How young Prithvi Shaw brought home the essential joy of sport

By Anand Vasu
One of the reasons many of us start reading the newspaper from the sports page is that this is where the good news usually is. But a strange transformation has taken place these days: the back page often looks like the front page.

There are more stories on corruption in sports, more column inches spent on the magnitude of television rights deals and consequently less celebration of the essential joys that sports essentially provides.

A departure from this was Prithvi Shaw’s century on Test debut for India against the West Indies — the youngest Indian to do so. Yes, the bowling attack was hardly the most threatening in the world; yes, the pitch was docile and there were no demons to worry about and, yes, this was the first innings of the match of a series and there was little obvious pressure on the batsman.

But all that pales in comparison when you consider what this achievement really was. Forget for a moment the references to other players and resist the temptation to immediately glorify the achievement and ask if it can be sustained. In isolation, here is an 18-year-old walking out to the middle to do what he loves best, against grown men, some of whom are one and a half times his height, expressing himself with pure freedom and spreading great joy.

Here was Shaw, coming good on years of predictions that he would one day play for India and succeed. It has been a blazing trail — from the 546 he scored in a Harris Shield match in Mumbai for his school Rizvi Springfield, when he was only 14, to the centuries on Ranji Trophy debut at 16 — much like that other short batsman from Mumbai who ended up with half the batting records in cricket — and centuries in his early outings in the Duleep and Irani Trophy.

Here was a moment when a young man’s dream came true. And truth be told, not just one young man’s. Shaw, whose family is from Bihar, brought glory to the Ranji team of Mumbai, the state of Maharashtra and eventually India. The outsider became an insider, he crossed the borders that political parties mark between a migrant and a son of the soil to become a hero.

Sports has this ability to uplift, not just because it is intrinsically magical, but because it is unscripted and accessible. While only a handful in a billion have it in them to play at the highest level, win cricket matches or Olympic medals for India, almost everyone has kicked a ball or run a race in her childhood. It is the most natural thing to do, whether on the field, in the backyard or at a ground.

That is why what sporting heroes do on the field is at once accessible — hey, I wanted to hit the ball like that once — and an object of great admiration. We know full well how difficult it is to do it at that degree of excellence. Sports is, or should be, unscripted, and this means its heroes are very real, compared to, say, the best actors who are reading someone else’s lines.

More than anything else, sports can be reassuringly familiar and yet surprising within a single hour. While there is nothing more Indian than batsmen piling on the runs at home, it is not every day that one becomes the youngest Indian to hit a Test century on his debut, as Shaw did on October 4.

While there was much else going on in India at the time, from politicians trading insults to stock markets crashing to courts passing landmark rulings, there was still time in almost everyone’s day to sit down with the news and read about the boy who grew into a man before our eyes. There was time at the end of a hard day’s work to turn on the television and relive that moment when Shaw got to his century and raised his bat to the grateful applause of a nation. And these are the moments in sport that make all the struggles that went before worth it.

(Anand Vasu is a cricket writer.)