Great Leap Forward

Last month, American coach Scott Flemming inspired India to their biggest-ever victory. Could this be the game-changing moment for basketball in the country, asks Karan Madhok

This article was first published in Tehelka Magazine (Issue 33, Volume 11) in the magazine's August 16, 2014 edition. Here is another look at the feature.

Coming of age: Indian players celebrate their Asia Cup victory over China in Wuhan. Photo: Karan Madhok for Ekalavyas.com

When the buzzer rang to signify the game’s end, all 12 members of the Indian men’s basketball team — affectionately nicknamed the Young Cagers — jumped into each other’s arms, celebrating together with glee rarely felt in the country’s basketball scene before.

For the first time in India’s seven-decade- long basketball history, they had done the impossible, defeating China 65- 58 last month in Wuhan, the most populous city in central China. The Chinese are the Goliaths of Asian basketball and among the top dozen teams in the world. India, placed 61st in the Federation Internationale de Basketball (FIBA) rankings, shocked the home crowd during the 5th FIBA Asia Cup, a biennial tournament featuring the continent’s top teams. Two years ago, the Indians were at the bottom of the pile, while China usually finish at the top more often than any other side. But on 13 July, the tables were turned.

While India’s heroes celebrated the stunning win on the court, the mastermind behind this improbable victory watched in silence from the sidelines, calmly soaking in the once-in-a-lifetime moment for him and his team.

In 2012, American Scott Flemming became the latest in the line of foreign coaches hired to make the most of India’s untapped potential. Two years later, he finally saw the fruits of his labours. India didn’t just defeat China, they became the breakout story of the tournament, as they gave headaches to top Asian teams such as Iran and the Philippines.

“I think we have proved that we belong,” said Flemming, 56, as he looked back at the team’s improved performances. “I don’t think there is anybody here that we feel we can’t beat. We have gotten past that point where we thought we had very little chance of winning. Those days are long gone. Now, we are going into every game knowing that we have an opportunity. It is a new day for India.”

But was this performance just a fluke in India’s otherwise dismal history?

The first national basketball championship was held in New Delhi in 1934 and the Basketball Federation of India (BFI), the game’s governing body in the country, was formed in 1950. Fifteen years later, the men’s team first took part in the FIBA Asia Championship — the highest platform for the game in the continent. Their best finish in the tournament was fourth place in 1975, and they have never reached those heights again. In 1980, as many countries boycotted the Moscow Olympics at the height of the Cold War, India made their first and only Olympic basketball appearance, but lost all seven of their games by an average margin of over 48 points each.

Game-changer Coach Scott Flemming. Photo: fiba.com

Limited to mostly Asian tournaments over the past few decades, the Indian team had been reduced to the role of minnows against the continent’s giants, happy to compete for participation points rather than gold. India’s current FIBA world ranking sees them trail behind the likes of the Virgin Islands, Cape Verde and Georgia.

Which is why the ‘Wonder of Wuhan’ — India’s surprise victory over China last month — will be remembered in the country’s basketball history forever. Although China fielded mostly a second-string squad for this tournament, they still featured those who will play professionally in the Chinese Basketball Association, one of the continent’s top professional leagues. Truly, all the countries India faced had players who play professional basketball for a living. The only exception was India.

All of India’s finest players today, such as Amjyot Singh, Vishesh Bhrighuvanshi and Amrit Pal Singh, are semi-professionals who have other day jobs and only participate in basketball tournaments to represent their state or the government unit that they work for. India is also among the handful of teams in Asia that don’t take advantage of FIBA’s ‘naturalised player’ rule, which allows each country to field one foreign-born player ‘naturalised’ into their nation. Since India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, no foreign player has given up his/her original passport to join India’s cause. Every single member of Team India was born, bred, and learnt to dribble the basketball — for better or worse — in India.

While India managed to defeat China, the latter is miles ahead in the marathon. Basketball is China’s favourite sport and the country boasts of world-class basketball infrastructure, star players such as Yao Ming, who have featured in the NBA (the world’s top basketball league in the US), and concentrated grassroots efforts that have produced hundreds of millions of talented young players.

Meanwhile, India has an unbalanced and mostly disorganised grassroots nursing system, and sorely lacks the necessary infrastructure to support our top talents, and the team’s exploits are mostly ignored by the mainstream media.

Worst of all, internal politics within the national and state federations have stunted any real growth and there is rarely any motivation from those who are in the basketball fraternity to rise higher. Many stay content to swivel around in mediocrity.

When he first came to India, an important part of Flemming’s mission was to change this attitude. So far, he has helped India take baby steps to success. On the court, the team has vastly improved on the defensive end and takes better care of the ball on the offence. Additionally, a growing sense of team chemistry through continuity has helped produce improved results in international tournaments over the past year, such as the 2013 FIBA Asia Championship in the Philippines and the Lusofonia Games in Goa where India won gold.

