The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  Back in Chocka’s studio, they had planned for something a little different with the CSK captain. Instead of the usual merchandise shots with the jersey, they wanted Dhoni in a more casual avatar, with his new hairdo and all.

  By now, Chocka was taking liberties with Dhoni, and if anything, only making his trips to the studio a lot more satisfying. Often at the end of a shoot, his crew and staff would gather around Dhoni for the facile selfie, and most days, Dhoni would ask everyone to gather around and oblige them. Chocka though had a couple of unusual requests. First, he wanted Dhoni to pose for a picture for his personal collection where he was strangling the ad director. ‘I told him, I take so much of your time and you’re irritated with me, so just grab my neck. He was such a sport that he did it despite me telling him that it wasn’t an official shoot.’

  The next time, after what was an extensive shoot, Chocka went to him with another bizarre request. Now he wanted Dhoni to stand and pretend like he was throwing a punch and the director would jump back and be frozen mid-air, like in an action sequence in a Japanese movie.

  ‘After seeing the reference shot, he said, “If you fly like that, you’ll break your head.” But I convinced him that I had practised it,’ says Chocka. Dhoni did as he was asked to, and Chocka thought the shot was a super success. But Dhoni wasn’t convinced. He didn’t think he was shot at the right angle compared to where I was for the shot to be a success. Dhoni told Chocka that he would prefer it to be perfect since it was for his personal collection and then, of all things, he asked him whether he’d be okay doing it again. ‘He was asking me whether I want to do it one more time. I couldn’t believe it. Here was M.S. Dhoni going out of his way and taking interest in some personal photo I wanted. That is M.S. Dhoni,’ says Chocka, who did oblige Dhoni and got the picture taken again, this time to perfection.

  Back in 2006, a young Dhoni met with two officials from a very popular dairy product company on the top floor at Mumbai’s Taj Gateway. The meeting had been set up by a common friend in the hope that India’s latest wicketkeeping, ball-smashing sensation would have his first long-term brand contract. The deal was pretty straightforward. It was a retainer for Rs 6 lakh—those were simpler times when the crore was still a mythical figure, catering only to a select few in the higher echelons. There was also a suggestion to the dairy company that they put in a right-to-reserve clause for five to six years which would see a 10 per cent rise annually in what Dhoni got. It was an endorsement deal made in advertising heaven, if there is one. Here was the most exciting new prospect in Indian cricket, with a reputation for being a heavy milk consumer—allegedly drinking four litres a day—signing up with one of the largest dairy brands in the country. He had that pehelwan (wrestler) look to go with it. But it wasn’t to be.

  ‘They said Rs 6 lakh is too much. What if he doesn’t click?’ the common friend recalls now with the same shock I assume he’s carried for the last dozen years. A year later, Dhoni was named as India’s captain for the World T20 tournament. He gave Joginder Sharma the last over in the final. Misbah-ul-Haq played that shot and Sreesanth took that catch. Then Dhoni’s price tag, within twelve months, burgeoned to over a crore rupees. There was no turning back now. The deal that wasn’t would forever remain a case of spilled milk. And anyway, nobody was talking about his milk consumption any more. It was all about fast bikes and a fast life. The desi pehelwan had landed on the big stage and was now on his way to become a global phenomenon.

  The market was crowded. Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid still ruled the roost. Virender Sehwag wasn’t far behind, leaving Dhoni in a head to head with Yuvraj Singh in the youth bracket. And Yuvraj had more going for him. He was glamorous, controversial and had the intrigue of the seductive kind. Dhoni, say those around him, wasn’t prepared to make any overt changes to who he was. He was, they maintain, ‘too comfortable and satisfied in his own skin’. So, he would target the youth-icon bracket in a subtler fashion.

  ‘If you remember, he had given away his jersey to some young fan. And he lifted the World T20 trophy wearing a sleeveless jersey. Nobody else could have imagined doing it. That wasn’t a coincidence. It was all worked out. He’s too smart. He’s not guarded but detests being a show-off. He doesn’t like jargon. But this was perfect. It was a statement made without a sound,’ says a close confidant. The Thala post now makes so much more sense.

  The ad market, though, still remained too saturated. Dhoni eventually realized that till the time he made a proper breakthrough, it was prudent to adopt a ‘jo mil raha hai, le lo’ (whatever you get, take it) approach.

