Waugh: The Class Act

Is Ponting an unworthy successor to Steve Waugh? Or are they really peas from a pod, crude and petty sledgers, with Waugh smelling a little better only because he won more often? My friend Shukles got me thinking about this a couple of days ago, when he suggested that Ponting was no worse than Steve Waugh.

Consider the case for Steve Waugh:

- He found the time to support Udayan, a home for disadvantaged children in Barrackpore, Calcutta

- Waugh found the time to take his team to Gallipoli, to honour the ANZAC soldiers who fell there during WWI, starting off a little tradition

- He taught his team to enjoy playing in India, and more generally the sub-continent. Approaching the tour as a fun experience, rather than as a punishment posting probably had a big part to play in their improved results. One of my favourite photos from Waugh's autobiography is of his team, wearing their lurid yellow uniforms and with their backs to the camera, staring mesmerized at the Taj Mahal

- He encouraged Ed Smith, then a colleague at Kent, to write about what it is like to be a county pro. This is one of my favourite books about contemporary cricket

- He mourned the game's loss when Zimbabwe's Neil Johnson retired after a scintillating World Cup in 1999, including a century against Australia, because he needed to earn a living. He made a plea to the cricket community to support the game in Zimbabwe, because the game was poorer if a player of Johnson's quality could not play. For this, Sunil Gavaskar described Waugh as not just a great player, but a great leader of men. BTW, Gavaskar is no reflexive Aussie supporter.

I couldn't Google-up a link to Waugh's comments about Neil Johnson. It stuck in my memory because of Johnson's amazing personal story. Johnson was a superstar at seventeen, and a has-been at twenty. The South African team management (rightly) preferred Lance Klusener and Shaun Pollock to Neil Johnson for that all-rounder slot. Yet, he hung on to his dream, played for Zimbabwe, and got his revenge on the biggest stage of all when he single-handedly beat a South African team that included Klusener and Pollock in the 1999 World Cup, before riding off into the sunset.

Could a cussed captain have been made to look like a hero by a good spin-doctor? Some moments, like Udayan and Gallipoli, could have been stage managed, though they reflect well on Waugh even if those associations were prompted by an image-consultant. But the Ed Smith and Neil Johnson stories would have been hard for a spin-doctor to fabricate. Looking at the whole rather than at the parts, the gestalt, I still am left with the impression that Waugh was a genuinely gracious guy. He understood that he was a part of something bigger than himself.

If so, why did he sledge? In his autobiography he says "sledging invariably occured when a player was frustrated at his poor form and wanted to show how much he was trying and how much he was annoyed with his performance. It is a cheap way of getting attention...". In Waugh's framework, he did not sledge. He tried to engineer a collapse in his opponent's confidence, mental disintegration, which is a part of the game.

He famously tried to bring about Saurav Ganguly's mental disintegration. Ganguly did not disintegrate, and Waugh now talks about "an ongoing verbal battle between Saurav and me, which belied an underlying admiration for each other... I saw in Saurav a committed individual who wanted to inject some toughness and combativeness into a side that had often tended to roll over and expose a soft underbelly".

In Waugh's world, a captain who tries hard enough is a captain who tries to engineer the mental disintegration of his opponents. Nothing personal or disrespectful. It's just part of the game. Which is why Steve Waugh is such a hard act for Ponting to follow.

Spiritual Intelligence and corporate life

कर्मण्ये  वाधिकारस्ते  मा  फलेषु  कदाचन
मा  कर्मफलहेतुर  भूर  मा  ते संगोस्त्व  अकर्मणि

These words from the Bhagavad Gita were first spoken by Lord Krishna to Arjuna at Kurukshetra. They roughly translate to: you contol your actions, but not their more remote consequences. So take the remote consequences off your mind, act, and fulfill your sacred destiny.

These words were also the theme of a corporate leadership development program I was at earlier this week. A bunch of successful and well-compensated executives spoke to us developees about how leadership is about service, about having a bias for action, and not obsessing about moving up the corporate ladder. Absolutely. Following the blockbuster success of Emotional Intelligence, Amazon is now selling a book on Spiritual Intelligence.

Yeah, right…but this program was not naïve. It recognized that the developees cared about money. After all, these were people in corporate jobs. The program advised setting very specific goals on how much wealth one wanted to build.

This advice, from Jack Weber at the Darden School in Virginia, was based on an interesting longitudinal study done by Harvard Business School. The study sampled a class of HBS MBAs at graduation. It asked the graduates to rate how much they cared about money on a scale of 1-10. It also asked them how much they thought their net worth would be in 5, 10 and 15 years. The answer to the second question could also be “don’t know”. The study then went back and measured the net worth of these graduates in 5, 10 and 15 years. The finding was that the first question had no predictive power: the MBAs all cared about making money. The second question was a strong predictor of future net worth, with the people who didn’t know what they would be worth performing even worse than those who had put down modest targets. As an aside, I would love to know if the students with the highest wealth expectations also had the highest variance in wealth outcomes, because of having made lower probability bets (I couldn’t locate this study through googling).