Flemming succeeded fellow American Kenny Natt, a former NBA player and head coach. But with limited time and resources, Natt couldn’t provide the team the needed turnaround in his 18-month stint. In 2012, Flemming came to India with 30 years of coaching experience, mostly at top college programmes in the US. He last served as an assistant coach to the NBA’s Development League side Texas Legends.

“My mission has been to improve India’s total national team programme from the under-14 team to the senior team,” says Flemming. “This can be done only with some consistency in player development methods and installing the same system of play. I also wanted to be a coach to other coaches in the country.

“It was my goal to narrow the gap between the top teams in Asia and our Indian national team. I have really emphasised the defensive part of the game with our team. I think this is being demonstrated by our opponents’ lower field goal percentages and lower scores. Defence will always help neutralise teams with more talent.”

India’s improved performances are a perfect underdog story, but it shouldn’t be. The country has the population and enough wealth to take bigger strides in the sport than they have taken so far.

Jayasankar Menon, who captained the national team in the 1990s, says that although India has taken real steps forward, only a professional league can herald a period of sustained success.

“Without a pro league, India cannot improve any further,” he says, “As far as players are concerned, playing for India once or a hundred times is the same. I have come across this situation after playing for India for a decade. The players need to be financially settled and only a pro league can make this happen. It is the right time for the administrators to act. Watch how the kabaddi and badminton leagues have done it. I know there are a lot of ifs and buts but the pro league is the answer.”

The responsibility for providing this answer will ultimately fall upon the BFI and its sponsors, a partnership between global sports/media company IMG Worldwide and India’s biggest conglomerate, Reliance. IMG-Reliance and the BFI have been planning to launch a professional league for years, and their efforts to grow the game at the grassroots with school and college leagues across cities has been a major step forward to get the game to more youth than ever before.

The recent launch of the football Indian Super League (ISL) — also organised by IMG-Reliance — provides a ray of hope for Indian basketball, as IMG chairman Mike Dolan announced that the ISL model would be used to launch India’s first professional league next year.

As many global observers have noted, basketball is one of the world’s fastestgrowing sports. With the interest of IMG-Reliance and the NBA, the 1.2 billion-strong country has the potential to become the game’s next lucrative market. But only a high-quality product will capture the fans’ attention, and the future performances of the national squad will determine if India can continue to provide a product to market to the larger masses.

“After the Asia Cup we have the confidence that we can compete with the top teams in Asia,” says Flemming, “We need to take the next step and win more of those games. We have come a long way, but still have a lot of room for improvement.”

Flemming’s two-year contract with Team India will come to an end in a few months, and he has said that he will evaluate the plans of his family and of the BFI before taking any future decisions. But regardless of his future, he has already secured his name in Indian basketball history by helping the Young Cagers finally grow up to defeat China and giving basketball fans in the country a moment that could change the game forever.

Indian Tamasha League: The ISL lays down structure for future Indian Basketball League

By and large, sports around the world center around the individual stars playing and dominating at the highest level, instead of the teams they represent or the intricacies of the sport itself. Sure, the serious fraternity behind any sport and serious fans of any club/country will look beyond the individual faces at the top, but mainstream attention comes most from the big names. Virat. Ronaldo. LeBron. Mayweather. Bolt. Tiger. Federer. Manning. Jeter. These are the names that draw the big crowds, the names that sell merchandise, and the names that can create or combust the popularity of their sport.

But a curious thing happened in India last week at the sale of the eight franchises which are set to become the backbone of the Indian Super League (ISL), the highest-profile attempt yet to launch a professional football league in the country. Few people were talking about the names of the stars that would actually play for these teams or the coaches that are confirmed participation. Past foreign footballing superstars like Dwight Yorke, Freddie Ljungberg, Robert Pirès, Louis Saha, and Hernán Crespo are all set to be 'auctioned' off to the various franchises, not to mention India's top football stars who will be entering their names into the fray, too. Peter Schmeichel, Marcel Desailly and Kenny Dalglish are rumoured to participate as the coaches masterminding some of the teams. But across the mainstream media reports of the ISL, these names were rarely mentioned.

Instead, just like everything else in India, the big newsmakers came from familiar grounds: Bollywood and Cricket. Even as the country reached closer to the launch of a potentially game-changing football league, the ironic thing was that rarely anyone was actually talking about football or footballers. Instead, the names behind the league - the owners who brought shares of the teams - stole the show. Sachin Tendulkar, Salman Khan, Sourav Ganguly, Ranbir Kapoor, and John Abraham were among the celebrities who brought stakes in some of the ISL franchises, while big business magnates in India including the Sun Group, Den Network, Videocon, and more provided the big financial backing. The closest the ISL got to a footballing relation was the involvement of Spanish Primera Liga side Atletico Madrid with the Kolkata franchise. About $200 million has been spent on the bidding of the eight teams.

The ISL is being launched by IMG Worldwide and Reliance - who together as IMG-Reliance have sponsorship stakes in several sports in India, including basketball - the All India Football Federation (AIFF), and Star India TV Network. The league is set to kick off in September this year and run for two months. The eight franchises are from Bengaluru, Delhi, Goa, Guwahati, Kochi, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Pune. It's format has already closely mirrored the successful T20 Cricket league IPL, and will continue to do so in the future.