  ‘Tendulkar doesn’t do jeans. I’ll do jeans. Tendulkar does BMW, I’ll do TVS. The hair worked perfectly,’ says a friend.

  Kakkar reveals that he was not in agreement with Dhoni over his early choice of ads, and his hairstyle. ‘I would often say, “Yaar, it would be better if you started using conditioner on your hair; don’t just wash it with Lifebuoy soap,”’ he says with that characteristic guffaw, and adds, ‘It was fancy to have long hair and all. But his hair was like straw. It wasn’t soft, shiny or had any glow to get him a proper ad.’

  For others though, he became a people’s champion, a man whom you believed when he was selling you a ceiling fan, a pen or a detergent powder. He had that everyday-man authenticity about him. While most of his contemporaries were sticking to the global trend of endorsing higher-class products, be it cars, watches or even cola, Dhoni was breaking new barriers and reaching out to newer markets. And he was doing so without spreading it too thin.

  ‘He could appeal to all classes and strata of society. He can become anything. He can look dapper in anything and connect with both a little child and a top-end executive, while also somehow looking the part in a Tamil ad where he looks to be mouthing a very street-style dialogue like, na vandhutenlaaa (I’ve arrived, no),’ says Chocka.

  He has also been compared to India’s greatest all-rounder, Kapil Dev, the man who cut ice with the top cream of the society and bridged them with the middle and lower classes. ‘Palmolive da jawab nahi. (There’s no answer to Palmolive.) Even years later, if you asked anyone for Kapil Dev’s most famous line, they’ll still mention that one and not some cricketing quote. They first laughed at Kapil but had to stop laughing once he started performing. It’s the same with Dhoni,’ says Kakkar.

  Kapil Dev too possessed a rustic charm that appealed to the masses. The 1980s, though, was a time when the fledgling ad industry in India was still obsessed with articulate, English-speaking and well-groomed cricketers. Kapil Dev was an anomaly who broke that trend,. Dhoni took it to the next level.

  If Kapil was the game changer, industry experts believe Dhoni was the game breaker. It happened when Rhiti Sports entered the scene. ‘I remember his earlier agents being greedy. They were all about paise do, maal lo (give the money and take your goods). It didn’t matter what the product was or whether he fit the role. I used to be very critical of his ad choices then,’ says Kakkar.

  He’s not the only one. Those around Dhoni from that period remember him being naïve, and he was being taken for a ride. This was one of the reasons he ended up handing over this part of his life to close friend Arun Pandey, who started Rhiti Sports.

  ‘Agar topi pehenane wala hi chahiye toh mere dost ko hi de deta hoon. (If I am always going to be cheated, then let it be by a friend.) At least the money will go to my friend’s house and not to some stranger,’ he had joked once to his friend. Pandey has become an omnipresence around Dhoni ever since. There are those who say that it’s an overbearing presence, but even they grudgingly admit to his efficiency in cutting the best endorsement deals for his friend and client.

  ‘No lengthy meetings and stuff. He might not be the most articulate but he can get a deal done in minutes. And the best deals,’ one says.

  According to one sports management expert, someone who has the who’s who of Indian cricket among his clientele, Dhoni and Rhiti Sports were responsible for the biggest boom that the cricket mar
ket had ever seen, till Virat Kohli came along. They did so by employing a master stroke: a press release in the year 2010 that said Dhoni was ‘signed for Rs 210 crore by Rhiti Sports’.

  ‘Minimum guarantees mean nothing. When a player grows, he starts getting chota (small) brands. It’s a fine balance. At that point of time you have to decide whether you want to tie up with a guy for Rs 15 lakh or you want to wait for him to do well and the same 15 lakh will become 1 crore. After every duck your rate changes, and after every 100, your rate changes,’ he explains.

  At the time Dhoni signed up with Rhiti, Tendulkar was still demanding the highest amount of around Rs 2 crore in the Indian ad market. ‘If I have a player whom I’ve signed for 210 crore, I’ll tell the brand, “Aapko kaise itna sasta mein de doon? (How can I give you so cheap?) That becomes a great selling point. What Rhiti did, changed the contract scales from 1 to 2 crore to 9 to 10 crore per year. This ensured that even Sachin gained from it. So, the benchmark for the top two players became 6 to 10 crore,’ he says.

