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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Before the Flood
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| How Mark Mascarenhas first broke open the business of cricket |
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Published : 1 February 2012 |
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HEMANT PITHWA / THE INDIA TODAY GROUP / GETTY IMAGES |
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| Mark Mascarenhas in 1997, one year after he secured world broadcasting rights to the 1996 World Cup.
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N 27 JANUARY 2002, an otherwise unremarkable Sunday a decade ago, a large car carrying four people hit another vehicle and overturned somewhere near Nagpur. It soon became clear that only three had survived. The dead man, Mark Victor Mascarenhas of Connecticut—but earlier of Bangalore and sometimes of the Oberoi Hotel in |
Bombay—was, until that moment, a puller of rugs, a stormer of barns, a breaker of closed oak doors. In the nine years that he had flit in and out of India, he had been embraced by the most powerful man in Indian cricket, represented its most famous cricketer, and issued the first ripples of the tide of wealth that would wash over the sport within a decade of his death. He would not find justification in the eventual creation of the private league along the lines of what he had envisioned, or witness the rise to dominance of Lalit Modi; these things sprang later. But his world, at that moment, was so small, and its characters so few, that everything that came after—the valuations game, the football money, the relentless search for new markets—were only branches of a tree nurtured by him and other men who all knew each other by name and reputation.
Jump back another decade—so long ago that the third umpire was a revolutionary idea—to a meeting that was held at the coffee shop in the Blue Diamond hotel in Pune. On one side of the table were Jagmohan Dalmiya and Inderjit Singh Bindra, cricket administrators who were still some years away from disrupting the international power structures of the game. They represented the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Opposite them were Henry Blofeld, the cheery, clubby commentator who looks just as he sounds, and Andrew Wildblood, who would go on to help Modi transplant an entire tournament between continents 18 years later. Wildblood was part of an expedition by the sports production company TWI—a wing of the global talent management juggernaut IMG—into cricket’s dark continent, where they hoped to find value for Sky, an English broadcaster. Over a coffee, they negotiated the cost of television rights for England’s looming tour of India. They haggled over “the last $25,000” for a bit before reaching an agreement. Wildblood later said, with the slightest hint of exaggeration, that the price they paid wouldn’t have bought a single over of cricket today.
The deal marked a break between the BCCI and Doordarshan, which had for a long time used its status as India’s monopoly broadcaster to demand payment for carrying cricket on its network. The BCCI was a monopoly as well, of course—but Doordarshan was a government agency whose programming appeared on every television in India, and until that moment it had the upper hand. To the BCCI, the broadcaster offered coverage but little else. Poor equipment transmitted weak signals that grew fainter until TV sets projected more grain than grass.
The cable and satellite upheaval that came along with India’s new economy brought down the curtain on the 1940s aesthetic that defined the look of cricket broadcasts in the Doordarshan era: for the first time, matches in India began to look good on television. TWI hired an international crew of cameramen and technicians for the England-India series in the first months of 1993. Cameras were placed down the ground at both ends of the pitch; eight of them were put to work across the stadium. Over one handshake, Indian coverage vaulted into something like modernity. But TWI was just getting started: it was already in talks with the organisers of the 1996 World Cup, the Pak-India-Lanka Committee (PILCOM), to acquire television rights.
The lure of that World Cup contract is what brought Mascarenhas back to India, and he appeared just as the custodians of Indian cricket were emerging from their long and abusive relationship with Doordarshan, shaken and a little unsure of their worth. But over the course of the era that he helped define—and then in the decade after him—the sport grew up from a gawky adolescence to an irresponsible adulthood, and the hesitations of yesterday were cast aside for the noisy satisfactions of a protracted financial bender. Looking back now, the sums involved were minute, but they made headlines at the time: when one of Mascarenhas’s clients became the first cricket millionaire in 1995, it was big enough news to make the cover of the weekly newsmagazine Outlook. A million dollars is what some cricketers now earn in a month. Mascarenhas was derided for the price he paid to acquire the 1996 World Cup; 16 years later, that amount wouldn’t have bought him two days of Indian cricket coverage. The transformation of the game wasn’t accomplished by one man alone, but Mascarenhas made the first move. Two years after India began to relax controls over the economy, Mascarenhas kicked off cricket’s liberalisation when he bagged the World Cup assignment, setting in motion the idea that the sport could be a lucrative engagement for players, administrators and businesses.
