Million Dollar Arm

by J. B. Bernstein

  My eyes watered in the heat and dust while I called the driver’s cell number that I had taken for just this very reason. It rang and rang until a recorded message in Hindi said, “The cell phone you are trying to reach is switched off.” (In 2007 virtually no one used voice mail in India; if someone didn’t pick up, you were out of luck. Even now, they text instead.)

  What was I supposed to do? I felt helpless in a way that would have been inconceivable for me back in America. But in America, this whole situation would be inconceivable. After a Mercedes, picking up some Saudi execs, took off and coated me with a layer of dirt, I turned to the driver of another car to ask where drivers parked around here. I found the congregated cars six blocks away and, about fifteen minutes later, my driver. It turned out that he had gone to get some tea. “You said you were going to be an hour?” he said unapologetically, although it had been an hour and forty-five minutes when I finally tracked him down.

  An hour is more ambiguous in India than it is in America. Everything is more ambiguous in India.

  I am not a guy who gets homesick, but back in my hotel room, looking out at the cold, black Indian Ocean, this place felt too big, too crazy, too much. I knew myself to be someone who could work a room, understand the subtlest dynamic, and turn it to my advantage. Here, I didn’t even understand how to take a cab.

  It wasn’t just that I was out of my element; it was also how in-your-face everything was here. What is usually kept hidden in other countries flourishes out in the open without apology in India—like the shantytowns nestled among skyscrapers that reach seventy stories and beyond. Many countries maintain stark boundaries between their rich and poor, but in India the juxtaposition of the two was unsettling. The shantytowns around the skyscrapers were inhabited by the buildings’ construction workers from faraway villages, who preferred to live under tarps and pieces of metal siding than to eat up their meager wages commuting to and from work.

  Even in the quiet cocoon of my high-rise hotel room, I couldn’t escape the reality of the human condition. From my window, I could see the slums that lined the ocean side of the highway below. Remember that the Taj President Hotel was located in Cuffe Parade, one of the most expensive areas in all of India, where high-rises on the land side of the coast-hugging highway boasted apartments that went for $40 million to $50 million. Yet their immediate neighbors on the other side of the highway lived in shacks of Sheetrock and aluminum held together with duct tape on a shore covered in plastic bags, shreds of clothing, pieces of paper, cans, and all manner of trash. Goats picked their way atop boat hulls steps away from a man parking his Maybach.

  Yes, I believed in math—but math couldn’t make sense of what I had experienced since arriving in India.

  Still, what choice did I have other than to continue on with this crazy idea? I couldn’t hop a flight home and tell Will and Ash that things got too weird and difficult over here. Plus, I’m sure that Vaibhav would have talked me out of it even if I wanted to—that guy could talk anybody out of or into anything. No, I had to see this through to the end.

  I had to get used to India, and that included how it did business on a handshake alone. Even the deal with the sports network to produce and air Million Dollar Arm was made on a simple verbal agreement, not unlike the one I had with the first baseball maker.

  When I explained to Himanshu Modi, the head of Zee Sports, what I had in mind for the show, his response was, “It will be done.”

  “We are envisioning eight episodes,” I continued.

  “It will be done.”

  That sentence was really beginning to bug me. TV was going to get out the word about Million Dollar Arm better than I or the agency ever could. And, more importantly, it was going to tell kids that this contest was legit. Otherwise I would just be some American standing in the local park with a sign and a radar gun.

  “We want to start running the episodes two or three weeks behind each of the main qualifier events, to give you time to edit. Then you’ll air the finals.”

  “Very good.”

  In a matter of minutes, we had it all worked out. I shook Modi’s hand and told him to send me a contract.

  “No,” he said. “No contracts necessary.”

  “No offense, but I prefer to have something in writing.”

  But he did take offense. In fact, he thought I was saying that I didn’t trust him, which technically was true. I don’t trust anybody. As far as I was concerned, that’s what contracts are for.

