As the Indian cricket writer managed to upgrade his column from the last page to the first, he missed on his way the most important story of his life. Or did he choose to? Sure, he has now gone to town about the match-fixing scam, but why did he not tell us the story as and when it was happening all these years, much much before the weekly Outlook broke it in 1997?
Why, indeed, the silence? Did he want to not spoil the fun, while overfeeding us with the great exploits and grand failures of the stars, by reporting what seems to be the sad truth, that cricket was better fixed than the WWF's fights? Or was it simply that he felt his beat did not allow him to write about the fixer's world? Or was he too much in awe of the star, basking in that proximity enjoyed by the sports writer? Or, perhaps, he just did not know?
Granted, the cricket writer was never meant to be the investigative reporter. But when he is actually spending much of his time with a group of pampered young and not-so young men, who are not beyond intrigues and gossip, it is impossible that the word was not out there. But the reporters preferred not to tell the hundred of millions cricket fans of South Asia that anything was untoward. Year after year, match after match, over after over, the fiction of probity was kept alive, without a whiff of questioning.
While the other sportswriters remained stuck to the back pages, the cricket reporter received his promotion to the front-page the day "Kapil's Devils" walked away with the World Cup in 1983. Our cricket scribe revelled in his new-found status, continued to write drably, and yet more patriotically about the game. He whined when India lost, went orgasmic when Pakistan got licked, groaned when an Indian missed a century, and castigated the umpires. He knew all about the North-South-West-East basis on which players got selected, and his box stories would be on these lines—"Azhar's cap missing", "Ganguly's goggles stolen, Bengalis enraged" …