Inspiring Sports Stories: Four Athletes That Inspired a Nation

LifeCaps Presents:

Inspiring Sports Stories

Four Athletes That Inspired A Nation

By Fergus Mason, Frank Forster, and Ryan August

© 2011 by Golgotha Press, Inc./LifeCaps

Published at SmashWords

www.bookcaps.com

Disclaimer

This book is not endorsed by any of the athletes it profiles, and should be considered unofficial.

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LifeCaps is an imprint of BookCaps™ Study Guides. With each book, a lesser known or sometimes forgotten life is recapped. We publish a wide array of topics (from baseball and music to literature and philosophy), so check our growing catalogue regularly (www.bookcaps.com) to see our newest books.

Rinku Singh and Dinsesh Patel

By Fergus Mason

Introduction

It’s hard to think of a game more fundamentally American than baseball. For well over a century it’s been one of the most popular sports in the USA and the World Series has been a highlight of the year for fans since 1903. Most American boys grew up playing catch with family and school friends, and millions have taken part in Little League games or played for their school or college team. For many a baseball scholarship has been a ticket to a college education and for others - the few who’re good enough and lucky enough to play at a professional level - it’s made their fortunes. Leading major league ball players can have annual earnings of millions of dollars and over the course of a career that can run into hundreds of millions – New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, the highest paid player in MLB history, had brought in over $353 million by the end of the 2013 season. There’s more to be gained than money too. The best ball players can enter the pantheon of American cultural heroes - players like Babe Ruth, who changed the whole face of the game in the 1920s and is still one of the standards today’s stars are measured against. All over the world, when people think of baseball they associate it with America.

Of course, the USA isn’t the only country where baseball is played. Despite the enduring legend of how it was invented by Abner Doubleday in 1839, the game doesn’t even have New World origins, and it certainly hasn’t stayed within America’s borders. A Canadian team has played in the World Series twice – the Toronto Blue Jays won it in 1992 and 1993. International competitions have been running for decades, with the first Baseball World Cup held in England in 1938. The game has been hugely popular in Japan and Korea for well over a century, and Asian teams now regularly win at an international level. There’s a whopping following in Latin America too, and it produces some astounding talent – Cuba won more Baseball World Cups than any other nation, starting with the second one when they took the trophy from Great Britain in 1939, and US teams have signed dozens of players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Australia has its own MLB-controlled league, and there are enthusiastic amateur teams all over the world, from Wales to New Zealand.

On the other hand, there are also countries where baseball hasn’t made much of an impact. Usually that’s because other games are already deeply embedded in the local culture. New sports tend to catch on where they fill a gap in what’s already available so if a nation already has a hugely popular bat and ball game the potential interest in baseball is lower. Through much of the British Commonwealth people already have a game that involves hitting a leather ball with a bat, and it’s cricket. Sometimes the cricket tradition goes back hundreds of years and loyalty to a local club more or less runs in families. In a situation like that few people are going to miss a match to watch a new game that they don’t truly understand. India is a classic example of that – a country where the sport has almost become a religion. If you’ve seen films like Slumdog Millionaire you’re probably familiar with the sight of Indian boys playing scratch cricket games all over the place, all of them dreaming about one day making the national team. In the face of that degree of passion, it’s obviously difficult for baseball to make much headway.

Baseball and cricket look majorly different, of course, but in 2007, an American sports promoter started to think about the things they have in common. He focused on one of them in particular – the need to throw a ball hard and accurately. He wondered if a country where tens of millions of men regularly play cricket also contained the talent to make it as a major league pitcher. His quest to satisfy that curiosity finally resulted in two young men from poor villages in northern India coming to the USA to train with a professional ball coach, then attempting to win fame and fortune as pro ball players. This is the story of how it happened.

Chapter 1: Early Lives

The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has a long history. Located in the north of the country, bordering Nepal, it’s been at the crossroads of some of history’s great migrations. Almost every invasion of northern India came through the area including the Huns and the Mughal Empire, who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. The legendary king Krishna is said to have been born there, and it was the heartland of several indigenous Indian empires. Finally in the early 19th century the British Army came from the south, overthrowing the Maratha warrior empire who had ruled the area – and preyed on its neighbors – for nearly 200 years, and Uttar Pradesh became part of British India. The ebbs and flows of history have given the area a rich and colorful heritage, with languages and religions mixing freely.