  After a conversation with Ash, who explained how business works in India and said not to sweat the contract, Zee Sports became our TV network. Not in my wildest imagination could I have envisioned signing up a show to a TV station like that. No paperwork. Only a handshake and an “It will be done.”

  Well, I certainly hoped so.

  CHAPTER 3

  San Francisco Giants star closer Brian Wilson, wearing a full suit and dress shoes, released a clean fastball as loose and easy as if he were playing a game of catch. The radar gun clocked it at a cool 80 mph. Since it was the off-season, Wilson was reluctant to throw full throttle, so he made some light tosses to illustrate the mechanics of pitching instead.

  Reporters and cameramen from twenty-five or so media outlets assembled outside a Mumbai horse racetrack for the press conference to kick off Million Dollar Arm looked on blankly as Wilson’s pitches rocketed past them. They had no idea what they were watching. No point of comparison. The great turnout for a story about a sport that most of them had a very limited understanding of could be explained by the fact that after Brian’s demonstration, we held a contest to see which reporter could throw the fastest: whoever had the best arm in the media would win up to 10,000 rupees, or roughly $160.

  With each reporter’s try at the cash prize, Brian’s skill became more and more apparent to the crowd, which, like the rest of India, consisted almost exclusively of cricket fans. Some of them couldn’t even get the ball in the cage. A pitching cage is similar to a batting cage, a netted-in area the distance between the pitching mound and home plate, with a painted catcher and batter at one end to help practice throwing. Missing the pitching cage entirely, the wild pitches sent the rest of us ducking for cover. And most of them were throwing almost impossibly slowly; I mean 20 mph slow. Based on my experience, not one man in the entire Indian media can throw anywhere close to a 70 mph fastball.

  The reporters could have thrown 5-mile-per-hour fastballs, for all I cared. Whether it’s in India, the United States, or Antarctica, when it comes to the media, I have three jobs. The first is to get them interested enough to show up for an event. The second is to make the experience of covering the event positive enough that it will be favorably treated in their story. And the third is to make sure their story is accurate. Well, with Million Dollar Arm, at least I got two out of three.

  When I opened the newspapers the following day, I couldn’t believe my eyes. More than a few of the Indian journalists had confused Brian Wilson, the famed relief pitcher, with Brian Wilson, leader of the Beach Boys. It seemed that someone’s Google search had gone horribly awry. Even though the singer-songwriter was sixty-five years old, that didn’t send up red flags for the writers who had seen Brian (described in one article as “America’s number one death pitcher,” whatever that meant) in the flesh throw a fastball.

  The case of the mistaken Brian Wilson identity was just the first in a long comedy of errors, as Vaibhav and I went on the road for the next several months in search of at least one good arm.

  From the start, the entire Million Dollar Arm project had been conceived of as a numbers game. The more young men who were aware that they could win $1 million, the more of them would try out. And the more people who tried out, the better chance we had of finding some legitimate prospects to bring home to train for a spot in the major leagues.

  To that end, I spent from dawn to dusk in one park or another across India as we traveled nonstop, holding events in as many different places as possible. “Parks”
was a loose term for where we passed our days. In India, most parks are just dirt fields without a blade of grass in sight. When kids get out of school, they head to the closest park to play cricket. And the kids who don’t go to school, of which there are many, occupy the park every day from morning to night. They don’t even need a park, or equipment, for that matter: Indian kids will fill in any empty spaces they find to play the country’s national pastime. In Mumbai’s Shivaji Park, it’s common to find ten thousand people playing cricket—some using rocks and sticks, and others with professional gear. There are so many kids playing at once on the park’s twenty-seven acres that the games physically overlap. A guy playing outfield in one game will be standing right next to a guy playing outfield in another. Typical Indian chaos.

  In any given park, we set up our Million Dollar Arm outpost in one corner of the field, so that we were off to the side. We weren’t going to make any friends disturbing people’s cricket games. Once we had camped for the day, we hired kids to run through the park, handing out informational flyers and yelling, “Go on TV and win a million dollars!” As soon as a cricket match ended, our hired guns ran after the players to encourage them to stop at the pitching cage on their way out. No one was breaking up a cricket game to throw a baseball, that’s for sure.

