Shuttle Blasts Off

Ten years after his triumph on badmintons hallowed stage at Birmingham,Gopichand is a willing raconteur of his story,though Sharma maintains that chasing his subject,taken aback at someone wanting to write an entire tome on him,was at times more difficult than convincing the publishers. Youve got to thank that grandmother of all badminton honours,the All England Championship,shuttles equivalent of Wimbledon,for throwing up a second gritty tale of excellence in this fondly followed sport,after Prakash Padukone played out a graceful career two decades ago.

Badminton rarely gets written about in the longest form of literature and in English. With some of the biggest names emerging from non-English-speaking countries like China,Korea and Indonesia,there are less than half-a-dozen life-portraits. Shuttlers are also a secretive lot,reticent about their tactics and fiercely clannish when training and plotting alongside compatriots.

Indias paucity of global excellence in Olympic sport in general also means that very few athletes have presented stories worthy of being explored. It helped here that Gopichand was persuaded to re-tell his inspiring tale,for he admits to being the sort who plays,forgets and moves on,never inclined to collect any souvenirs whether photographs,written memories or newspaper files bunched on clipboards.

As coach now,Gopichands charges will tell you that he refrains from narrating his own accounts to them. But his 2001 triumph needed to be chronicled,even if all it would convey is a snakes-and-ladders story of beating the odds,erring,failing,persisting and preparing intelligently,before his playing days culminated in the All England title. Gopichands is also a values-fount and skillset being passed onto the next generation notably Saina Nehwal thus giving us a blueprint of Indias future in shuttle. It wont be surprising if a copy has been snapped up by the Chinese,so trite and cryptic are interviews and so scarce the flow of information in the East Asia-dominated badminton world.

Gopichand was a hyper-energetic boy from a small Andhra town,Ongole,who loved the outdoors. His parents with modest means zeroed in on badminton in Hyderabad because they saw many cars and scooters around tennis courts,oozing affluence,and thought it prudent to stick to a lower-middle-class sport so that their boy didnt suffer from an inferiority complex. The recital builds on every effort taken by Gopichand to become faster and stronger than his peers,seeking seclusion,drawing up his own tough regimens,realising that it would eventually be physical fitness and not mere silken skill that would take him forward. The Chinese would be beaten not by stroke or touch,but by speed and power, he realises after a bitter loss to a Chinese at an early All England. He took primitive facilities as well as selectors whims into his stride,without wasting too much energy fighting officialdom. He showed frequent spunk and conviction when choosing coaches and moving on,everything done with the sole aim to improve his court craft,and eventually did his own thing in the lead-up to the All England. You had to play the game the Chinese werent prepared for,think your own strategies,and I had to take some strong calls as there was no Indian coach of that calibre or vision, he says.

Gopichands surgery after an on-court injury and his year-long fight-back to fitness it left him with a lingering limp and being called langdaa could make a chicken-soup-for-the-soul entry,but it is his on-court improvisations that make for compelling reading. Right from developing an audacious jump-smash and an attacking style,to his slow embrace of defensive tosses and flicks that were forced on him post-injury,this is a personal graph of a hot-headed teenager who tempered his game and chiselled his strokes with the help of yoga and an almost hermit-like living.

Perhaps the most obsessive and endearing of his traits is revealed when Gopi,the young player,carts used shuttles from international matches,for the bird was an expensive investment at that time and a smash-centric shuttler like him needed them in bulk.

This is the second account of a sportsman coming out this winter,after Abhinav Bindras memoirs. Gopichand too comes across as someone who,eight years after his retirement,can embrace his regrets,explain his arrogance in climbing the pinnacle of Indian badminton,and be unapologetic about bitter rivalries,revenge and his paranoia about an opponent getting better of him. While Gopichand is the supreme hero of this narrative,pen sketches of his contemporaries Rajeev Bagga,

Dipankar Bhattacharya and Abhinn Shyam Gupta show his ungrudging respect for rivals back home,even though he was not generous as an opponent in his playing years.

Theres also a brief cameo from

Rajinikanth who impressed the adolescent Gopi so much that he too wanted a moustache. A rare fetish-phase for a boy who followed the monkish path all through his life,and considered going to a Bangalore pub on a few Saturday evenings to sip a soft drink a grudging bribe to mates who dragged him along.