“Give us one hour,” Vaibhav said dramatically.
The police lieutenant agreed, as long as we left our staff and stuff with him as a guarantee of our return. Our driver raced us across the road and across the street to the base. Vaibhav sweet-talked our way onto the base—even though what good could two strangers be up to at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning?—and convinced an assistant in the main office to call and bother this Colonel Q at just such an early hour on a weekend morning. As he explained the situation over the phone to the colonel, I worried that we were going to be drawn and quartered.
Instead, a half hour later, the door flew open, and in marched Colonel Q, a tiny man covered in medals that together probably weighed more than he did. And boy, was he angry—except not at us. “Give me this guy’s number,” he said to Vaibhav.
As he dialed the ranking police officer’s number from his cell and gave it to Colonel Q for a serious tongue-lashing, I had to hand it to Vaibhav. He had really come through on this one. “You got me out of bed because somebody wants to throw a ball around in the park?” the Colonel screamed into the phone. “You let these guys do whatever they want, unless you want to spend the rest of the day emptying garbage cans!”
Back in the car, I gloated to our driver, “The situation is resolved. Colonel Q approved our permit.”
“I know,” the driver said. “I just spoke to him.”
“What do you mean you just spoke to him?”
When Vaibhav went to call the police lieutenant, he’d misdialed and called our driver by mistake. Colonel Q’s diatribe was so intimidating that the driver hadn’t uttered a single word to let him know he was screaming at the wrong guy.
The scene at the park was mayhem. The police, who had not received the message that we were allowed to stay, had put my entire staff in handcuffs. And as soon as Vaibhav and I returned, we were put in handcuffs, too.
“You’re making a big mistake!” Vaibhav yelled. “If I’m wrong, you can put me in jail forever!”
I was contemplating what a jail cell in Calcutta would be like while Vaibhav continued to plead with the lieutenant to let him make just one phone call to Colonel Q. If he was lying, the lieutenant would know right away, and we would go to jail anyway. But if he wasn’t, the lieutenant would be in big trouble for carting us away.
He relented—probably just to get Vaibhav to shut up—and called the military base himself. As the colonel’s assistant on the other end of the line relayed the entire conversation that had been delivered to my driver by accident and explained why he probably wouldn’t want to bother the colonel for a second time on a Sunday morning, the police lieutenant’s face turned white, and he began whispering to all the other cops, “Uncuff them! Uncuff them!”
It was all in a day’s work. In leaving no stone unturned in my search for pitchers, I experienced more of India than most Indians will ever see in their lifetime. The conditions of our travels were as varied as the different landscapes: from the clean, industrialized city of Bangalore, where all the big international technology companies are headquartered; to the lush rain forests of Karnataka; to Ludhiana in the state of Punjab, where the pollution is so bad that you can cut the air with a knife.
Our hotel accommodations were equally diverse. In Hyderabad, we stayed at a Taj hotel that was once a nineteenth-century palace built in the shape of a scorpion. While in the small town of Madhubani, we had to keep going down to the front desk and buying scratch-off cards in order to use the internet.
No matter where we went, however, my first order of business was getting a supply of Diet Coke. Whenever I checked into one of the hotels from the Taj chain, I had the staff clear out the minibar and stock it with Diet Coke. Out in the countryside, though, when I asked for Diet Coke, I was usually directed to the big Indian brand of cola, Thums Up, which, loaded with sugar, is as far from diet as you can get. I went so far as to download a picture of a Diet Coke can to my phone so that I could use it as a visual aid while trying to feed my caffeine addiction in small roadside mom-and-pop stores. Sometimes even finding a Thums Up on the road was a luxury.
When we drove from Bangalore to Goa, all the way near the west coast, I would have drunk or eaten anything—and I did. I didn’t think anything about the three-hundred-mile trip before Vaibhav and I left. That’s about how far it is from LA to Vegas, a trip I’ve made many times before, and we were planning on taking an interstate highway. A piece of cake. The problem turned out to be that for the majority of the drive, large swaths of the highway basically did not exist.
Averaging about 10 miles per hour (any faster than that and our car would have bottomed out on the massive potholes), we passed road crews of women who all looked to be about ninety years old. Holding large, shallow bowls filled with gravel, these ladies were tasked with maintaining the road by hand-sprinkling the gravel. With that kind of crew, I was surprised the roads were in as good shape as they were.
After nine excruciating hours, Vaibhav and I were at the point of starvation. “No problem, sir,” our driver said. He knew a great restaurant along the way. In the middle of nowhere, he pulled over at a shack that looked like the perfect place to rob an American and then hack him into little pieces. Inside, the place was absolutely filthy. I could tell that Vaibhav was just as appalled as I was by the grime-caked walls, buzzing flies, and underlying sewer stench. However, neither of us wanted to insult the driver or his friend the cook, who could murder us and take our money. So we settled on an order of eggs, which seemed like the safest bet.