  Until I actually saw it with my own eyes in parks across India, I didn’t have a full understanding of how truly massive cricket is in that country. Technically, field hockey is the national sport of India, but cricket is the national obsession. The sports section of any newspaper is devoted almost entirely to cricket, with one page for all other sports, from soccer, to basketball, to chess. At any given time, it’s likely that all seven of India’s dedicated sports channels are showing cricket. On one channel, you can watch live cricket, and then if you get bored, you can flip to another and watch some classic match from 1990 in which India beat Australia. On the next channel, they’ll have the World Eighteen-and-Under Cricket Championships, or something like that, and then, on the next one, some old prerecorded match between Sri Lanka and Australia. It doesn’t even matter if it’s an Indian team: the country’s insatiable desire to watch cricket knows no geographical or demographical bounds.

  The only way to compare it to America is to think about football, which is far and away our most popular sport. Still, there is a limit to how much football people in the United States are interested in watching. Imagine if, all year round, on all the different sports channels, they showed nothing but live NFL games, old NFL games, college games, high school games, Pop Warner games, and so on. That’s what cricket is like in India. There is an ESPN channel in India that airs live Major League Baseball games at three o’clock in the morning, because of the time difference. But the network allots the game only a certain time slot, and when it’s over, so is baseball. In the ninth inning of a nail-biter, it will cut out, and viewers are suddenly enjoying the cricket news report.

  India’s devotion to cricket borders on cultlike. Every day at five o’clock, thousands gather outside the home of Kapil Dev, a retired cricket superstar who in 2007 held just about every record in the sport and who endorses all kinds of products (including particular brands of cement and rebar), for a quick glimpse of and wave from the cricket god.

  When it comes to professional athletics, the cricket blinders mean very little opportunity for most anyone who wants to make his or her living playing sports. In the United States, there are thousands and thousands of pros in dozens of different leagues and events, from the NFL, to the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), to the X Games. In India, a nation with over 150 million boys, the sum total of sports careers where the player had any chance of making good money was twenty-five spots on the national cricket team. And some of the guys on the cricket team have been on it for twenty years!

  The odds that a kid who could throw a baseball would win the $1 million was way, way higher than getting a spot on the national cricket team. The only problem was that it didn’t seem like any of the kids in India could actually throw a baseball.

  When the kids pitched, it was a train wreck: 99 percent terrible, 100 percent crazy. They were so bad that more often than not someone watching got hit with a ball. The first time that a skinny teenager in a dusty school uniform launched the ball a good ten feet to the left of the net, I almost didn’t believe my eyes. How the hell did he miss a twenty-foot net? In America you would have never seen a ball thrown that wildly, even by little kids. But in India, it happened all the time: to the left or right, or high in the air like a golf ball whistling down the fairway.

  Of course, it’s pretty understandable. If someone is hurling a ball as hard as he can but doesn’t know when to release it, because he’s never done it before, where that ball is headed is anyone’s guess. It became so commonplace that I decided my place in the contest was right behind the pitcher. No one was so bad that he could throw it behind him.

  Vaibhav, who knew just as much about baseball as our contestants, wasn’t quite as strategic about his safety. Before I came along, he was aware that baseball was a sport but had never seen it played. Still, every now and then I caught him showing kids how to throw a baseball. “No, no, no, don’t do that,” I scolded. “Stick to what you know.”

  All I needed was these kids getting baseball tips from Vaibhav.

  He should have listened, because he wound up with a ball in his face. After one of the kids had his turn, a ball had gone rogue, rolling about forty feet left of the pitching cage, and another contestant in line chased it down. Vaibhav, instead of letting him run back with the ball, as he should have done, held out his hands and shouted unwisely, “Throw it here!”