A third perspective on careers that emerged came not from the faculty but from a fellow developee, chatting after work. Her boss had told her, “Our company is an ocean with many currents running through it. The key to success is to find a current that will become as big as the Gulf Stream, and to ride it.” This makes even more sense if company were replaced by industry or society. Some realpolitick here: how does one respond to mundane work that moves the company forward, but is unlikely to grow into a career-enhancing Gulf Stream?

Maybe staying sane is about balancing these perspectives. Or maybe it is about these elements coming together: ride the Gulf Stream to get wealthy, which enables the generosity of spirit needed to think in terms of मा कर्मफलहेतुर भूर.

There but for the grace of you go I

Came across this story in the New Yorker, a profile of a liberal Iranian economist called Mohammed Tabibian. Has stayed in memory because Iran, seen through Tabibian's eyes, reminds me so much of India.

Here are some nuggets that I really liked:

- Tabibian speaks with a lucidity and directness that is startling in a culture marked by allusiveness and elaborate courtesy

- In Iran the spectrum of economic thought, Tabibian joked, "runs from left to left". The so-called convervatives... talk of redistributing Iran's wealth, not of re-structuring its economy

- "The common morality was that if the rich give a part of their wealth to the poor, then the poor will be helped out. Many days and nights, in my imagination and daydreaming, I distributed the wealth of my family to the poor in my neighbourhood. Always my calculation came to the same conculsion: that such an imaginary scheme, even if it happens, makes us poor and the neighbourhood not much better off"

- Tabibian is not bothered by the negative example (of free markets run amok) unfolding in the West. "We are on two different sides of the spectrum. You need more regulation. We need less regulation and government intervention"

- The senior Iranian clergy at Qom "were nice people, gentle people, very concerned about morality and things to come from the other life". Their economic presriptions, however, were vanishingly vague: society should be prosperous, people should not be greedy

- After the Revolution, the Central Bank had only one clear priority, to abolish the interest rate which was deemed un-Islamic. And yet, no matter which policy the Central Bank pursued, interest quickly reappeared. A bank branch in Tehran would place a red car on its roof and announce that all depositers would be entered into a lottery for that car - a strategy that allowed the bank to pay a variable rate of return on its deposits. Bankers even found ayatollahs who would issue fatwas in support of their schemes

- The revolution had made education available to more Iranians. But there was no role for these people in an economy that depended not on productive industries but on the dispensation of oil-rents

All the Shah’s Men?

Was Barack Obama’s tough talk on Iran the kiss of death for the recent protests?

Great question, because it opens up a pivotal passage in history that needs to be resolved before sanity returns to the Middle East. I didn’t know about this until I read All the Shah’s Men. This book, a breeze at 230 pages of comfortably large fonts, is a must read for anyone who has been following the news coming out of Iran over the last few weeks.

The key to understanding Iran, and why any association with America and/or Britain is so toxic in Iranian politics, goes back to 1953.



This was when the CIA sponsored a coup to unseat the secular, liberal, democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and install Shah Reza Pahlavi in his place. The point of the coup was to retain western control of the oil fields and refineries at Abadan. Mohammed Mossadegh planned to nationalize these oil fields, which were owned and operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as British Petroleum).

The coup worked for a quarter century, until the Shah was overthrown in 1979 by a people’s revolution that morphed into the Islamic Republic. These events, not much talked about in today's western media, are vividly remembered in the Middle East.

Interestingly, America’s Democrat leaders are well aware of this history:

- Barack Obama referred to the 1953 coup during his historic speech at Cairo University, “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is in fact a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”.

- John Kerry wrote this op-ed piece in the New York Times, “The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet”.

Some other interesting nuggets from All the Shah's Men:

- Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, was the CIA agent who engineered the 1953 coup

- Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. spoke to the exiled Shah to convince him to return to Iran and take power. His son was the Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. who commanded American forces in Operation Desert Storm in 1991

- Winston Churchill was the British Prime Minister when Mossadegh started moves to nationalize Anglo-Iranian. This felt personal to Churchill, the Admiralty man. Abadan had fueled the Royal Navy through two world wars. Churchill immediately reached out to America for help, and got nowhere with President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The plot to oust Mossadegh really started getting traction when the Eisenhower administration brought the Dulles brothers to the center of power.

Flying through Dulles airport in Washington DC reminds me of the story of Mohammed Mossadegh.

