In my travels for Million Dollar Arm, I had visited a few villages like Rinku’s and Dinesh’s that dotted India’s rural landscape. Many of the thatched-roof houses look like they came straight out of the Middle Ages. The two-story homes seem like a fancier option, until a local explains the second floor is a necessity because flooding renders the ground floor unusable during the rainy-season months.
In some villages, large families cram into one- or two-bedroom homes that don’t usually have a door. If they own anything of value, the family will lock it away in a big steel trunk. Most homes in Indian villages also don’t have indoor plumbing. There is either an outhouse, or the bathroom is a pit outside. The cooking area—a pipe hooked up to a gas line sticking out of the ground, with some rocks cobbled around it—is outside the house, too. Buffalo mingle with goats that provide thick and nasty milk.
Where Rinku and Dinesh grew up, they didn’t have an exact mailing address like in the States or in India’s big cities. To send a letter to a village inhabitant, one need put only the person’s name, the village name, and the postal code on the envelope. The mailman walks around asking, “Does anybody know where Singh lives?” That’s how it works. And bear in mind, probably about 70 percent of the village is named Singh.
The circumstances these guys came from were humble, to say the least. Rinku’s father, the devoted head of a family of seven, sacrificed everything in his means to give his children an education. He supported his large brood by driving a vegetable-delivery truck 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Like many villagers, the family ate the same dish of rice and dal, a spicy Indian vegetarian stew made out of lentils or beans, for almost every meal, every day. For a special treat, Rinku’s father would take part of his wages to buy a chicken from the market. The menu might have been meager in the Singh household, but love and support were certainly in abundance.
Dinesh, whose father did not have a steady source of income, faced greater economic hardship than Rinku. His mother worked in the fields, growing vegetables to eat and sell, and helped her brother, who ran a silk loom. Dinesh’s main motivation was figuring out how to make money to help out his parents and two siblings, whom he loved dearly.
In general, young people in India grow up with a heavy burden of responsibility. A child’s primary goal is to ultimately take care of his parents. Only after that has been accomplished can he focus on providing for himself. The need to improve the lot of one’s family was instilled in both Dinesh and Rinku.
That was the reason they were enrolled in the Guru Govind Singh Sports College in Lucknow, training in javelin throwing. In India, young athletes attend these government-run academies, the American equivalent of high school, with the implicit aim of competing in the Olympics. India, however, doesn’t qualify for nearly enough Olympic events to support all the students at these colleges across the country, so in reality, the colleges are a feeder into coveted jobs in the army, police, or national transportation system.
Rinku and Dinesh became friends when they began training for a spot at Lucknow. They were sixteen when they started to attend. They worked as a team, videotaping each other’s tosses and then analyzing the footage together to correct their deliveries. They also traveled together to competitions at other schools.
Javelin throwing explained Rinku’s odd pitching motion. When he held his body in that strange pose for a long time before throwing the ball, he was using an adapted version of a javelin training drill called speed packing, in which the athlete throws the javelin parallel to the ground instead of up in the air, to build arm strength. Rinku figured it was the best technique he had to put velocity on a baseball, and he was right. When we conceived Million Dollar Arm, I imagined recruiting cricket players, not javelin tossers. But I would have taken someone who skipped stones if he had a good arm.
Rinku and Dinesh threw hard in Delhi, which earned them a trip to the finals. There the best pitcher would win $100,000 and a chance at $1 million. We’d originally planned to fly the top twenty-five contestants from the qualifiers to Mumbai for the finals in March, but, really, there were only a few with any hope of becoming American baseball pitchers, and topping that short list were Rinku and Dinesh.
So when I received the news that they weren’t planning on participating in the finals, I almost had a heart attack. I knew the call was going to be bad news as soon as I saw the number on my cell, because it came from an agency employee named Shukla. I dubbed him Crookla, because he was so bad at his job I considered it thievery every time he cashed his paycheck. He was a complete buffoon, a real loser’s loser. He screwed up anything I asked him to do—permits, phone numbers, restaurant reservations—or he simply didn’t do it at all. Everyone has worked with someone like this, and it’s never fun.