  As the words came out of his mouth, I wondered, Why is he doing that? But by the time the thought fully formed in my head, it was too late. Just as these kids didn’t know when to release the ball, they also didn’t know how to throw it gently. The contestant whipped it at Vaibhav, who caught it with his head. Out of all the countless people who got hit with balls during the contest, Vaibhav was the only one who took it in the face. (The others got hit in the back of the head because they weren’t looking.) His fancy designer glasses shattered, and he ended up needing stitches.

  Vaibhav proved just as adroit with the baseball equipment as he was with the game itself. While we were in the city of Indore, midway between Mumbai and New Delhi, our radar gun stopped working. After bringing it to a handyman, who charged me $500 and then told me he couldn’t fix it—most likely because he’d never seen a radar gun in his life—we resorted to using balls with little LED screens that marked the speed. But they turned out to be completely inaccurate (off by plus or minus 10 mph, according to the manufacturer) and, so, completely worthless.

  Vaibhav said that the real problem was with the generator used to provide power out in the parks and to our radar gun (because of the difference in voltage between the United States and India). Now, Vaibhav’s real skill was talking. He was so authoritative, even the crankiest government officials came around to his side. So when he said the problem was with the generator, I went for it, hook, line, and sinker.

  Ash shipped in a brand-new Yamaha generator. In the week and a half it took to arrive, I was going out of my mind over the time we were wasting. In this numbers game, ours were dwindling every minute. After the new generator arrived, it was held up again in customs because a government official worried about its environmental impact. Now, India is by no means a pristine eco habitat; there is pollution everywhere. Untold millions of three-wheelers belch filth into the sky out of go-kart engines built back in the 1970s. People use rivers as garbage dumps. But according to this official, our top-of-the-line generator was going too far.

  It wasn’t a surprise. Anytime you ask anyone in power in India for anything, the first answer is “Namumakin,” which in Hindi means “impossible.” Enter Vaibhav, who went to see the official and talked him into handing over our generator.

  Unfortunately, after the new generator was set up, the radar g
un still didn’t work. I went over to see for myself what was happening and was horrified by what I found. Under Vaibhav’s careful guidance, his crack team had cut the American-style plugs off the radar gun and stuck the wires—with the plugs snipped off—into the outlets on the generator (made for American-style plugs). Twigs held the wires in the holes.

  Surveying the Frankensteinian situation, a terrifying thought occurred to me: What does Vaibhav know about mechanical equipment? After I spliced the plug back on, wrapping it with electrical tape, and then plugged it into the new generator, the gun still didn’t work. Now, I’m not exactly the handiest guy in the world, but I asked if anybody had checked the fuse. Everybody looked at me, like, What’s a fuse?

  Between the repairs and the customs fees and the new generator, not only did I lose over a week’s worth of time, I also spent $14,000 to fix a problem that could have been solved with a 50-cent fuse.

  Vaibhav was incredibly intelligent and even more loyal, but he always seemed to get tripped up by the simple things. This special quality of his almost landed my entire team, including me, in jail. It all began on an early Sunday morning as we were setting up for a tryout in Calcutta’s Jodhpur Park, when the mounted military police questioned our operation but ultimately, after Vaibhav chatted with them, left us alone.

  No sooner had we finished setting up the large net, pitcher’s mound, mannequin, and display board when a whole other contingent of police in completely different uniforms—this time from the Calcutta municipal force—asked to see our permit. According to them, it was no good, despite the fifty municipal officials who’d signed off on it. But worse than that, the police lieutenant placed us under arrest for unlawful assembly and called a police bus (a school bus with bars on the windows) to confiscate all our equipment. We had gone from reality show producers to outlaws in five minutes flat.

  Vaibhav sprung into action, needling and cajoling the lieutenant into telling us what we had to do to avoid going to jail. Surprisingly, to me at least, there was a way: we needed permission from a certain ranking officer, known ominously as Colonel Q, who happened to work on the military base directly across the street from the park.