In an attempt to learn from the great man, Rahul Dravid, I recently read "Timeless steel- series of articles written on Rahul Dravid". I would highly receommend the book to every cricket fan. Few excerpts from different articles I found worth sharing:
- Dravid the cricketer was immense, but the man is just as exceptional, if not more so, which is amazing, because to remain a successful athlete at the highest level for as long as he did requires a degree of self-absorption and even narcissism, since rarely does a sport allow its successful practitioners to develop rounded personalities. In a sense, that was Dravid’s biggest triumph. It would be hard to find a cricketer who was as devoted and consumed by his craft, or one who spent as much time polishing it, but he also found energy and time to understand and engage with the world outside cricket. He is earnest and curious, and has varied interests.
- Batsmen like Dravid don’t bring a song to a spectator’s heart; they can sometimes be tedious to watch (though Dravid was a beautiful batsman in his own right). But they are the kind whose presence every team is grateful for. The true indication of Dravid’s greatness came when batting called for more than driving on the up, when the ball curled in the air and fizzed off the pitch, and when survival became an end in itself. To India’s enormous fortune, when a situation called for a batsman to stand up and be counted, Dravid was there. Almost always. Some are born to greatness. Rahul Dravid acquired it. In some ways, that is a greater achievement.
- Dravid, in his classic self-effacing way, confessed to being, for the most part, an on-side player. The bowlers had come to know of his strengths and had stopped feeding him on his legs. He had to find another way to score runs. Which is how he became one of cricket’s outstanding off-side batsmen. It must have taken hundreds of hours of shadow practice to get into his system, so as to make it absolutely seamless. Dravid went through the grind. Nothing great has ever been accomplished without passion.
- In cricket, as in life, it is not the most talented who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change. Dravid’s career was an eternal quest to get better. Everything he did was to as he puts it best “deliver the bat at the right time”. It all began with his middle-class upbringing, of being taught to believe in fundamental values like humility and perspective. He has also had some very old, solid friendships that have kept him rooted.
- When Rahul Dravid walked into the dressing room of St. Lawrence ground in Canterbury on a cold spring morning, you could feel he was different from all others. He did not swagger with cockiness or bristle with macho competitiveness. He went quietly around the room shaking the hand of every Kent player- greeting everyone the same, from the captain to the most junior. It was not the mannered behavior of a seasoned overseas professional; it was the natural courtesy of a real gentleman. We met a special human being first, an international cricketer second.
- Real toughness takes many different forms. Dravid could appear shy and slightly vulnerable off the pitch; in the middle, you could sense a depth of resilience. Many overseas players liked to set them apart from the county pros- as though they had to swear more loudly and clap their hands more violently to prove that international cricketers were tougher than the rest. Not Dravid. He never paraded his toughness. It emerged between the lines of his performances. Instead, he always talked about learning, about gathering new experiences- as though his cricketing education wasn’t complete, as though there were many more strands of his craft to hone. His journey, you could tell, was driven by self-improvement. One word has attached itself to Dravid wherever he has gone- gentleman. The word is often misunderstood. Gentlemanliness is not mere surface charm- the easy lightness of confident sociability. Far from it; the real gentleman doesn’t run around flattering everyone in sight; he makes sure he fulfills his duties and obligations without drawing attention to himself or making a fuss. Gentlemanliness is as much about restraint as it is about appearances. Above all, a gentleman is not only courteous, he is also constant; always the same, whatever the circumstances or the company.
- On the field, what set Dravid apart was a rare combination of technical excellence, mental toughness and emotional restraint. He was restrained in celebration, just as he was restrained in disappointment- exactly as the true gentleman should be. And yet his emotional self-control co-existed with fierce competitiveness and national pride. Dravid single-handedly disproved the absurd argument that tantrums and yobbishness are signs of “how much you care” or, worse still, “how much you want it”. He was rarely outdone in terms of hunger or passion. And he was never outdone in terms of behavior or dignity. Those twin aspects of his personality – the dignified human being and the passionate competitor- ran alongside each other, the one never allowed to interfere with the other. He knew where the boundaries were, in life and in cricket.
- Dravid is an inward-looking player, an analyzer, constantly scrutinizing his art, dismembering his innings and emotions into pieces for study. Predictably, he is too intelligent to be at ease with this hero business; he finds it discomforting, exaggerated. He says “I don’t really feel like hero, my only qualification is that I come on TV more than a nurse or a soldier or a teacher. Anyways, I don’t think sportsmen can really be considered heroes”.
- Dravid’s batting is not, for some, immediately appealing; it is like some paintings, it requires a second look, a considered appreciation. Soon its beauty is revealed, its simple elegance, its clean, classical lines, its divorce from awkwardness, its stylish symmetry. He plays to his own wondrous sheet music. He is the owner of more shots than some believe, he is merely fastidious about what to play when.
- Laxman offered us art, Sehwag liberation, Tendulkar consistent genius, but Dravid taught us that the ability to reassure is a gift. For such a neat man, he loved an ugly scrap. Runs might emerge in unsightly dribbles- sometimes it was as if to be uninhibited was an act of immodesty for him- but he’d keep going. A leave, a block, a block, a leave, and this should have been boring-and well, yes, sometimes it was- except, by the end he’d built a lead, or rescued a situation, or offered India a winning chance, and you’d look at this man, shirt bound by sweat, ferocious in his concentration, and just think, bloody hell. Struggle, in all its forms, was his hymn.