  The sports management guru explains that historically, Indian cricket has had two players sharing the spoils at any given time—Sachin and Azhar, Sachin and Jadeja, Sachin and Dravid, Sachin and Yuvraj, Dhoni and Yuvraj, and so on. And if you, as a management firm, didn’t have one of the two top players, you were swimming against the tide. With Yuvraj’s stock not in the same league any more, Dhoni was sharing the spoils at the top with Tendulkar.

  In a way, when he signed up with Rhiti Sports, Dhoni was becoming his own manager. And deals started pouring in; behind each of them was Pandey finding the best price without fuss.

  ‘That move also meant that Indian cricketers could now go head to head with the Bollywood bigwigs in the ad market. They had now entered the big league for good,’ says the management guru.

  And while Dhoni kept pushing the envelope both on and off the field, he also maintained goodwill by being loyal to those brands that had stuck by him when he was a nobody—that adage again of not to leave anyone stranded.

  The ride, of course, hasn’t always been smooth. Dhoni’s silence over the spot-fixing scandal in 2013, increased scrutiny on his off-field associations. Then there was the conflict-of-interest allegations involving his stakes in Rhiti Sports, which also had other cricketers on board, and his position as Indian captain became an albatross around his neck. But Dhoni remained unstirred. He let Pandey do the talking, and the agent would go routinely on record about his star client not holding any shares in his company. Now it depends on which side of the fence you sit on with Dhoni—as an outsider, that is—to ascertain whether the issue ever quite got its closure or not.

  On the other hand, Dhoni ended up leading India to that one global title that had eluded them, the Champions Trophy in 2013. It wasn’t the first or only time an on-field feat had overshadowed, if not eclipsed, an off-field controversy surrounding a team or player. You just have to think back to Italy winning the FIFA World Cup in 2006 in the midst of one of the biggest fixing scandals in football history.

  Perhaps Dhoni himself summed it up best on the eve of the World T20 final against Sri Lanka in 2014 when he said, ‘There’s hardly any good or bad in Indian cricket that happens without my name.’

  Prahlad Kakkar is no stranger to getting superstar cricketers to shed their inhibitions and perform roles they wouldn’t otherwise for the camera. He worked extensively with Sachin Tendulkar and so too with Rahul Dravid in later years. He puts Dravid and Dhoni in the same bracket in terms of their simplicity. Kakkar reveals how Dravid would often end up having lengthy chats in Marathi with his driver whenever he met him at the airport. He says Dhoni does the same.

  But Kakkar finds a problem with the Dhoni voice. He says, ‘His big problem, like with Sachin, is his voice. It isn’t a baritone, and we would often have to enhance it to make it sound more authoritative.’

  As for the Tendulkar comparison, Kakkar feels that unlike the star batsman, Dhoni took a while to become more conscious about the brands he was endorsing. This changed as he matured as a captain but friends say that he could never resist any ad which gave him a chance to ride a new bike.

  Kakkar also feels that Dhoni has been underdone, unlike Tendulkar, by most of the ad directors who have not tapped into who he really is. To portray Dhoni as a flamboyant hero in almost every other ad is what he refers to as ‘playing it safe’.

  It’s not like Dhoni isn’t prepared to try something different. If anything, he thrives on it. He doesn’t even mind being on the receiving end of a barb, like Chocka says. He even shares a video with me of an ad he’s shot for a leading cement brand where the script is based around making fun of Dhoni. In it, he is seen trying his best to learn two lines in Tamil and seems ready when the director calls for action. He mouths off the two lines eloquently and looks very pleased with himself. The wide smile, however, vanishes when he hears a voice saying, ‘Sorry, Dhoni, only stills today.’

  ‘Dhoni’s brand,’ Kakkar tells me, ‘is that of an outsider who gatecrashed the party. It is of an underdog who came from the wrong side of the tracks and won.’ He then goes on to describe what his idea of a dream ad with Dhoni is, one where he would focus only on his strengths. ‘His strength is introspection. His strength is doubt. His strength is his argument with himself. Am I good enough? Can I prove them all wrong? Portray Dhoni as who he is, a man with five million questions and doubts. And then he finally resolves himself saying, “To heck with it, I’m going to prove everybody wrong. I’m going to do it the only way I know.” The Dhoni way.’

