Million Dollar Arm

by J. B. Bernstein

  Stepping off my plane in Mumbai at two o’clock in the morning on November 15, 2007, I was instantly overcome by the heat. The air was thick, moist, and pungent. After the antiseptic cool of the two-leg, twenty-two-hour flight, I could hardly breathe it was so stifling. The airport obviously wasn’t air-conditioned.

  As I made my way to the baggage claim, sweat circles spread out under my arms, on my back, and across my chest. Everywhere I looked, there were banks of pay phones. Most of them were filled with women in colorful saris and men in short-sleeved dress shirts, slacks, and sandals making calls. It was like I had stepped off a time machine to thirty years ago.

  When I got downstairs to pick up my luggage, the noise hit me before anything else. With about ten international flights all about to land at the same time, large families carrying enough luggage to last a lifetime or two, official-looking men blowing whistles, little children playing tag, and old women crying, it was like walking into some crazy after-hours bazaar. In my experience, airports are typically empty in the early hours of the morning. But this one was filled with more activity than I had ever seen anywhere else, ever. I muscled my way to the baggage carousel, grabbed my bags as soon as they came around, and found the automatic doors, desperate to escape the chaos.

  But when I got outside, I found only more chaos—and more heat. There were people everywhere, holding signs and screaming. “Do you need a car, sir?” “This way, sir!” “Sir!” “Sir?” “Sir!”

  I searched frantically for my driver. I had assumed there would be a guy standing with a sign bearing my name, the same as when you fly into anywhere else, and my assumption wasn’t wholly incorrect. Except in this case, there were literally hundreds of guys holding signs. To make it even more confusing, 90 percent of them clearly worked for the same company, because they were all wearing the exact same white driver’s coat, pants, and hat. It was like walking into an endless sea of ice-cream vendors.

  The heat, the noise, the ice-cream-vendor army: it was total sensory overload, and I had been on Indian soil for only a few minutes.

  After stumbling around and rapidly dehydrating, I finally located my driver and collapsed in the backseat of his Toyota Innova minivan, but my relief was short lived. The forty-five-minute drive to my hotel was lined almost entirely with shantytowns. The extreme poverty was marked even as we sped by—at one point, veering onto the wrong side of the road, in the direct path of cars heading right for us in what I was sure was going to be the end of my life. All just so that my driver could pass the car in front of us.

  After sitting in an intersection for a nasty twenty-minute symphony of car horns beeping without pause, we arrived at the Taj President, a large high-rise overlooking the Indian Ocean. The upscale hotel was located in Cuffe Parade, the business district of Mumbai and one of the most exclusive neighborhoods with the plushest residences in all of India. Even then, upon exiting the car, I was besieged by a group of kids with no shirts or shoes (and some without teeth) hawking the most bizarre wares. The one closest to me was selling a copy of the magazine Harvard Business Review, a bouquet of plastic flowers, and a bunch of Rosetta Stone French language CDs. I felt like I was hallucinating.

  Entering the lobby, I was revived by the familiarity of a luxury hotel (God bless air-conditioning). I approached the front desk, my typical confident stride returning.

  “Hama kare, mein darj karna chahta hoon,” I said in Hindi, which translated to “Excuse me, I would like to check in,” followed by a flash of my winning smile.

  Before leaving for India, I had tried to learn as much Hindi as I could, listening to language CDs while running or driving in the car. I was under no illusion that I was going to become fluent in Hindi; my studies were a matter of respect rather than utility. By this point in my life, I was fairly well traveled. While attending college at University of Massachusetts Amherst back in the 1980s, I used a Eurail pass to travel all over Europe, going as far east as Russia. And when I worked for Upper Deck, I went to South America to chase down the rights for a set of World Cup soccer trading cards. I had been to Japan on baseball business, and to Guangzhou, China, with Barry Sanders for NFL China, the arm of the NFL that handles sponsors, broadcasting, and merchandise in China.

