THERE is no surprise left in American sport, no indiscretion too staggering, no drug-using, fire-arm brandishing, wife-beating incident that leaves us astonished.
ROHIT BRIJNATHTHERE is no surprise left in American sport, no indiscretion too staggering, no drug-using, fire-arm brandishing, wife-beating incident that leaves us astonished.
But then, Kobe Bryant.An adulterer. An alleged perpetrator of a sexual assault? This time we are incredulous.
This is not, so we were told, one of those indulged, bored, unconscionable stars with a taste for misadventure. This was a sweet halo-ed boy, smitten with his lovely wife, committed to his art, the new Jordan, rarely in trouble.
Kobe fit the picture of an unspoiled star on the straight and narrow. Perhaps he is, perhaps not. But we must consider this: who drew this picture? Did he decide this is how he wants us to see him, did we determine this was all there was to him?
There is a compelling issue at work here, and it is simply this: how well do we know an athlete, how far do they let us penetrate into their lives, where does image end and reality begin, how guilty are they of the stereotypes we conveniently assign to them?
In sport, we are quick to characterise people: in the lazy flicker of fingers on a keyboard we decide who is worthy, and who not. All very convenient, till we come up against Hansie Cronje.
He was all good, we surmised. A Bible-thumping Christian soldier, a captain brimming with a zeal that only missionaries carry, a man of considerable charisma and cricketing intellect. At an interview in Nagpur one year, he showed me a "mission statement" he had written for his team, which included the suggestion that players should be like godfathers to their teammates' children.
Of course people said the Delhi police had trumped up a case. Because Hansie did not fit the picture of cheat.
Athletes live in absurdly cocooned worlds, only few like Beckham will parade their personalities before us. But even him we got wrong. The spoilt star of 1998 became the courageous captain of 2002. Did he change that much, or did we err in labelling him?
Most champions draw a Chinese screen in front of their lives, they allow us only a glimpse of who they truly are. Like Tiger, they put forth a somewhat mechanical, sterilised version of themselves. Answers are carefully calibrated, smiles are rationed, opinions are diluted.
When Tiger Woods is asked whether Augusta (site of the Masters) should have women members, he is reluctant to reveal himself, for the consequences can be devastating to how he is perceived. Furthermore, however sensible his position he will be mocked by some, and so his response will be measured.
Some of it is a protection of privacy, the athlete willing to share with the public only a part of himself. After a dozen and more meetings with Sachin Tendulkar I am only a trifle better educated about him than before I met him. Certainly he is more complex than the boy-next-door, humble-but-hungry champion that he is happy for us to see him as.
Not everyone is as coy; some like Steve Waugh, who admittedly inhabits a less claustrophobic and less conservative world than Tendulkar, can be more outspoken, allowing us to see them with a sharper clarity. Sometimes, though, this outspokenness has a price: when Martina Hingis spoke out, inevitably she was left chewing on her adidas sneaker and was pilloried for it.
Most top athletes are often loath to attract unwarranted attention to themselves (McEnroe and friends excluded), and will tiptoe around controversy. Some of it is fear of the press' perverse fascination with the colourful story, some of it the athletes own need to preserve some manufactured image. Sport is business and sponsors are watching. Being disingenuous has become an art form. I once teased an Indian cricketer, better left nameless, who conducted an exclusive interview with a magazine, where he spoke for over an hour, on a variety of subjects, was wonderfully articulate, but still managed to say not a single sentence of any substance. It was a masterful performance in non-speak.
Athletes are also fitted into stereotypes, by nationality, by culture. Indians are humble, Australians rough and tough. Americans showy. But Mark Taylor had few rough edges, Pat Rafter was hardly fuelled by machismo, and Sourav Ganguly is some distance from humble. Yet, neither, as the Australians contend, is Ganguly an arrogant captain, as many of his teammates might testify, or spoilt, as we once insisted he was.
Pigeon-holing of any sort is dangerous. Glenn McGrath is ill-mannered on the field, but gracious off it. Chris Evert may have been almost English in her primness on court, but Ice Maiden was an inaccurate reflection of the vibrant, party-going, occasionally pot-smoking person she was off it. The first time I read that Pete Sampras reportedly had predilection for four-letter words, I was stunned: not because it is some cardinal sin but because it did not sit with his clean-cut, old-school, leaving-the-talking-to-his-racket image.
We all see athletes through prisms of bias, we draw a picture and often remain content with that. Only occasionally, like with Agassi (punk turned saviour), or George Foreman (menace turned minister), we alter our position.
With some athletes we see no good where some exists. With others we see only good. With Azharuddin, especially in his later days, many critics and spectators were unable to see anything redeemable about him. Yet when Harsha Bhogle once told me about how he slipped personal cheques to players during benefit matches it suggested immediately that there were more dimensions to him that we cared to see.
Similarly, we have mythologised and beatified Muhammad Ali to the point where fact is often defeated by fiction. The powerful book I have read in the past few years is Mark Kram's Ghosts of Manila, where his sometimes brutal deconstruction of Ali made me confront most things I held precious about the boxer.
As Kram writes in his introduction: ".this book is intended to be a corrective to the years of stenography that have produced the Ali legend. Cheap myth coruscates the man; the wire scheme for his sculpture is too big. Junk commentary has been slapped on to it to the point that a precise appreciation of just who Ali was (and is) has become obscured.''
Perhaps Kram is fashioned by his own prejudices, and his own interpretation is flawed, but it is the most stirring reminder to us that athletes are often not who we see them as.
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