I had asked Shukla to call up all the finalists and make a list of their shoe, pants, and shirt sizes, so that I could buy them clothes for the show. When he called Rinku and Dinesh, that’s when both of them told Crookla they couldn’t make it to Mumbai.
Before Million Dollar Arm, neither Rinku nor Dinesh had ever heard of baseball. Their javelin coach was the one who suggested they try out for the contest in Lucknow in case they could win some money.
Rinku, nineteen, had just finished his fourth and final year at school, and had already set up a recruiting meeting with the army for a month after the Million Dollar Arm finals were scheduled to take place. Like most of their classmates, Rinku’s and Dinesh’s true purpose for school was landing a position in the army that would allow them to earn a salary of about $400 a month—plus a month’s vacation each year. That kind of money would vastly improve their families’ financial situations.
Rinku’s parents did not approve of his traveling all the way to the big, corrupting city of Mumbai to compete in a contest for this strange sport. What was the point? Even if he won, they opposed him flying to America, an unfathomable prospect, or doing anything else that would jeopardize his military career.
Rinku didn’t put up much of a fight, perhaps because he didn’t actually believe that anyone was really going to win $100,000—much less $1 million. From the beginning, Will, Ash, and I assumed that was the price of entry for producing a reality show. But a $1 million prize had never before been offered on television in India, where the per capita income is less than $1,500. The size of the prize actually damaged our credibility with the ordinary man on the street.
Zee Sports, however, was thrilled about the newsworthy prize and promoted the hell out of it. Apparently, Shahrukh Khan, a very famous Indian actor and host of India’s version of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, was livid upon learning that an unheard-of baseball show on a cable sports network was giving away $1 million, when his popular show on a major network was giving away only about $250,000. Shahrukh wound up using us as a negotiating tool to force his network to up its prize by $1 million, for a total of $1.25 million (5 crores).
In my infuriating phone call with Crookla, he told me that some javelin contest with a grand prize of a couple hundred dollars was being held at the academy, and this conflicted with the televised finals of Million Dollar Arm. Although Dinesh and Rinku had a chance to win $1 million with us, they were both going with the javelin contest. It was an understatement to say that Million Dollar Arm was the opportunity of a lifetime for Rinku and Dinesh. Why would they throw that away for a fraction of that amount?
One day I asked Rinku what he dreamed about becoming when he was a kid. Although I was speaking through an interpreter, since neither he nor Dinesh spoke more than a few words of English at that point, he didn’t understand what I meant.
“What did you pretend you were going to be? A cricket player? A fireman?”
“Nahi sapanē,” he said in Hindi. “No dreams.”
No dreams? There were only about 1,500 people in his village. Its inhabitants all grew up with limited career choices: most would be farmers, or the lucky few got to be in the military or some other government job. Rinku was extremely fort
unate to go to the sports college and would be even luckier to get into the military. No one from his village would ever dare dream of becoming a famous writer or a movie star or professional athlete.
I hung up on Crookla without responding. What was the point? All I had left in me were obscenities anyway. Then I turned to Vaibhav to explain the situation; there was no way I was going to lose the two fastest pitchers out of all the qualifiers all across the country. “You have to fix this.”
Vaibhav did what he did best and talked Rinku and Dinesh into changing their minds. He assured them that the contest was real and that they had a legitimate chance of winning. Even if they didn’t, they would be in the same exact place with their military careers right after the finals. Rinku said later that the whole contest would have been easier to believe if the grand prize had been just a bunch of prepaid phone cards.
In the last week of March, Dinesh, Rinku, and twenty-three other kids—most of whom had never flown anywhere before—got on a plane to Mumbai for a week of training before the official competition. Over the day or two that all the contestants, scattered throughout India, were traveling, Vaibhav’s phone rang every five minutes with the same questions over and over.