  In all my previous travels, I found it wasn’t so important that I learn a language but that I try to learn it. My attempt to speak Hindi was proof that I wasn’t an ethnocentric American.

  But the young Indian man screwed up his face, clearly not having understood a word I said. I knew that Hindi was very different from English, but I didn’t think my pronunciation had been that far from the throaty woman on the CD. I tried again. Now the concierge looked pained.

  “Very sorry, sir,” the clerk said in the most polite and perfect enunciation. “Do you perchance speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  As I discovered, there are only a few cities in India where the modern standard Hindi I had been studying was in common use. Down south in Chennai, they speak Tamil. In Calcutta, it’s Bengali. In Chandigarh, Punjabi. If I had wanted to chat with this guy in Mumbai, I should have learned Marathi. Or just speak English, as we did. Six months of Rosetta Stone was 100 percent worthless.

  I hoped that the rest of my plan would prove a little more successful than my language studies. Million Dollar Arm—as Will, Ash, and I had coined our project—was to begin as a series of promotional events throughout the country that would drum up excitement for (or even just awareness of) the contest. Hopefully, having discovered some raw talent, we planned to hold qualifying trials in six different cities before the final competition and crowning of a champion.

  Officially, we were looking for prospects between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. But even in the best-case scenario, the athlete would have to train in the States in order to get signed and then put in a couple of years in the minors. So realistically, I didn’t want to bring anyone older than twenty back to America to train for a tryout in front of all of Major League Baseball. From the start, we decided to bring the winner to the United States, along with anyone else who had a legitimate shot at playing pro baseball. Only the winner, however, would receive a cash prize of $100,000 during the finals—plus a chance to win $1 million if he could throw three consecutive strikes over 90 miles an hour.

  First things first: I had to obtain permits to hold the promotional and qualifying events in India’s public parks. To navigate the foreign business landscape, we had hired an advertising and promotions agency with a local office to help with the contest. My contacts at the agency were Sanjay Lal, the owner, who spent most of his time at his headquarters in Dubai; Vivek Daglur, who ran the office in Bangalore; and Vaibhav Bassi, my day-to-day assistant throughout the contest.

  Vaibhav looked more like a scenester from Dubai than someone who hailed from northern India. In his crisp dress shirts, expensive driving mocs, and designer tortoiseshell glasses, he had an aura of upbeat cool. Vaibhav’s reputation was that he was especially adept at talking to government officials and working the system—and I believed it. With his smooth way of talking and hip clothes, you couldn’t help but want to ally yourself with him.

  On the way to the municipal office to request a permit, Vaibhav talked about his interests, which matched his persona. Hot restaurants, hot clubs, hot stars—he was definitely in the mix. If this thing took off and I got invited to Bollywood events, he told me, I had to take him along.

  The two of us walked into a large room painted gray, the international color of bureaucracy, where men in identical cubicles looked tired and hot. There were no signs, titles, or even names to guide us to the appropriate person to talk to about the park. Vaibhav, unperturbed by the lack of information, simply started talking to the man in the cubicle closest to the door as if the two were long-lost friends.

  While Vaibhav described Million Dollar Arm and the permit we needed for guys to throw baseballs in the park, the clerk nodded enthusiastically, insisting that o
ur needs were “no problem.” My shoulders dropped from up around my ears where they had hovered since I arrived in this hectic country. The clerk really seemed to be on board when he told Vaibhav and me to have a seat. I relaxed in the hard plastic chair.

  Ten minutes later, a man from an adjacent cubicle came out shaking his head and repeating, “This is impossible.” My shoulders immediately rose back to their previously tense position, but Vaibhav acted like he knew the man was going to say that from the beginning. “There’s nothing to get excited about, my friend,” he said to the second man. “It’s no big deal. We are talking about a few boys throwing around a few balls.”

