A team sport for sure, but the legendary Sachin Tendulkar played in the Indian team as the single vital cog for most years in his international career. There are so many stories, especially from the late 90s and early 2000s, when people would get along with their usual business the moment he got Out, but stayed glued to the screens in admiration and to watch him bat like very few did during those years.
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In a career which spanned across 24 years, Tendulkar managed to achieve what every cricketer could only dream of at the highest level. Despite the modern day Cricket skewed in the favour of batters with all the field restrictions in and a host of majority playing conditions suited for them to have an edge over the bowlers, not a single player looks like even coming close to his world record of 100 international centuries across formats.
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Scores of players who have made a mark for themselves at the international level, including the legends in MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli have looked up to him as a role model while playing the sport.
Sachin Tendulkar once revealed that his favourite sportsperson has never been a cricketer
While Tendulkar has, on many occasions in the past, expressed his huge admiration and respect for the legendary batters in Sunil Gavaskar and Vivian Richards amongst others, his idol as a young man was surprisingly never a cricketer. It was in fact, the former American Tennis great John McEnroe.
“I think there is something wrong with me because my sporting hero has always been outside cricket and it has always been John McEnroe,” remarked Tendulkar during an interview in the year 2009.
Having admired McEnroe since the age of five, Tendulkar considered him as one of the very few players whose hand-eye co-ordination might have been a match of this own.
“I used to roam around the colony with a head band, sweat band and tennis racket imitating him,” reckoned Tendulkar.
For those unaware, McEnroe had won seven Grand Slam singles titles, nine Grand Slam men’s doubles titles, and one Grand Slam mixed doubles title in his professional career. His singles match record of 82–3 in 1984 remains the best single season win rate of the Open Era.