“Sir, I am at the counter at the airport; what do I do now?”
“Sir, why will they not let me bring my suitcase on the plane?”
“What is a gate? How do I find which one is mine?”
I was about as familiar with all these different airports as these kids, but I did my best imitation of an air traffic controller and am proud to say that all twenty-five of them wound up safely on the campus of CKT University, right outside of Mumbai. The accommodations were far from cushy. The guys, who ate all their meals in the cafeteria, slept in a big conference room that we’d cleared out and filled with mattresses on the floor. This definitely wasn’t the mansion on The Bachelor.
Each contestant received a welcome package containing toiletries, sneakers, baseball clothes, and caps—everything he needed for our weeklong crash course in pitching. Vaibhav and I had gone to a big box store called Big Bazaar to buy all the necessary provisions. While I was buying thirty pairs of everything in the Wal-Mart of India, which sold everything from rice to tube socks, I had my first brush with stardom. A couple of gangly teenagers approached me and exclaimed, “Sir, you are Million Dollar Arm guy!” They didn’t ask for my autograph or anything, but Vaibhav still taunted me, “Look at you, big celebrity!”
The contestants were incredibly excited by everything I got at Big Bazaar. Aside from an aspiring actor and a guy who was working at an investment bank, none of them was wealthy, even by Indian standards, and some were really, really poor. They couldn’t believe they had a clean bed (even if they had to share a room with two dozen other guys), three meals a day, and all the Gatorade they could drink. As a contest sponsor, the company provided an ice chest filled with bottles of the sports drink on the field. Although there was more than enough to go around, some kids stashed away bottles back in the dorm. To them, Gatorade was a luxury not to be left on some field.
The bar was low with these guys. This was a good thing, particularly when it came to the uniforms that I had made in India specifically for Million Dollar Arm. Just as with all my experiences with manufacturing in India, the factory owner told me, “No problem, sir,” after I showed him a picture of a baseball uniform. Well, he wasn’t completely wrong. The way he made the shirts was no problem—for him. When I opened up the boxes of shirts, which, of course, came at the very last minute possible the day of the contest, I could not believe my eyes. At first I thought Vaibhav was playing a joke on me. The manufacturer had taken all my instructions—what the seams should look like, where the buttons went—but instead of sewing the seams and putting buttons on the shirt, he had simply printed all those details as a design on the shirt. They looked utterly ridiculous, like tuxedo T-shirts, but they were our uniforms.
Ray Poitevint arrived in India to train our guys. As one of the most successful scouts in history, Ray has a sixth sense about it. Talent is not just what a radar gun says; it is what a baseball player looks like, feels like, and even sounds like. That’s right: Ray could close his eyes and hear a good pitcher by the sound of the ball cutting the air.
He has opened up a lot of foreign markets to baseball, but no matter where Ray has gone to “eat mama’s meatloaf” (a term among agents for whatever unusual local cuisine you have to sample when you’re recruiting a player), he is the same guy. In India, though, he didn’t quite take to paneer, a type of cheese, as well as he might have, say, meatloaf. When on the first day I saw him looking kind of uncomfortable, I asked if he was okay. “It’s just that green stuff I ate last night,” he said.
That wasn’t the last of Ray’s trials. Obviously, there was no baseball diamond available at the university, so we set up on a wide, open dirt field in the middle of the campus. Our only protection from the brutally hot sun was a tent, under which it was even hotter. That was the seventy-four-year-old scout’s base.
The focus of his pointers was to maximize their velocity and control. A week obviously wasn’t a lot of time, and we were starting from the ground up with every one of these kids, but Ray was a very effective teacher. He demonstrated how to start the pitch by lifting the front leg and some basic ways to grip the ball. He had them on the field doing long tosses and throwing from one knee, standard drills that pitchers use to get loose and improve their technique.