Eoin Morgan and the tragedy of Greame Hick

As I start this post, Ireland have restricted Sri Lanka to 28-2 in 6 overs, after Sri Lanka had scored over 60 in the first 6 against Australia, West Indies and Pakistan. Jayawardene and Jayasuriya are just starting to power away from the Fighting Irish.

I usually back Lanka above all teams except India, but today my heart is with the underdogs. The Irish amateurs playing for pride, taking on the galacticos. If only... if only quality players from Ireland, good enough to make a living playing cricket, were actually playing for Ireland.

Eoin Morgan played for England earlier this year. Admittedly, his only game was England's famous defeat to the Netherlands at Lord's in the opening game of this Twenty20 World Cup. But still, he is good enough to play for England. His first class average is better than either the Irish captain William Porterfield, or their star batsman Niall O'Brien. Ed Joyce is another England international who might have been playing for Ireland today.

How much of a difference would a couple of quality batsmen, or at least better batsmen, make to the Irish run chase today?

The greatest tragedy of this sort was Greame Hick. Playing for England, he was a disappointment. Playing for Zimbabwe, alongside the Flower brothers, Dave Houghton and Eddo Brandes, he might have made the difference between a team capable of making noble gestures and a team capable of winning.



In Hick's time, maybe playing international cricket was the only credible way of making a decent living as a player. Maybe playing county cricket for a lifetime was not ambition enough.

Today, has the IPL changed that dynamic? Hopefully it will. But this generation of the Fighting Irish will have to win with the talent they've got.

Juno

Juno is an outstanding film. It's funny, quirky and cuts as deep as you want it to. Watch it.

This is an old-fashioned movie, a movie with a plot. A monosyllabic dork who runs around in golden shorts gets a sixteen year old pregnant. She is going to have the baby. Complicated situation needs resolution, and that keeps the story-line rolling.

But is that what the movie is about? Naw. In almost all movies worth watching, plot is nothing more than a device that serves to showcase character. What makes the movie is Juno, the title character, brilliantly and authentically played by the twenty year old Canadian actor Ellen Page.

Without giving too much away...Juno is naive, mature, perceptive, cynical, trusting, would love to be wooed by a jock, loves her own dork, is spunky, vulnerable, really into cutting edge music, thinks chemistry lab is kind of cool, just doesn't get her tone-deaf parents, has wonderful parents...she is real.

When Charlie Brown picks up the Little Red Haired Girl's pencil, notices it has been chewed, and beatifically declares "She's human", maybe he is discovering that she is a bit like Juno.

Ideally, Juno, I ain't looking to analyse you, categorize you, or define you, or confine you, all I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.

But...but Diablo already defined you. By calling you Juno. Not Jane, or Janet, or Jennifer, but Juno. Juno, wife of Jupiter, mother of Mars, Regina of Rome, guardian of the Empire's finances, Lucina (she who brings children to light), spiritual heir to both Hera and Diana. The goddess is back.

Why the IPL works

The IPL, and more generally the Twenty20 format, is producing quality cricket. Commentators who liken the IPL to exhibition cricket or the Harlem Globetrotters are being both unfair and blind. They are simply not observing closely enough.

I'm typing this up the night before the 2009 finals. I just watched my team, the Chennai Super Kings, lose to the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Both teams played hard and produced moments that were as good as anything I've seen in tests. Consider:

- Dravid's immaculate straight drive to welcome Jakati into the attack. It was worth watching the game just to see that one shot

- Murali trapping Dravid LBW bowling around the wicket and straightening the ball into the stumps

- Virat Kohli dancing down to the pitch of the ball and lofting Murali over long on for a match-deciding sixer (the shot in the picture above)

- Parthiv Patel anticipating a short ball from Kallis and upper-cutting him over the slips for four

- Vinay Kumar frustrating Dhoni by bowling very full and outside the off at the death (exactly what Dhoni had Zaheer and Ishant do the the Aussies in the Nagpur test)

Despite the cheerleaders, despite the horrible uniforms, this is the real thing: top quality players competing to win.

Of course, nothing can match test cricket for genuinely memorable drama. But I would have no heartburn about Twenty20 entirely replacing the ODI format.

More generally, sport that has been seriously dumbed-down doesn't seem to sell.

An interesting (and heartening) case in point was the failure of an American Football league, the XFL. It was promoted Vince McMohan, the guy behind WWF wrestling. The idea was to compete with the NFL, despite having second rate players, by having more skimpily clad cheerleaders and morphing the rules to create more "action".

The venture was possibly inspired by the belief that "nobody ever went broke by under-estimating the intelligence of the American public". Well, Mr. McMohan didn't go broke, but he did manage to lose $72 million.