Today Uttar Pradesh is home to just under 200 million people. About 80% of them are Hindus, with 18% Muslims and the rest split into small minorities of Sikhs, Christians and Jains. The official language of the state is Hindi and almost everyone speaks it, but the language is split into at least five main dialects within the state. Uttar Pradesh has the third largest economy among India’s states, but it also has by far the largest population, so out of 30 states and territories it ranks 21st in per capita income, putting it well below the average for a country that in global terms is already poor. A lot of that is down to reliance on agriculture. The big cities in the state, especially Noida and Lucknow, have attracted investment from high tech industries and many IT sector workers are part of India’s growing middle class. Other sciences are taking hold as well, including cutting edge genetics; Lucknow has the first human DNA bank in Asia, and the second in the world.i Outside the cities, however, the only industry is traditional crafts like weaving and carpet making. Most people rely on farming and often it’s a low tech, manpower intensive style of agriculture. Whole families slog away on small plots, producing enough for themselves and a bit left over for barter or sale. There are a few more modern wheat and rice farms in the west, and sugarcane is a substantial cash crop, but for most Uttar Pradesh farmers life is a constant struggle.

Visit a rural Uttar Pradesh village and the first thing that strikes you is how timeless many things are. There’s a veneer of modern technology that strikes the eye because it just looks so out of place. Blocky houses built of mud bricks sport gleaming satellite TV dishes on the roof, powered by noisy Chinese generators under a lean-to round the side. Teenagers on battered, burping motor scooters weave between farm carts drawn by oxen on the dirt roads. Women in traditional saris walk through the markets with a woven cage of chickens balanced on a shoulder and a cell phone clamped to their ear. Spice markets and farm supply stores rub shoulders with privately run technology schools, rows of students learning programming or network administration on state of the art laptops in open-fronted wooden hovels. Most aspects of life haven’t changed in a thousand years though. Vegetables still come from the fields or the bustling open air markets. Skinned carcasses hang outside butchers, attracting clouds of flies and dripping blood into the dust. Water comes from wells and has to be carried home, although empty plastic five gallon palm oil containers have replaced traditional earthenware jars for that purpose – they’re cheaper and lighter. Many families share their homes with their livestock, keeping precious goats and chickens in a large room to protect them from the wolves and leopards that still roam the hills. Literacy is low despite sharp rises in the last decade. In the state overall, 70% of people can read and write; there’s a big difference between men and women, with only 59% of women being literate. The figures are distorted by the big cities, though, and in a small village it’s not uncommon for less than half of men to be literate and practically none of the women. The age gap is glaring too. Most of the young people are educated, and that spurs many of them to leave and look for a job in the city. Others join the military, and once they’ve left they don’t often come back except to visit. The only ones who stay in the villages are those so trapped by poverty that there’s no other choice.

Rinku Singh

Bhadobi district, in the southeast corner of Uttar Pradesh, lies on the silty, fertile floodplain of the Ganges River. The city of Bhadobi itself is known as Carpet City because it’s the largest center of carpet manufacture in south Asia, but the rest of the district is staunchly agricultural. The soil is deep and rich, laid down over millions of years by the river, so a whole range of crops grow readily. Antiquated farming methods mean it’s a hard life for the people, though, and rural villages like Holepur are trapped deep in poverty. Almost everyone works on the land or supports those who do. The staple diet of the village people is daal, a seasoned lentil stew; rice is mostly sold to buy essentials or pay debts. Meat and fish are occasional luxuries.

For Holepur, Bramhadin Singh was something of an exception; instead of making a living as a farmer he worked for 35 years as a truck driver, hauling loads of cement from a factory in Sonebhadra north to Nepal. It’s a journey of over 250 miles and the roads can be poor. Most of the trip is surfaced with hot top and fairly well maintained, but it’s a single narrow strip of tar and local driving standards