Maverick Commissioner

Boria Majumdar

• Publisher: S&S India
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9789392099045
• eBook ISBN: 9789392099052
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

The Indian Premier League. Its mere mention forces cricket fans across the world to sit up and take notice. World cricket's most valued property has only grown stronger with time. Conceived and implemented by Lalit Modi in 2008, the IPL has forever revolutionised the way cricket is marketed and run globally. Modi had built and orchestrated the tournament by his own rules and after the stupendous success of the IPL, the same rules were questioned by the administration. Modi was subsequently banned for life.How and why did it happen? What went on behind the scenes? How did it all start to go wrong between Modi and the others? Are there secrets that will never come out? This book is all about everything you never got to know. Each fact corroborated by multiple sources who were in the thick of things, Maverick Commissioner is a riveting account of the IPL and the functioning of its founder, Lalit Kumar Modi. Did Modi have a long telephone conversation with a BCCI top brass the day he left India for good? What really was discussed? Is Lalit Modi the absent present for the IPL and Indian cricket?Soon to be made into a film by Vibri Motion Pictures, Maverick Commissioner documents things exactly as they happened. No holds barred and no questions left out. It doesn't judge Lalit Modi. All it does is narrate his story. Who is the real Lalit Modi? Let the readers decide.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CREATION OF THE IPL

When the legendary Arthur Morris, key member of Don Bradman’s invincible team of the 1940s, was asked what he got out of playing cricket, his answer was startling. Morris negotiated the question with a single-word retort: ‘Poverty’. With the onset of a cricketing revolution courtesy of the Indian Premier League, contemporary cricketers will have a radically different answer to a similar question. Most, it can be conjectured, will suggest with a welcome smile, “We became millionaires.”

However, the process of them becoming millionaires wasn’t an easy one and the credit has to go to Lalit Modi for transforming the sport forever.

It was around 4 p.m. in the afternoon on 18 April 2008 and I was right outside the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru trying to gauge the mood of the crowd that was starting to build up. I had been a sceptic and was not sure if anything except nationalism worked in Indian cricket. We in India, I have always argued, don’t really consume cricket. Rather, we consume spectacle. We don’t watch the Ranji Trophy, the national championship for cricket in India featuring the best of domestic talent. We don’t watch the Duleep Trophy, yet another premier domestic tournament. We only watched the Indian national team play and that’s where the scepticism was coming from. Will Modi’s brainchild, pitching one city against another and involving the world’s best players, capture Indian public imagination?

“You weren’t the only sceptic,” said a senior BCCI functionary when I mentioned my doubts to him while writing this. “You should have seen Lalit on the day IPL started. He was putting on a show but from inside was a nervous wreck. His career was at stake. If the start wasn’t up to the mark and if people did not warm up to the concept, his career in sports administration would come to an end,” said the source. “In fact, many within the BCCI also wanted him to fail. He had ruffled a lot of feathers in the way he had worked the last few months and you can’t do so in an institution like the BCCI. You end up making enemies if you do and Lalit would have to pay the price if the IPL did not take off,” he concluded.

Frankly, when Lalit had set off planning the IPL, all he had in front of him was case studies of a few American and British leagues. He had extensively studied how the NFL and the MLB worked in the US and planned to take the best practices from each to create something unique for the Indian market. He had partnered with IMG in doing so and in a meeting held in July 2007 during Wimbledon, first outlined some of his thoughts on the IPL to his colleagues in IMG. With the ZEE network led by Subhas Chandra already on the start line with the launch of the Indian Cricket League in April 2007, Modi was faced with stiff competition in trying to accomplish his vision. While he was seeking an alternate model that worked in India, he knew that Indians had little or no regard for domestic cricket. He also knew that for a league like the IPL to work in India, matches had to be played prime time and he had to rope in the best players globally. The problem was the players were already overworked. Calls of a burn out were rife and to expect them to play for 2 more months non-stop was unrealistic unless Modi was able to sweeten the deal by paying them monies they had never earned before. He also had to work on franchise owners and the first thing he had to do was convince franchise owners of what they owned. A franchise-based league was alien to the Indian market and in the absence of a physical asset a lot of the owners were not convinced to start with. “Some of them asked Lalit what they were owning. They would own no physical stadium unlike some of the established football clubs in India. Nor will they own something like what the state cricket associations did. So while he expected them to spend 60 million dollars for a franchise, he needed to explain to them what they were getting in return for the money spent and how they were supposed to recover the money. I have to tell you it wasn’t easy for him to get the high and mighty from around the country to buy into the concept,” said a former BCCI President closely involved at the time.