But when the plate of eggs was placed before me, they were covered with ants! The man who ran the place stood over us, wanting to know how we liked his food, while the insects swarmed the runny eggs. I gave him a big American thumbs-up as I shoveled the eggs and ants into my mouth. Luckily we had six more hours of driving for me to digest the special meal.
Panjim, Goa’s capital, a beach town located on the Arabian Sea, was a lot more pleasant than the ant omelet, although not without its own perils. We arrived at our bungalow on a beautiful stretch of beach for New Year’s 2008 and took the day off from the contest to celebrate. Goa, India’s answer to Ibiza, was jam-packed with foreigners. After a long, lazy day on the beach, we spent the night going from club to club, where I was back on my game. I met a cool French chick and was actually able to pick her up, since, unlike the Indian women I had been surrounded by for months, she was definitely not looking to get married. The only unpleasant part of the visit was our mode of transportation: scooter. As we whipped through dicey traffic situations on the little motorized scooters, I was almost killed about twenty times, once even bouncing off the back of a car.
Mostly, however, our trip was about watching kids throw terrible, terrible pitches. Finding potential pitchers turned out to be a lot like fishing. You can go out on a lake and catch a nice, fat fish in the first hour—and then you might not catch anything else for months. During our tour, when a huge range of kids, from those in school uniforms to those without shoes or shirts, gave it their hardest try, sometimes we saw multiple guys who could really bring it in the same day. Other times we went weeks without so much as a nibble.
As I had imagined it would be, the TV show was the bait that on a good day lured as many as a thousand kids to wait in line for their turn on the mound. It wasn’t the actual show that aired on TV that provided the attraction; rather, the camera equipment and flat-screen TV playing pitching highlights and a promo for the show had the desired effect of drawing curious kids into our contest. The big setup we hauled all around India was a lot more interesting than Million Dollar Arm. If you never saw an episode of the Zee Sports program—well, I would say you’re lucky. Even in America, it would be pretty challenging to make an exciting show about of a bunch of guys pitching against a radar gun. But in India, it was downright impossible.
The show’s production values were very low, and that is being kind. In 2007 high-definition TV was pretty much nonexistent in most of India. At least two epi
sodes still had the time code used in the editing process of the rough cut when they aired on broadcast TV. Million Dollar Arm also never had a specific time slot. It aired simply whenever the last Indian Cricket League match of the day ended. But I didn’t go to India to make a great reality show or chase ratings. I went to reach as many potential pitchers as possible, and, in that effort, the show helped immensely. Zee promoted the show across its various platforms, like announcing the dates and places for upcoming qualifiers on Zee News.
No matter how much press we got or how many kids lined up to see if they could light up the radar gun, I wasn’t satisfied. I put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to make the contest succeed. As kid after kid threw only around 50 miles per hour, my stress mounted. Haunted by the thought that I might pass through a town where a potential future Cy Young Award winner lived and never get to see him, I blew my stack every time there was a missed opportunity due to a problem with permits, malfunctioning equipment, or poor turnout.
As the contest wore on without our identifying one truly viable candidate, I started yelling at people for things I would normally let slide. I had so much to supervise, and so much of it was going wrong that I found myself screaming at Vaibhav or the shopkeeper who handed me a Thums Up instead of a Diet Coke, “Can anybody just do their fucking job?” My lowest point, though, came when I yelled at some poor kid who just wanted to throw a stupid ball.
In some dusty park in God-knows-where India, this one skinny kid with bangs that brushed his eyes and an arm that had all the strength of a pile of cooked rice lined up over and over again. Each contestant got five throws per turn, but that wasn’t enough for this guy, who on his third go-round still hadn’t cracked 30 mph. When I saw him approach the mound for a fourth time, I lost it.
“What’s wrong with you?” I shouted. “Can’t you understand that you are never going to succeed at this no matter how many times you try? You’re just doing the same thing over and over. What do you think’s going to happen? Miraculously you are going to get some kind of different result? I mean, that is the dictionary definition of futility!
“You are not going to succeed here,” I went on ranting, “so stop wasting my time, accept defeat, and go home!”
The kid, who might not have understood my tirade but definitely got my meaning, turned away, shamed. It wasn’t my finest moment, and of course I was really just projecting my own fears. I had so much at stake with Million Dollar Arm. Although there was a significant amount of capital on the line, money wasn’t the biggest issue.
More than money, my reputation was on the line. Looking for pitchers in India wasn’t like some career study abroad program. As an agent, I had put myself way out on a limb. I had left four extremely high-profile clients back at home to pursue this crazy idea—jeopardizing my relationship with them in the process. For the most part, they were pretty skeptical about my going to India. Barry Sanders thought I was going to Indiana when he first heard the news. That’s how out of left field it was for him. Although he didn’t say it to my face, I knew that he didn’t want his guy halfway around the world. Barry Bonds, after twenty-two years in the bigs, the last fifteen of them as a Giant, was hoping to catch on with another team at the age of forty-three. It was a crucial moment in his career, and he couldn’t have been too happy about the timing of my trip. Top athletes aren’t going to put up with a six-hour lag in returning their calls due to the time difference, and they aren’t going to put up with their business going down.
