For me sports (Of any nature) are the microcosms of life in general. Like art sports imitates life in its various manifestations; like having set of rules, limits and regulations for the engaging sportsman to engage in the vagaries of a particular game. For years only few sports have caught my imagination and since the childhood these few sports never failed to tick my mind.
Pakistan’s predictable exit from the ongoing World T20 once again shifted my attention to a unique concept which is rarely discussed at length in print, electronic and social media and that is related with the ‘Intensity of Work Ethic’. Why intensity? I have few examples in my mind to put them into the mix of this vital component of modern sports, Work Ethic.
In 1982 the famous franchise of Rocky series released its third installment for global cinemas and in the initial part of that particular movie the protagonist (Rocky Balboa) was shown to have gain his ground in professional boxing and gain his much needed financial stability by securing more title defenses after his epic showdowns with his arch-opponent in the first two movies, Apollo Creed.
With success came stability, money and somewhat relaxation to the nerves of Rocky in Rocky III. Here now Rocky started to gradually focus more of brand endorsements, modeling with leading models of his age and at the same time focusing less on the intense nature of his training with the upcoming contender of his world title known as Clubber Lang.
His mentor and trainer Micky spotted the dangerous shift of priorities for Rocky and warned him to pay more attention to the basic core values of his struggling and humbling days in order to stay vicious and intense. To his own peril Rocky chose to ignore the wise warning points of his mentor and moved on to face the ultra hungry and ruthless opponent CL to face a miserable knock out defeat.
That’s a piece of art that gained recognition in its time; the reality of this concept could be seen in the famous beat down of Iron Mike Tyson in the 1990 bout with an obscure opponent at that time James ‘Buster’ Douglas. At that time many of the reasons which were cited for Tyson’s shock defeat were startlingly similar to the events of Rocky III movie eight years earlier to hammer the point of getting distracted with fame and recognition of premier sportsmen of this modern age.
Lennox Lewis (Another world heavyweight champion of boxing) once revealed about the nature of his hard work ethic before gaining the world title that he used to train 16-18 hours with his coach & colleagues to such intensity that he rarely used to have the time and power to move on to his nearby apartment and often used to sleep on the spot of his training rings.
Arguably the world’s greatest batsman Sir Don Bradman used to work extra hard before his games and that too with rounded clubs and much shorter cork balls along the faade of walls in order to increase the levels of accuracy of his shots and time proved the worth of his manic obsession in the shape of his legendary 99.94 career average of bating in international Test matches, the second best after him is still languishing in the mid 60’s and since 1948 the so called power hitters of modern age have yet to even catch up with the shadow of his greatness in batting.
Geoffrey Boycott, who is considered one of the premier batting legends of England post WWII era, used to do batting practice in access of 300-400 minutes in the nets just prior to his even club and county matches. The Late Dr. Zafar Altaf once spotted the anxious nature of this great batsman in an international match in England when Geoffrey scored in excess of 200 runs and hundreds of minutes and after his eventual dismissal he was heading straight to his practicing nets without changing his sports gear. Shocked and bemused, Dr. Zafar asked the reason of this madness of his and his reply was something like that;
‘No mate I still have to practice 200 minutes in nets in order to rectify my mistake of shot which got me out with that particular delivery. I was well settled in the match and never expected to play that rubbish shot to squander my hard work, so 200 more minutes of practice is required before I would head to my resting room’.
Just before the tour of England & Wales in 2006, Pakistan’s premier batsman Muhammad Yousuf was not satisfied with his batting posture and balance of his body during the time at crease and hence he engaged with Bob Woolmer to work out these nagging glitches of his in order for him to mentally prepare himself for that important tour. Yousuf is on record to acknowledge the greatness of Bob and delineated in stark detail about the application of some extra techniques like having extra padding around the area of his chest and the use of marble slabs in order to simulate the conditions that he was expecting to get in the forthcoming tour of England along with ironing out his imbalanced posture whilst batting in a particular manner.
The likes of Shane Warne never shied away to ask for important tips and words of advice from the legend Abdul Qadir in early to mid nineties at Lahore no matter how tight the playing assignments were for Warne in that time. It paid handsomely for Warne and later resulted in career wicket haul of 700 plus second only to Muralitharan in the all time list. The fame, awe and fear which Warne garnered in the subsequent years is a point which could be expanded for several hundred of pages to give some perspective about the nature of hard and disciplined work ethic for an ambitious sportsman like him.
Countless other examples could also be cited here with the likes of Jahangir Khan whose monstrous nature of work ethic transformed him to become a colossus of the game of Squash and accumulating records that will most probably could stay on record books for another 200 plus years. The likes of Sarfaraz Nawaz and Saqlain Mushtaq used to toil for days, weeks, months and years on the local domestic circuit of Pakistan with dead pitches and miserable balls before they came up with the valuable variations of Reverse Swing and Doosra respectively to flummox the flat track bully batsmen of their time.
The current lot of Pakistani senior team is such useless, shameless and misreable creatures that they might not know the meaning of these valuable terms like self-esteem, respect, professionalism, work ethic, cricketing values, discipline, innovation, ruthlessness etc. They don’t even bother to acknowledge the gross and raw nature of their skills and usually think that their so called ‘Influential Contacts’ will be there in eternity to safeguard them from any crises no matter what their on-field performances are.
Many points could be mentioned in this cathartic piece but I limit my point to the important aspect of Work Ethic with intense zeal and sadly this vital component is also missing from the rank and file of the senior Pakistani team for over the years. They have to develop ‘The Eye of the Tiger’ to channelize their energies and passion to deal with their daily routines of training, innovative drills and high octane performance on match days.
