NEW DELHI: As cricket continues to maintain a stranglehold on India’s sporting landscape, the organisers of a new kabaddi league have taken a hands-on approach at dragging the quaint, indigenous game into the professional era.
The success of India’s IPL Twenty20 cricket tournament has spawned similar franchise-based competitions on a much smaller scale in several sports and kabaddi, a mixture of team tag and wrestling, is the latest to attempt a formal structure.
Roughly 100 players will enter an auction early next month and STAR Sports will broadcast the eight-city Pro-Kabaddi League live from July 26 as the ancient sport is propelled into the 21st century on the back of big-money sponsorship deals.
Rakesh Kumar, who captained India to the 2010 Asian Games gold in Guangzhou, reckons the new league is precisely what the game needs to advance towards professionalism.
“We may not become household names overnight but there would be more money and more visibility for sure,” Kumar, a ticket inspector with Indian Railways, employers of the largest number of kabaddi players, told Reuters.
“Kabaddi is only shown on television when we win gold at the Asian Games and sporadically during the nationals but now we have a confirmed, quality broadcaster for the league, public interest is bound to rise.”
Revolving around very basic skills, the game is played by two teams of seven, in which a ‘raider’ enters the other half of the court to tag or wrestle opponents before returning ‘home’ while holding his breath and chanting ‘kabaddi, kabaddi’.
India has bagged all six Asian Games gold medals in men’s kabaddi while also winning the inaugural women’s event in Guangzhou.
Charu Sharma, the man behind the league, said India’s success and kabaddi’s popularity in rural areas of the world’s second most populous nation made the tournament boasting 10 million rupees ($165,800) in prize money an inevitable step along the path of progression.
“Kabaddi is our unique heritage. Our lack of respect for what is our own is simply mystifying,” Sharma, a well-known television commentator, told Reuters.
“It’s tailor-made for television. Played by extremely athletic sports persons in a small indoor arena, under the lights, on a coloured mat... it’s a spectacular one-hour of good television.”
Sharma is optimistic of the league’s long-term viability.
AFP