So I pulled double duty the entire time I was in India. By day, I worked on Million Dollar Arm, and then while America was awake, I spent the whole night on the phone. An assistant accompanied my clients to their appearances and shoots, attending to all the details I laid out for her. But I still solicited and booked all the deals and reviewed and signed off on all the contracts.
If I came home empty-handed, it would be a major blow to my judgment, which is the key to being an agent. We had been so sure that we would succeed when everyone else was so sure that we wouldn’t. If we didn’t, it would be a life of I-told-you-sos. Right now the other side was definitely up.
Well aware that my ability to assess pitching talent was seriously limited, we’d hired one of the best scouts in the business to look at videotape of the contestants to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. (The only baseball player I represented was Barry Bonds, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out he’s pretty good; still, if I had seen Barry when he was sixteen years old, I’m not sure I would’ve known just how good he was.) It takes a special skill to be able to judge talent at the pro level, and that is not a skill that I possess. All I could really do was look at the radar gun. Beyond that, I relied on Ray Poitevint, a man with nearly fifty years of traveling the world to find great players.
Having unearthed talent everywhere from Nicaragua to Korea, Ray believed in the project and agreed to travel to India for the contest finals. For the Baltimore Orioles alone, in the 1970s he discovered and signed first baseman Eddie Murray, a future Hall of Famer, and pitcher Dennis Martínez, who won 245 games in a twenty-three-year MLB career and in 1991 threw a perfect game.
In the meantime, he was back home in Southern California, watching thousands of kids try out on DVD. Ray saw video of every single kid who came anywhere close to hitting 80 miles per hour on the gun.
Mostly, that meant watching tons of kids with absolutely no prayer of becoming baseball players in something akin to a blooper reel. I instructed Ray to call me immediately if he saw anyone with a shred of potential that we might have missed. Maybe his eye could detect someone who didn’t throw hard but had some easily correctable flaw that might allow for dramatic improvement.
Yet after sending DVDs of thousands of kids, I still hadn’t heard one word from Ray.
The morning after I yelled at the kid who took too many turns, I headed out at five in the morning for a run. I found that after a long day of frustration and then an equally long night of working for my American business, I needed to move my body to clear my head and get ready to do it all over again. On this particular morning, I hardly noticed the smoky orange of the sunrise or the coolness of the only fresh air that would exist all day. My mind was racing as fast as my legs with fantasies of failure and embarrassment.
I was about to turn back for my hotel when I crossed paths with a beggar who didn’t have any teeth in his head and might have been about 80 years old, although he looked more like 120.
When he spoke, I broke my stride instantly, because I could actually understand his Hindi as he told me, “Don’t stop breathing.”
CHAPTER 4
By the time we arrived in New Delhi in January to hold a qualifying event, we had it down. Over the course of the contest, we tried out more than thirty-eight thousand young men, which gave us ample opportunity to work out the kinks in the system.
Among the several hundred hopefuls who lined up in yet another dusty park on yet another long, hot day were two friends, Dinesh Kumar Patel and Rinku Singh. Finally, after standing in line for an hour and a half, Rinku stepped up to the cage and held a baseball in his left hand for the first time in his life. The fact that he was a lefty was a good sign: southpaws are always a valuable commodity in baseball because there are relatively few of them to go around. Still, I didn’t hold out much hope for anyone, lefty or righty.
Standing six foot two with broad shoulders, Rinku straightened all his limbs and lifted his front leg, so that he looked like a flamingo. His high cheekbones and mouth under his Clark Gable–style mustache were completely stony as he stood perfectly still for so long that I began to wonder if he was actually planning to throw the ball. I had seen a lot of crazy pitching since arriving in India, but this was easily the most bizarre technique I had encountered.
Then in one swift motion, his body uncoiled, and Rinku unleashed a real fastball. The speed from the radar gun flashed on the video monitors: 85 miles per hour! The crowd went crazy. Rinku still didn’t crack a smile.
Dinesh was, hands down, the best raw pitcher I saw in India. It didn’t take a lot of imagination or expertise to understand his ability: he threw harder than anyone else during the course of the tryouts. What made his speed even more impressive was that he did it with terrible mechanics. His right arm swung wildly and long, and his entire torso turned, as if he were throwing a shot put. Nonetheless, he got close to the magic number of 90 mph. Sure, no one knew where the ball was headed. But you can teach control; you can’t teach how to throw hard. What could this Dinesh kid accomplish if he brought his core and legs into line and got his tempo?
Despite Dinesh’s power and speed, it was Rinku who received the highest honor. Out of all the kids that Ray Poitevint watched on video, only Rinku prompted him to pick up the phone. “Make sure that lefty with the weird windup is in the finals,” Ray said.
Rinku and Dinesh had kept each other company on the twelve-hour train ride from Lucknow, where they attended the same school, to Delhi for the official qualifiers on February 1, 2008. Both of them had traveled even farther than that, however, since they both were raised in small villages worlds away from a big city like Delhi.
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