In the absence of physical ownership, franchise owners needed to buy into an idea. They had to buy into Lalit Modi. They had to start from the premise that the tournament would take off. Only if they believed in it could they agree that they would make money from ticket sales, merchandise, hospitality and of course broadcast rights. Modi, an industrial magnate in his own right, had to use all his personal connections to get the franchises sold off to India’s best. He also had to get a broadcaster on board and it was more difficult than was envisaged. For a T-20 competition, no broadcaster was willing to risk everything. The format had not yet taken off in India and the duration of the games meant far less time than a 50-over match to monetise advertisement spots. Pitted against soaps and prime time serials, it was a risk no broadcaster could afford. While some suggested a revenue share model, Lalit was fundamentally opposed to such a concept. No sports league in the world could work on a revenue share principle and the broadcaster had to have skin in the game and believe in the concept if they really wanted to deep dive into it. Getting a broadcaster was key to be able to demonstrate to franchise owners that over a period of time they will start to earn significant profits and there was much more to the league than just vanity. Lalit was also playing on a new Indian mindset where the city had replaced the state as the primary loyalty for the youth. In my case, for example, I am an Indian first and then I am from Kolkata. However, I would always say Kolkata ahead of West Bengal and there was no cricket tournament that had been organised along these lines. The Ranji Trophy was played between states and other tournaments were zonal in nature. To get cities to play each other would be an attempt at creating a very different kind of loyalty than before and mark a departure from established practice. Would it work? No one really knew. Was it worth a try? Lalit Modi believed it indeed was.

While Modi was convinced he was onto something, he needed others to buy into the idea. And that could only happen if the format itself was acceptable to the masses. Some things they say are destined to happen and India’s victory in the 2007 World T-20 in South Africa was one such. More than anything it was this victory that set stage for the IPL. It was proof of concept for the broadcasters and advertisers alike that Indians loved the format and would queue up to watch it prime time if it was packaged well. In fact, when Lalit managed to get a buy in from BCCI President Sharad Pawar for his league in early September 2007 and walked out of the meeting with 25 million dollars in hand to start player recruitment, little did he know what was waiting for him in South Africa where the World T-20 was being held. Rather, with Sachin, Sourav and Rahul withdrawing from the tournament it was the only World Cup which was being played without the expected fan fare and euphoria back home. In the absence of the nation’s premier stars, fan interest was lukewarm and few were backing M.S. Dhoni and his young brigade to do something spectacular. Modi and his concept was the classic underdog story. He knew it best for he wasn’t making much headway with broadcasters who would stonewall the project saying the Indian fan wasn’t going to stand up for it.

“You could sense a degree of nervous energy in Lalit. It was as if he was waiting for the one opportunity but wasn’t really getting it. He wanted to show the world what he could do but doors were closing in on him with India not really backing the T-20 format. You could sense something was to give,” said a leading broadcast professional who had followed things closely. Had India done poorly in South Africa, there was very little chance the IPL would take off. Nothing succeeds like success as they say and the moment India beat Pakistan in a bowl out in the first game of the tournament, a young country sat back and took notice. Here was a format that appealed to the impatient youth. You did not have to wait all day for a result and you also had the national team play in front of you. It was cricket of the very highest quality and had more drama than other longer formats put together. And when Yuvraj Singh hit the six sixes off Stuart Broad, one man was thanking his luck in South Africa and that was Lalit Modi.

Dinesh Chopra, one of India’s finest journalists and one who was covering the tournament for ESPN, recounted how Modi was delighted with Yuvraj Singh’s exploits in the India vs England game. “Modi was wearing a blue cap with IPL written on it. Most of us did not know what it stood for or hadn’t really followed the story. This is because franchise cricket was still not an accepted format in India and the BCCI had forever been sceptical of it. Soon after Yuvraj hit the six sixes, Modi came and spoke to us journalists and said something very big was in the pipeline. Seeing the reaction to Yuvraj’s innings had added to his confidence and soon after the match was over he gave us all a presentation as to what the IPL was all about. That was the first time I had heard of the IPL,” recounted Chopra.

Modi, who was there to speak to players, had everything going for him and it was natural that players would warm up to his minimum guarantee idea with the possibility of making much more money if the concept worked out well.

In one of our many interviews later, Lalit summed it up nicely. “If the broadcasters did not think the formula worked, they now had the proof in front of them. I did not have to show them anything. When the victorious Indian team returned to Mumbai and it was pouring cats and dogs, it was a clear case study if the fans backed the concept and came out in support of the team braving the rain. More than 20 lakh people lined up on the streets of Mumbai and it took the team 9 hours to travel from the airport to the Wankhede Stadium where they were be felicitated. The journey was a spectacle like no other and to think that such a spectacle could be enacted for 50 straight days, every evening, every year was a broadcaster’s delight. I knew I had it all wrapped up. India’s victory had given the IPL a serious boost and now it was up to me and the team to get everything right,” said Modi.

