Getting a gift of an article 30 years later

By Shevlin Sebastian

Long-time freelance journalist and my friend, Rudolph Vance, stepped into a musty book shop on College Street, in Kolkata a few days ago. He came across an old issue of Sportsworld. He had been a contributor to the magazine, too.

As he flipped through the pages of the July 1, 1992 edition, he came across an article by me. He sent it to me via speed post.

I worked at Sportsworld for nine years. Those were fun-filled years. We played cricket inside the office after the deadline was over. We put up posters of beautiful sportswomen on the walls. In prime position was a poster of former tennis star Steffi Graf under a poolside shower.

What a body!

Unfortunately, I may be the only former Sportsworld staffer to keep this habit. I always had a poster of a beautiful woman on the wall, and increasingly, as my default desktop image.

Some people don’t grow up.

When I looked at the pages of the magazine that Rudolph had sent, I marvelled that even after 30 years the pages had not completely deteriorated. There were some brown patches on the edges here and there.

When I read the article, it reminded me of a method I used during my time in Sportsworld. The essence would be a question-and-answer format. Interspersed in between, I would put in some mood, and bits of conversation with the subject, so that readers could get a feel for the person I was interviewing.

The Pesi article begins with my arrival in Bombay and my call to the Shroff household to learn that he had gone to the airport to fly to Bangalore. But fate was in my favour. I gave the answer later.

In Sportsworld, if I remember right, since we had so many pages to fill, we would write anywhere between 1500 and 2000 words for a story. A typical feature story would run from four to eight pages. Today, journalists would consider 400 words a lengthy story. Of course, for a single newspaper page, 1200 would be fine.

I also read up on Pesi.

In his career, he had ridden 5614 races. He won 1,751 of them, including 106 classic races and 29 Derbys (source: Wikipedia).

His career as a jockey ended in 2004 because of injuries. Thereafter, to my shock and delight, he had embarked on an equally stellar career as a horse trainer and won many races.

It’s uplifting to know that the 57-year-old is still going strong.