and neatly side-parted, was outgunned by Jimmy Connors, nothing in place except his game.

Even the Connors phenomenon was swept aside by Borg, whose only known chink was a superstitious streak that prevented him from shaving through the tournament. The 1970s was when sport finally shed its shackles and embraced fashion. George Best had set the trend in 1965 with his Beatle-locks; in the mid-1970s, the provincial British town of West Bromwich produced the pioneering black trio of Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendan Batson, the first time ever an English club had fielded three Black footballers. With their frizzy hair-do, could they have been called anything but the Three Degrees?

Ah, the 70s! They gave us Bob Willis8217;s frizz, Ian Botham8217;s shaggy mane, McEnroe, Keegan8230; Moustaches were de rigeur and shorts were really short. But they were nothing as compared to the decade that followed, where the lifestyle excesses overflowed onto the field of play.

It may seem improbable now but back then Andre Agassi was just a spoilt, short kid with a mullet and a hairy stomach. Actually, he was much more than that; he was precocious, too, and smart enough to know what would work with the public. 8216;8216;Image is everything8217;8217; was the tag line of one of his ads and his colourful clothing, self-professed junk-food diet and ear-stud certainly said more than his two bland rivals of the time, Jim Courier and Pete Sampras.

That brings us to the 1990s, an era that belongs almost exclusively to David Beckham. The man took personal style to an art form, whether in choice of wife, tattoos, sarongs, children8217;s names or, most famously, hairdo. Natural blonde, bleached, shaved, stubbled, cornrowed, alice-banded, every change of style was aped the world over, Toronto to Tokyo. The man has been pilloried for having no personality but it8217;s raked in millions for him; he can be everything to everyone, gays to giggly schoolgirls. He made metrosexuality.

And that8217;s easier said than done, especially in the uber-macho world of professional football. Even with a vacuous mind, it takes guts to admit to wearing your wife8217;s thongs. Now that8217;s what you call a fashion statement.

Dhoni isn8217;t quite there yet but if we leave him to his own devices, and fingers crossed we do, he will express himself in whatever way he wishes. That, ultimately, is what we want from any creative mind.