What was still a problem, however, was the players’ auction. Never before had players gone under the hammer in India and no one really knew how the fan would take to a Sachin Tendulkar, considered the god of cricket, being sold to a franchise. Will it go against the very grain of Indianness was something that was not known.

Modi’s decision to put the cricketers under the hammer met with vociferous opposition from more than one quarter. Moralists and politicians throughout India were up in arms against this public auctioning and in February 2008, some even threatened to raise the issue in Parliament. Gurudas Dasgupta of the Communist Party of India claimed that the auction had sounded the “death knell” of the gentleman’s game.

Over in Mumbai, Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray castigated then BCCI President Sharad Pawar for turning cricketers into “commodities”.

It was also conjectured that faced with teams made up of random conglomerations of players, the draw for most spectators was less the game and more the entertainment on offer. But will fans really want to be merely “entertained” for forty-four straight days? Finally, it was hotly debated whether the benefits of the new league would trickle down to the grass roots of cricket and whether the tournament could ultimately serve as a supply line for future national stars?

Modi, however, was unfazed. He believed in the spectacle and, in Pawar, had an ally who was willing to travel the distance with him. Could you imagine the thrill in seeing M.S. Dhoni being sold? How titillating was the prospect of possessing the man who had won India the World Cup! You could now buy him in an auction. The very thought was enough to rouse fan passion and, more importantly, investor interest. Modi knew it and did his best to ignite appeal among these stakeholders.

To be honest, I had posed a lot of similar questions to the fans queueing up outside the Chinnaswamy from around 4 p.m. in the afternoon on 18 April. And most of them, in fact a majority of them, had no concrete answer to any of these questions. For most, it was something exotic that was happening and they had assembled to see if Lalit was really onto something interesting. It was more out of curiosity than any genuine appreciation of the game. With globally renowned dancers, Bollywood divas, and all kinds of exotic shows planned for the inauguration, Modi had managed to convert the launch of the IPL into an ultimate spectacle of sorts. So while the queues were a vindication, his real challenge was not day one. It was the standard of cricket that would be on display and whether people turned out week on week braving the summer heat to watch the extravaganza.

“Yes you are right. It is always easy to pull off an event. You can channel all your energies and spend sizeable amounts and create a spectacle that will leave the world in awe. But that’s not what the BCCI wanted. The Board wouldn’t settle for a one night stand, you see. We wanted a settled marriage. We wanted a deeper bond. We wanted the public to consume us day in day out. And that’s what Lalit’s brief was. Anything less and he wouldn’t have it easy within the BCCI. So even when the first night of the IPL was going like a dream for him and may I say it did, the battle wasn’t over. Even while he was celebrating, he knew he had a battle the next day and the day after and the week after. To be fair to him, it was one of the most difficult challenges anyone could have undertaken,” said the senior BCCI functionary who was very closely associated with the whole process from the first day.

What Lalit Modi had got right was the formula. Matches played between city teams on a home and away basis with stars and industrialists owning teams was a brand new innovation in Indian cricket. It was over Christmas in 2007 that these details were being worked out in Mumbai between Modi and the IMG top brass. Should franchises be assigned icon players or should they go under the hammer was a key question that Modi had to answer? How would it look if Sachin Tendulkar was bought by a franchise other than Mumbai? Or Sourav Ganguly was picked up by anyone except the Kolkata Knight Riders? Would such things end up dividing fan loyalty and would such a move go down well with the fans? Sachin was very Mumbai and to force him out of his comfort zone wasn’t the best call and that’s what prompted Modi to take the franchise owners into confidence and assign icon players to some of them. Their values also had to be pre-decided and they couldn’t be paid less than anyone in the auction either. This is where the IPL was unique. While it was borrowing the best practices from the Western leagues, it remained very Indian in its core with Indian sensitivity impacting key decision making.

And while the first game was a kind of no contest in the end with Brendon McCullum destroying the Royal Challengers from Bengaluru, it was his innings of 158 not out that was a statement on what the IPL could be. BCCI officials, watching the extravaganza from the VIP enclosures of the Chinnaswamy, were all ecstatic with what they had seen. It was intense cricket and of the very highest quality. There was glamour and glitz and if you were a socialite you wanted to be a part of the action for it was the most happening thing in town.

