Hot On Hoops

BEHIND the minarets, the sound of the azaan, the meatshops crammed into a bylane and the whiff of kebabs is a raging sports fetish. Move ove...

BEHIND the minarets, the sound of the azaan, the meatshops crammed into a bylane and the whiff of kebabs is a raging sports fetish.

Move over cricket. Nagpada, a pocket of Mumbai almost entirely Muslim and last in the national news when the city was rocked by communal riots, is Basketball Country. Out of this quaint little court, in the middle of grimy slums, have emerged 22 international players, including Maharashtra’s only Arjuna awardee in basketball Abbas Multasir. The number of players from here who’ve represented the state runs into a few scores.

It’s a love story that began in 1949, when the Nagpada Neighbourhood House (NNH), was started by Bachoo Khan, a basketball player himself. A low-investment sport, the tournaments organised by the NNH multiplied rapidly in the following years, reaching a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, the names announce themselves in sepia tones: the Figuerido Cup, All-India Tipu Sultan Gold Cup and Jehangir Cup.

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Abdul Majeed Sheikh, known locally as Majeed Mamu, says Nagpada was a trendsetter of sorts in the 1960s. ‘‘Basketball became a way of life; every household would have a ball and every second home would have a hoop’’, he recalls.

At one time, as many as 17 members from NNH were playing in the state men’s junior and senior teams.

The popularity was driven as much by sporting concerns as by economics; for a lower-middle-class locality, a cheap sport that could produce jobs for its boys was always going to be popular. ‘‘Over three or four decades, some 100 young boys got picked to play for teams like Central Railway, Western Railway, Naval Dockyard, Income Tax and others’’, says the 63-year-old Sheikh, whose current retired life includes spending two hours every evening watching the youngsters practise. ‘‘But now’’, he laments, ‘‘the standards have gone down.’’

The stars have dimmed too. The last international the club produced was Shahid Qureshi, in 1994-95. ‘‘The falling standards are thanks to the shoddy job the state basketball association did’’, says Hanif Patel (47), a product of the NNH and now coach of Central Railway. ‘‘Thankfully, there’s a new committee heading the state body now. And hopefully things will revert to Nagpada’s former glory.’’

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Patel often tells the kids on the neatly-maintained court — renovated last year at a cost of Rs 9 lakh, with floodlights, fibreglass hoops and a Mastic (soft cement) surface — about the packed houses during matches in the 1980s. ‘‘He tells us that sometimes there’d be 7,000 people watching Mastan YMCA vs NNH’’, says a lanky teenager sweating it out in the Mumbai summer.

‘‘People were pasionate about the game’’, Patel says.

Not just passionate, he’s corrected by Noor Khan, a former basketballer now in charge of administrative work at the club. ‘‘We were basketball-literate.’’