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NSIDE A MEETING ROOM at the Pakistan Cricket Board headquarters at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium one afternoon in 1993, PILCOM was about to make a decision. Until then, TWI had been in long and frustrating discussions with the organising committee over purchasing the World Cup’s television rights. Now, as Mascarenhas stood alone, facing the committee’s |
members, he held them in thrall. Years later, Amrit Mathur, an Indian cricket administrator on the panel, remembered Mascarenhas’s confidence and, more significantly, his willingness to do as they asked. “We’d ask him for guarantees,” Mathur said, “and he’d get us guarantees. We’d ask him for more, and he’d call up his people from a phone in the room, and they would tell him that it was possible. We’d ask him for something else, and he’d get it done right there. He was calling people in other countries. It was the first time we had seen this.”
There were misgivings about Mascarenhas’s ability to deliver, but these doubts were not based on his inexperience with selling the rights of a major cricketing event. Instead, they wondered about bank guarantees and the initial payment, and when every requirement was met, the committee decided to give him the rights there and then. (They had a flight to catch.) “He was so confident,” Mathur said, in the tone of a man who had been shown the future. “He told us what was going to happen next.”
In his book Sphere of Influence, the cricket historian Gideon Haigh described how Mascarenhas turned the World Cup into money. “His production company, WorldTel, offered a knockout $10 million in August 1993, planning to offset the costs by breaking the rights up and onselling them to other offshore broadcasters. He had obtained a bargain, almost making his money back with his first two sales.” By comparison, the various television rights for the previous World Cup had all been sold for a sum of roughly $1 million, according to Wisden, the authoritative cricket almanack.
In recent interviews, friends and acquaintances testified to Mascarenhas’ supreme self-possession, but on that afternoon his manner and bluster were misleading. He later told Mathur and others that his poise had been a front and that the deal nearly wrecked him. Peter Hutton, who then worked for TWI, said that an earlier deal WorldTel had signed with a British broadcaster fell through when the broadcaster collapsed, leaving Mascarenhas with huge personal risk. Mascarenhas hinted at his troubles later, saying, “When I finally got the World Cup rights, I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’”
WorldTel had big ambitions, but it was still a small shop, and so when the thwarted personnel at TWI heard about the collapse of the British broadcaster Mascarenhas had sold rights to, they began to believe that PILCOM would call off the deal. “We thought the rights would come to us,” Hutton said. “We waited for him to fail.” But Mascarenhas swung back by reselling World Cup rights in lucrative television deals, and the spectre of failure grew fainter. TWI was dismayed; they reasoned that Mascarenhas had a natural advantage. An official from TWI said, “He was just one guy, and he was able to make decisions instantly. We were a company, and processes were slower. There’s no way we could have competed with one guy.” By one estimate in Wisden, Mascarenhas earned PILCOM $50 million in profits by seeing value where few others did. In the months before the 1996 tournament, the World Cup was everywhere. Hoardings on streets played up individual rivalries, and advertisers released new commercials for the occasion, creating for the first time the atmosphere of frenzied commercial anticipation that now attends every major international cricketing event. As the journalist Mihir Bose wrote in Wisden: “The tournament was marketed on a scale never before seen in cricket. There was an official sponsor for every conceivable product, including the official World Cup chewing gum.”
Depending on whom you ask, Mascarenhas’ standing in history swings between that of a visionary and that of a scavenger who picked at the sport’s ever decreasing returns. Wildblood, whose company TWI competed with WorldTel until Mascarenhas’s death, was convinced that Mascarenhas wasn’t a visionary. “He saw that we had created a market and then he tried to break into that market,” Wildblood said. “Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not the work of a visionary.” Vivek Menezes, a writer who worked with Mascarenhas in the US after the 1996 World Cup and saw him up close, called him a “machine” and a man ahead of his time. Menezes recognised that Mascarenhas treated him differently—“on western terms”—than his other employees, and he had plans that reached into a future that not many could conceive. Another employee dismissed Mascarenhas as full of bluster.