  Who was this guy? Who was the first man that Vaibhav had talked to? Who was anybody? It never became clear to me, because it wasn’t clear. In India, no one wants to let on who is in charge. Instead, they try to make it appear like everyone is equal. So in making your way through the massive amount of red tape, you have to go from person to person, getting the lowest person and each person above him to sign off on a plan or document until finally the highest official on the ladder is willing to sign. For someone like me, who hadn’t asked anyone permission for anything since grade school, the process was maddening.

  After a twenty-minute conversation with the second clerk, he gave us the next clue: the man that we needed to see was out for coffee and would be back in about ten minutes. Vaibhav and I returned to our seats and waited. I could feel my patience quickly wearing thin. When the same clerk reappeared about an hour later, I thought my head was going to explode.

  “He is actually in a meeting out of the office,” he said.

  “But I thought you said he went to get a coffee?” I butted in angrily.

  “That is where he is having coffee.”

  Vaibhav shot me a look to shut up. He was concerned that I would screw things up, and rightfully so. These were sensitive, strange, and precarious dealings. All it would take was for one guy to get a bad taste in his mouth to scuttle the deal.

  After we left the municipal office, Vaibhav told me, “Next time, just stand there and look rich.”

  Four days and about fifty signatures later, we got the permit. That, however, was just the start to the complete insanity of doing business in India. While prepping for my trip, Will, Ash, and I had countless meetings about the type of talent we would be looking for, about branding, about the format of the TV show, and so many other details. But it never occurred to me that there wouldn’t be high-speed internet available except in one small corner near the spa in my luxury hotel, or that my cell phone wouldn’t work much of the time, and when it did, it would cost about $8 a second.

  I also never considered the geopolitical implications of the pitching setup we had sent from the States. While the plan was always to have a lot of stuff for the contest and show—like T-shirts bearing the show’s logo and baseballs—manufactured in India to save money, we had to bring the pitching cage, plate, mound, and a mannequin to stand in for a batter, all of which were made in America. Before packing up the mannequin, though, we dressed it in a baseball jersey and pants so that it wouldn’t be naked, and those, I learned later, were made in China.

  I was made aware of the origins of the clothing after an Indian customs agent discovered the “Made in China” labels, which turned into a huge headache for us. India’s fraught relations with China made bringing anything from that country into India difficult. The mannequin’s stupid outfit was holding up our shipment! Vaibhav had his work cut out for him getting our stuff into the country.

  Making the baseballs in India proved to be an even bigger headache than our cheap Chinese-made baseball clothes. The process had started like all my other endeavors there: friendly and confident. When I showed a manufacturer an MLB regulation ball that I had brought with me, he told me in no uncertain terms, “I can make this, no problem.” Fast-forward to a week before Vaibhav and I were scheduled to hit the road to promote Million Dollar Arm. The shipment arrived, but when I opened the box, I found three hundred cricket balls. Not cricket balls that looked like baseballs. Or baseballs that looked like cricket balls. Straight-up cricket balls. Cricket balls have a hard casing, and one seam that goes around the circumference of the ball, unlike the softer leather and dual-seam pattern on a baseball. They also weigh about half an ounce more.

  “What the hell are these?” I bellowed. “I gave you the sample!”

  “Oh yes, sir. We did not know what were those balls. So we made you cricket balls.”

  What was wrong with these people? It wasn’t that in the United States we were any more competent. Sure, a lot of sports manufacturers in America would botch making cricket balls. But at least back home, we knew that when we messed up, we either had to admit it or try to cover it up. We didn’t just change the plan when things didn’t go right and expect the other party to accept it.

  Everybody in India is so eager for work that he’ll say anything to get business. Then he has no qualms about coming back and saying that he can’t do what he said he was going to do. “It’ll be done” is the common refrain, and utterly meaningless.

