By Just how much does a player owe his sport? Conversely, how much does a sport owe a player? When it was predicted recently at a literature festival that soon we would have a player earning Rs. 50 crores (about 60 million dollars) in the IPL, the audience gasped.
Earlier, the Spanish golfer Jon Rahm who had once said he was not interested in money, had jumped on Saudi Arabia’s LIV bandwagon for a reported half a billion. That’s 500,000,000 (five hundred million) dollars.
The door to further IPL riches has been opened by Hardik Pandya who returns to Mumbai Indians after leading Gujarat Titans to the title. His choosing to make the shift is a shot in the arm for player power — till now it was the franchises which decided if they wanted a player or not. And by getting a percentage of the transfer fee (beside his regular fee) he has shown where the money lies.
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Those criticising the players for seeing sport merely as business (as many of us have done) usually don’t have access to such numbers. But would you or wouldn’t you accept the offer as one that would mean financial security for a few generations of your family while doing something you love and are probably among the best at?
Pandya’s case is straightforward. The IPL rules allow him to switch teams, negotiate his salary and work out the percentages with the team he is leaving. Careers are short, made shorter by injury. This has been an issue with Pandya in particular. A second career outside the game means starting in the middle at best, which for a player who was at the top is difficult.
Sport has been a business, too, for years, and any pretense that it is otherwise is naive. It is not unusual for human beings, whether bankers or journalists or builders to move to where the pay is best.
In the case of Rahm, the question is whether he is letting his sport down by switching sides. When sports go through such churning, a small percentage of players make a lot of money but when things settle, players at the base of the pyramid get uplifted, too. This is what happened with cricket after Kerry Packer bought the players for a private league and then arrived at a compromise with the official body.
But as those who stayed loyal to the PGA are discovering, sometimes loyalty can cost you when the factions kiss and make up. That, too, happened with those who replaced the Packer players when the ones who had gone away returned.
Things are in a flux in the golf world, but the questions we started this column with will remain relevant as long as sport is played, and as long as the imbalance in talent (which is the essence of all competition) exists. It may be old-fashioned to think that a player owes sport more than sport owes him if it owes him anything at all.