I had also gotten the Wilson Sporting Goods Company to sponsor the event and give us all these brand-new gloves, but none of the contestants wanted to use them. Staring at them as if a strange creature had perched on their hand and wouldn’t get off, the Indian kids wanted to take off the mitts and play bare-handed. One of our major priorities, however, was making sure that no one got hurt. With twenty-five kids who had hardly thrown a baseball before spending a week throwing it as hard as they could, that wasn’t easy. Without the mitts, and with guys who couldn’t toss the ball without whaling it, fielding without a glove was downright dangerous.
On the field, our contestants dropped so many balls, Ray said sarcastically, “Maybe we should just let them catch bare-handed.”
That was just Ray being Ray. He really sparked to how respectful the kids were and how hard they worked. Compared with the generally immature and often spoiled American youth that he usually coached, these kids were extremely respectful—particularly since Ray was a man of a certain age. They were quiet when he talked, asked questions about what they heard, and worked hard on the drills he offered them. They understood that he was trying to help them do the best they could do in the contest, and in return, they did the best they could for him.
By the second or third day, though, it was clear that a couple of kids had no chance. We had seen all kinds of crazy deliveries throughout the contest. Usually the people with really bad form didn’t get anything on the ball. However, among the contestants we brought to Mumbai, one guy from Goa managed to top 80 miles per hour on the radar gun throwing almost underhand like submarine-style pitchers Dan Quisenberry and Kent Tekulve. Then there was a kid who somehow made the finals even though he released the ball from right next to his face, as if it were a shot put.
The kid who won the contest for showing the most heart was Deepak Kundal, but he couldn’t throw 90 miles an hour in a car that was going 91. He knew he had no prayer of winning, and yet he was on time every day. He paid attention. He tried as hard as he could in every drill, every day.
Just as devoted, if not more, to this foreign sport and these strange American men was Ray’s translator, Deepesh Solanki. A college athletic coach in his twenties, he sought us out as soon as he heard about Million Dollar Arm. He sent me an email, he sent Ash an email; he basically stalked us, begging to be a part of our contest in any way.
Deepesh was without a doubt the most passionate baseball fan I had ever met in India. Of course, he was the only baseball fan in India I met. He fell in love after discove
ring the sport on the internet. The field, the uniforms, the strategy—he found everything about the game beautiful. He even played baseball in college. Other than a Little League run by Joel Ehrendreich, an ardent Milwaukee Brewers fan and an assistant to the American ambassador, on embassy grounds, Deepesh’s team played, to the best of my knowledge, the only other organized baseball in all of India. Most other “baseball” teams were really softball teams scattered through some major cities.
I made Deepesh’s dreams come true when I put him in charge of making the arrangements for the training camp and the finals. To be honest, I had no idea whether he was actually capable of pulling it off. By that point in my great Indian adventure, I had stopped trying to make that assessment. In this country, I had found the people who were supposed to be the most professional were the ones who ripped me off the most. And the people who seemed like they couldn’t do anything were the ones who wound up getting things done.
When I first arrived in India, something called the Baseball Federation of India contacted us about teaming up with its organization to bring contestants to our events. It seemed like a natural partnership. We had meeting after meeting after meeting, the result of which was an agreement that it would bring three thousand kids to a qualifier in Punjab. I was thrilled—until the day of the contest. The federation brought a total of seven kids. Seven kids. The craziest part was that a representative from the organization came with them and asked us to give them money to develop baseball in India or for equipment that they would probably sell on the black market. I don’t know the Hindi word for chutzpah, but they had it in spades.
Deepesh might have followed me around like a puppy dog and startled easily, but I knew two things about him: he worked for CKT University and loved baseball. He coached youth athletics at the university in a remote area outside of Mumbai, which is just where I wanted my guys. I didn’t want them out in the city, getting into trouble or not coming back.
Million Dollar Arm Page 6