  With the balls for Million Dollar Arm, it wasn’t just a matter of nominal authenticity that made using cricket balls instead of baseballs a problem. This was a contest to bring back Indians who had a shot at the major leagues, and the only way to judge that was on speed. To do that, the balls had to be as close to an official MLB ball as possible. An ounce heavier could slow down a pitcher’s speed by as much as seven miles an hour, with the opposite true as well. The average baseball weighs five ounces, while cricket balls could weigh at least a half ounce more. Meanwhile, my cricket-ball maker thought that his three hundred balls constituted a job well done.

  We went through the same drill with the next manufacturer: “I can make this, no problem!” And then when we got the sample back, the balls were way too small.

  When the balls from a third manufacturer arrived, they looked and felt perfect. The seams were in the right place, and the weight was five ounces on the nose. Then we took them out for a test drive. Vaibhav, who was as much a contender for the majors as my kid sister, threw one of the balls, which hit the ground and exploded. The seams were so fragile that they burst if the ball hit anything harder than the net, disintegrating into sawdust on impact.

  We went through two more manufacturers before we finally got our baseballs. All this time, I was navigating this frustratingly inefficient terrain with the worst caffeine headache of my life. While I didn’t drink coffee, I was a heavy user of Diet Coke. Back home, I was good for ten cans a day. But it wasn’t so easy to find the stuff in India. Compared to exploding baseballs, nonexistent pitching equipment, and permit problems, this was a minor inconvenience. But when my temples were pounding, it felt like a big deal—and didn’t exactly do great things for my increasingly bad mood.

  I was particularly short tempered the morning of my meeting with a television executive to pitch our show. I still hadn’t worked out a deal to make and air a reality show about Million Dollar Arm—the linchpin of the contest. Everything else had been such a pain in the ass, I couldn’t imagine that this was going to be a piece of cake. I stopped at the concierge desk of my hotel and asked for a driver who could speak English and knew his way around the part of town where I was headed.

  “No problem, sir, it will be done.”

  I got in the car and gave the address to the driver.

  “Yes, yes,” he replied.

  “You know where that is?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes.”

  The windows were rolled down, but the morning was anything but fresh.

  “Do you have air-conditioning?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Well, can you turn it on?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  For Christ’s sake, this guy didn’t understand a word I was saying. He probably didn’t have AC, either, so I sat back totally on edge while we bumped along the city’s terrible streets, which were laid out so haphazardly I wondered ho
w anyone got anywhere.

  I shouldn’t have wondered, because as it turned out, we weren’t getting anywhere. After we had been in the car for an hour, suddenly my driver, without explanation (although, to be fair, he couldn’t have explained to me anyway), pulled over and got out of the car. He approached a couple of men squatting over a rusty bicycle. They seemed to be talking forever when I got out and went up to them.

  “No problem, sir. We help with directions,” one of the squatting men said in English.

  I asked if he knew the location of the TV network’s office. No, he informed me proudly, but they had given the driver directions to a man named Amid three blocks away. He would know. I thought I was going to cry.

  “You said you knew where you were going!” I yelled, pointing my finger at my driver. We all looked at the English speaker to translate.

  “Well,” the driver replied once he understood, “I’m in the right city, aren’t I?”

  I wanted to catch a cab back to the States. But there was nothing to do but get back in the car and find Amid, which we did, and a half hour later, we pulled up to an enormous fifty-story building of glass and steel with an incongruous dirt driveway that looked like it should be in a rural village somewhere and not leading up to a skyscraper. Jaguars and Range Rovers were covered in its red dust.

  “Okay, I have a meeting,” I said to the driver, using my hands to mime my words. “Wait [holding out my palm, indicating “Stop”] here [pointing downward]. I’ll be out [walking fingers] in one hour [index finger].”

  True to my word, I was back outside in an hour on the dot. (Anyone who knows me knows that I am never late.) The dirt road had become a busy street with dust hanging in the air like a hot red cloud. I looked left and right but didn’t immediately see the car. I could see child beggars starting to approach. All I wanted to do was get in the car. Where the hell was my driver? A little kid in nothing but a loincloth held up for sale a Motorola cell phone charger and a squirt gun.