Let Sachin play at 40; we will remember the good times anyway

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player ever. Jordan also played basketball until he was 41, twice coming out of retirement to continue his career. The first time he went back to the Chicago Bulls, winning three more championships. The second time he turned out for the Washington Wizards, and failed to make the playoffs in either of the two years he played for them. He also averaged just above 20 points a game for the Wizards, a far cry from the 30-plus points he averaged with the Bulls. He was not close to being the player he was in his prime, though he was still very good. Yet Jordan wanted to play, had to play, because his competitive juices still flowed. He was not done raging against the light. [caption id=“attachment_725229” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sachin Tendulkar celebrates his 40th birthday in Kolkata. PTI[/caption] Andy Pettitte, a star pitcher mostly for the New York Yankees, and the winner of more playoff games than any pitcher in history, retired in 2011. A year later, he was hired as a guest instructor by the Yankees and that gave him “the itch”. A few months later, having fought his way back into shape, he was wearing a Yankees uniform again at the age of 40 and continues to play for them this season at 41. He too found it impossible to resist the siren call of the game he has now played professionally for 22 years. For an elite athlete, sport sets the rhythm of their lives. It is the constant routine of training, practice and performance that gives their lives meaning and structure. Their performance is measurable and unbiased. You win or lose. You score goals or runs, take wickets or make saves. Those numbers had heft and weight to their legacies, and can even come to define them - the great Don Bradman has become synonymous with 99.94 (the Don also played until he was 40). In Tendulkar’s case, the numbers are already staggering and do not need repeating here. They stand as a measure of the man and his abilities over the last 24 years. Their sheer vastness also makes them hard to walk away from. Tendulkar has already made concessions to age. He played a solitary T20 game for India, and has retired from 50-overs cricket. He understands he cannot push himself as hard or as far as he used to. Yet he believes he still has something to offer in Test cricket. And who can blame him when playing cricket is what he has done for all of his adult life? Who can blame him for continuing to rage against the dying of the light when it is a well-trodden path? In an ideal world, Jordan would have retired as a Chicago Bull without his third act as a Wizard. But now, 10 years after his final retirement, those two years are a fuzzy haze at best. The memories of him as a basketball player are of him soaring above the rim in the Bulls’ red uniform, and crying as he hugged the Naismith Trophy as NBA champion. And so it shall be the same with Tendulkar. In time, we will not remember him scratching and prodding against England and Australia. We will remember Desert Storm in Sharjah and the dismantling of Shane Warne in Mumbai; the first ever ODI double-hundred against South Africa and the match-winning hundred in Chennai. We will remember the six he hit off Shoaib Akhtar in the World Cup and his century against Dale Steyn in Cape Town. And pass these tales on to our children. It will not matter then that he played on at 40 and that is how it should be.