What was undeniable was Mascarenhas’s charisma and charm: Wildblood, now a vice president at IMG, says he nearly resigned to work for him before changing his mind: “I felt that Mark was so big, there was no place in the room for anyone else.”
The business of cricket, especially its Indian incarnation, is filled with individuals who make rooms smaller. They mark its history like signposts, each one denoting a more exciting, and more moneyed period than the last: Mascarenhas and BCCI President Dalmiya in the 1990s; Kunal Dasgupta, the head of Sony Entertainment Television, who made the game more alluring to female audiences with the 2003 World Cup; and Lalit Modi and Harish Thawani (whose production company, Nimbus, won four-year rights to Indian cricket for a then boggling $612 million), who pulled out some of the wildest numbers cricket had ever seen half a decade ago. Hutton, the broadcaster who knew Mascarenhas, contemplated why cricket grew when it was influenced by strong individuals, and very carefully said, “It requires imagination to move forward.”
But even as cricket marched forward, conflicting internal interests, some of which recurred with demoralising frequency, brought it to a standstill. Sharad Pawar and Modi’s entrance (as chief and vice president of the BCCI, respectively) in 2005 was marked with declarations that India’s cricket administration would turn a new leaf, and accounts would be less opaque, but five years later it was apparent that little had changed. Whispers of backroom deals, nepotism and serious conflicts of interest were common.
As with the dealmakers who came after him, talk about Mascarenhas’s closeness to the administration stained discussions of his achievements. In an interview with Rediff.com, he was asked why his company was shrouded in mystery. His reply transcended his situation: “India is a mystery in itself. Everything is mysterious. Anyone who does anything, anyone in the limelight, is suspect.” Mascarenhas’s answer described the predicament businesses that dealt with the BCCI found themselves in. The board was riven by infighting, and broadcasters and production companies eager for its business picked sides. When a senior executive at a large sports agency was contacted for an interview for this story, his response was telling: “It depends. Is the story pro- or anti-BCCI?”
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HE SON OF GERARD MASCARENHAS, a renowned surgeon at St John’s Medical College and Hospital in Bangalore, Mark Mascarenhas showed no early indication of his eventual occupation. He played, instead, the role of predictable hellraiser. One story detailed the pickling of a new teacher. “Before he started,” an old school administrator said, bringing |
out his broadest brush, “Mark stood up in class and said, ‘You can’t start a class without the prayer.’ The teacher was unsure, but Mark started anyway and went on until the end of class.” This happened during the next class as well. Perplexed, the teacher approached the school principal, Father Hedwig, to ask how things worked around there. After he heard him out, Hedwig voiced his weary suspicion: “This boy who told you about the prayer … is he tall and fat?”
By the time he was 14, Mascarenhas was six feet two inches. He was attracted to bowling fast, as tall men of a certain type are, although this had little effect on the results of the immense appetite that remained throughout his professional life. “He’s what we call a big healthy boy in the Punjab,” a colleague said.
He had intended to study medicine, but a technicality prevented him from following his father and grandfather into the field. Mascarenhas turned, strangely, to cricket commentary for All India Radio, a decision that befuddled his family. However, a reverend who knew the family, and who was then director of the communication arts programme at St Xavier’s College in Bombay, heard Mascarenhas and recommended that he sign up for the programme. “Once there,” he told an alumni magazine at Mascarenhas’s university in 1999, “he excelled in TV production … and showed considerable creative powers. I recognised that he could do bigger things, and told him so.”
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Siddhartha
10 February 2012
11:39 PM
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remember reading a report in newspapers that Sachin was very depressed after hearing about the death of some Mascarenhas who had helped him shape his career....did not have much idea of who he was then...now i know why...good article!
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