Football leagues have been in India for a long time, and so why is this one special? A National Football League started in 1997, but that folded up in 2007 and it gave way to I-League. which is running (not as successfully as expected) today.

So far, the ISL has been, for the lack of a better word in my opinion, a dumbed-down version of the sport from the point of view of football purists, like the IPL has been for true aficionados of cricket. Team owners will be more popular then most players and there will be a lot of annoying tamasha on the side (ever tried listening to IPL 'experts'? Yeesh!).

But here's the truth: in the long run, even the purists will be glad when they see that the money going into the league (and thus, into the sport in general) because of hype or celebrities. Like it or not, in India, you need hype to sell anything, and established themes like Cricket and/or Bollywood can be used to bring attention to non-so-established things (which include every other sport apart from Cricket).

In certain pockets in India (Bengal, the North-East, Kerala, Goa) Football is huge and can easily rival Cricket's popularity. But it is still relatively a poor sport unknown to the mainstream audience. The unconvincing performances of India's national teams is a major reason for this. Perhaps, playing in a big-money league among established foreign coaches and stars and the chance to finally be celebrated for their talents will give a ray of hope to Indian footballers and encourage more to take up the sport. If the popularity spills beyond ISL, football could finally begin to live up to its potential in India, and eventually, India's national team performances could see a major boost.

There are critics of the ISL, of course. The CEO of Churchill Brothers (Federation Cup winners) Valanka Alemao has said that, "This league will harm Indian football. There cannot be two leagues in the country which is struggling to qualify for the World Cup... We should have been talking about building a team rather than having such a league. India should have a 10-year vision to qualify for the World Cup."

Although he makes valid points, I don't fully agree with Alemao's opinion. If a sport is struggling in India, more money and interest poured into it can never be a bad thing. Yes, the AIFF needs to have a 10-year national vision, but that vision can be eased with the performances of Indian players at the ISL. There are also scheduling conflicts to solve, as the ISL currently clashes with FIFA dates and the I-League.

But count me among the camp of those excited for the ISL. I'm a football fan who unfortunately knows much more about players from Real Madrid and Liverpool than I know about players from clubs in my own country. Hundreds of thousands of football fans in India feel exactly the same way. A well-produced league that brings the game closer to mainstream India is sure to pay huge dividends.

On the day that the eight franchises and their owners were announced, Mike Dolan, the chairman of IMG, threw a curve-ball that sparked the interest of us over here at the 'India Basketball' camp. Dolan said that while the ISL has plans to grow aggressively and add 12 new franchises in the coming years, he also said that the model would be used to launch India's first professional basketball league next year. Remember, IMG-Reliance also hold marketing rights to basketball in India because of their partnership with the Basketball Federation of India (BFI). They have been in delayed talks to launch the pro league in India for several years now, but Dolan's public announcement with a set date (2015) right after the ISL's first season seems to be the surest sign yet that the basketball league which all hoop fans in the country have dreamed about for years could finally be here.

The benefits of finally having a professional basketball league in India are many. In an earlier column that I wrote for Ekalavyas, I noted that such a league would change everything for the sport in the country. India's best players would finally have an assured, steady contract from the sport that they excel in, and many more will be encouraged to start taking basketball seriously. The league would eventually generated jobs for several others connected to the game, including coaches, referees, scouts, trainers, broadcast personnel, and more. And it might help in accelerating the rise of new, better basketball infrastructure around the country. Eventually, the rise in interest, talent, and financial support could lead to better results for India's national basketball teams at the Asian or global stage.

Of course, Basketball is far less popular in India than Cricket or Football right now, but the same model as the IPL and ISL - at a smaller financial scale - could be successful here for the proposed Indian Basketball League.

And so what if it takes a little bit of tamasha, hype, or celebrity culture? So what if cricketers, Bollywood stars, or big name billionaires are needed to get it off the ground? The NBA in India has already understood that the majority of casual fans only show interest when there is a celebrity or too involved, and recent NBA-India events (like the NBA Jam) always ensure to have glamour and lifestyle infused with basketball.

Here is a possible list of things to expect in the Indian basketball league outside of basketball: corny cheerleaders, T-shirt throws, cameras zooming into the fringe Bollywood types (whattup Dino Morea!) on the sidelines, and too much attention on fashion or what they call 'glamour'. All of this already happens in the NBA anyways, but at least the high quality of basketball makes it all tolerable. This won't necessarily be the case in India. But if that is what takes to sell basketball to mainstream Indians, then so be it.

Purists can call all of this a 'dumbing down' of the sport, but in the long run, it might end up being the smartest thing that the organizers could have possibly done.

Perhaps, just like the ISL, on the day that the basketball league franchises are launched, the celebrity names might garner more neattention than the basketball players themselves. But, hopefully in the future, the real stars of the sport on the court will begin to speak and shine for themselves.