  Perhaps the answer to our quest for discovering the real Dhoni lies in that must-be-made advertisement. For, his journey has been one based on self-education, and along the way, he has learnt that he’s just Dhoni. A man who was not born to be a cricketer but became one. A man who was not born to be a captain but became one. A man who was not born to be a legend but became one. A man who was born to be an enigma and will always remain one.

  10

  The Man Emerges

  ‘I’m Dhoni.’ V.B. Chandrasekhar still sounds a tad staggered every time he recalls his first-ever encounter with Dhoni. More so when he narrates that last part where Dhoni knocked on his hotel room door at 10.30 in the night and introduced himself in the most matter-of-fact fashion possible. But to really fathom his astonishment, you’ll need to know the background to this unique first meeting between the then national selector and the rookie wicketkeeper he’d never laid his eyes on before.

  It was 29 March 2005, a day before the touring Pakistanis were scheduled to play a warm-up one-day match in Hyderabad. Chandrasekhar was on hand as the South Zone national selector doubling up as the manager of India A—a common practice back then—which had only one wicketkeeper in their squad. But by 7 p.m., there was no sign of Dhoni, and Chandrasekhar was getting concerned. ‘I made a call to Pranab Roy, the East Zone selector then, and asked him about this Dhoni’s whereabouts. He simply said, “Don’t worry, he’ll come.” I asked, “Where is he coming from?’’ But he just said, “No, no, he’ll be there.”’

  Chandrasekhar, the former Tamil Nadu and India opener, hadn’t even seen a picture of Dhoni at that point but had heard that he was an exceptional striker of the cricket ball.

  Concern turned into near-panic by 9 p.m. as Dhoni remained absconding. An hour later, Chandrasekhar had more or less resigned to the fact that his team would go into the match the next morning without a specialist wicketkeeper.

  ‘Hyderabad wasn’t a big airport back then like now, and not many flights would land post 9 p.m. Plus, I knew he was coming from really far away,’ he says. Then came the knock on his door, and an annoyed Chandrasekhar was just about to unleash himself on the long-haired, muscular man standing right outside.

  ‘I wasn’t used to seeing cricketers look like that. He looked very different with the hair and all and I was just about to throw him out when he told me who he was in just those two words. I just smiled back at him,’ he recalls.

  When he look
s back now, it was Dhoni’s overall disposition rather than the candour in his introduction that left a strong impression on Chandrasekhar. He had expected the young cricketer to not just take a few steps back when the door opened in a show of respect to hierarchy, but also look a little fidgety with his fingers not knowing where to keep them. ‘None of that happened with MS though,’ he says.

  That first meeting was also when Chandrasekhar realized that M.S. Dhoni wasn’t one for what he calls ‘misplaced politeness’. But it did kind of set a funny precedent of sorts wherein the two would in later years—long after VB was done with his term as national selector and their three-year union at Chennai Super Kings—always jokingly introduce themselves to each other at every meeting. ‘Hi, I’m V.B. Chandrasekhar.’ ‘Hi, I’m Dhoni.’

  A few years after this first meeting, Chandrasekhar would receive another, more telling, reminder of that famed Dhoni self-confidence and his unflappable belief in who he was. It came during the first season of the IPL. Chandrasekhar was CSK director of operations and chief selector. Dhoni was the captain. CSK had made a successful start to their campaign, winning their first four matches before going down to Delhi Daredevils in an away match. Dhoni had won the toss and elected to bat despite having lost his two key top-order Australian batsmen, Matthew Hayden and Michael Hussey, who’d left for international duty. Chennai could only muster a middling total which the Daredevils chased down rather comfortably. Chandrasekhar had by now noticed a trend in Dhoni’s decision-making at the toss which didn’t sit well with him.

  ‘I realized that Dhoni was just blindly deciding to bat after winning the toss. He was not weighing in the prevailing conditions, the opposition or their strength. He just felt that whatever the runs on the board, he could protect it like what he’d done in the World T20 final a year earlier. He seemed really sold on that idea and it was very difficult to wean him off it,’ he says. So, Chandrasekhar tried impressing upon Dhoni that especially now with the Aussies gone and the bowling subsequently strengthened as a result with the entry of Makhaya Ntini and Muttiah Muralitharan, he should look to bowl first in helpful conditions.