For me, it was slightly awkward. I was perhaps the only journalist whose accreditation was turned down by Modi and was something we have later laughed about many a time. It was my so-called role in helping Dalmiya in the 2005 election that had prompted Modi to reject my application. What he had done was force me to gain access into the hospitality boxes without having to bother going to the media enclosure. I could speak to a lot of people in these boxes and understand the sentiments on what was unfolding before them.

People, it has to be said, were ecstatic. In one night, Lalit had turned himself into a super celebrity. He was giving the high and mighty a play field they had never imagined and it was to continue for weeks on end. You did not need to wine and dine people anymore. All you needed to do was invite them to the IPL and watch the world’s best franchise league being played out in front of you. Lalit’s stock was going up by the minute and he was finally starting to fulfil what he had set out to achieve when he entered the Indian cricket scene in 1995. The world was looking at him in awe and he was all of a sudden the magician who was creating a brand new cricketing world order. People, and here I mean the high and mighty, were all vying for a piece of Lalit Modi. Journalists were at his beck and call and gulping every word he said. Film-stars and celebrities were flocking to be Modi’s friends and if Twitter had all the features that it has now, Modi would be trending for weeks on end.

His biggest success was being able to fill stadiums for 4 p.m. games and it was something very few could have imagined. Every editor had the same brief for sports journalists. Get a Lalit Modi interview at any cost. He was Prime Time TRP who had revolutionised India’s viewing habit and posed a serious challenge for soaps and serials and big Bollywood blockbusters. In fact, from IPL’s Season 2 onwards no major films would release during the tournament, for it was known they would lose out. Lalit had made the brand bigger than Bollywood and it was a success story like no other.

Ever since the inception of the IPL I have spent time with multiple team owners and industry leaders and have seen from close quarters what the league has come to signify for each one of them. That’s what was the best proof of Modi’s success. These men and women run the country and to see them vulnerable and anxious is not something we are used to. Each one of them wanted a share of the IPL pie and each one of them wanted to win the league. That’s how coveted it had become, giving Modi a degree of immortality few achieved before.

For example, the entire senior management of one of the teams I had the opportunity of closely following, used to leave the hotel together around 2 p.m. on match days to offer pujas for the team. They would never be a minute late, and the kind of discipline shown in performing this ritual was unbelievable! That the team did not have the greatest results is a different matter altogether.

Team owners, men and women who run big corporations, are not as tense in their business meetings as during IPL games. One team owner clutched a worn-out picture of his family deity for the whole time a match was on, and every wicket falling or boundary scored was greeted by a pranaam. Surrounded by friends and family, an IPL owner’s box best defines the complex Indian modernity of today. Most people in this box wear branded clothes and watches, carry fancy phones with powerful cameras and drive to the stadium in luxury cars. But when it comes to the game itself, they turn into devout god-fearing Indians who pray for the success of their teams. So what if they are not playing or have themselves never played the game? Prayers, many feel, are enough to win cricket games. Prashad is passed on to the team members hours before the game and everything from vaastu to feng shui is tried out. Team names and jersey colours have been altered to align better with the stars, and it is fandom of a very different nature that makes the IPL a very different beast in comparison to international cricket.

Tendulkar has alluded to the fascinating behavioural patterns of IPL owners in the book Playing It My Way. Owners in the IPL, he says, have their own superstitions, which are then passed on to the team. In one of the teams, it is always the team owners’ priest who decides when the players should leave their hotel rooms on match days. It can be at any time during the day and, on this issue there are no arguments. Whatever state the players are in they will have to leave the room when the priest orders them to do so. “I have seen players wondering in the corridors in towels or forced to go down for brunch even if they aren’t hungry because they have been forced to vacate their rooms,” he says.

Another team owner believes in vaastu and their dressing room is always organized in a particular manner with mirrors set at specific angles. To go back to Tendulkar, “It once happened that in a match against us [Mumbai Indians] in Mumbai, this team had even gone ahead and changed our dressing room at the Wankhede, putting in mirrors like the way they usually did at their home venue. Because it was our home game, this arrangement was changed late in the night and all mirrors were covered with towels to ensure the opposition was thrown out of their comfort zone.”

Things often turn funny as a result of these superstitions. On one particular occasion, players of a particular team were told not to use a washroo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1. The Creation of the IPL
• 2. The Institution Versus the Individual
• 3. The Beginning of the End
• 4. The Rise and Rise of Lalit Modi
• 5. Always a Maverick
• 6. 24 Hours of Mayhem
• 7. There Is No Right or Wrong
• 8. The Absent Present
• Postscript
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright