How much they argued - about 'how much' Brian Lara, Carl Hooper and co. should be getting! 'The bwana devil to pay!' sums up the 'spot' TV reaction of all South Africa as that clangour was dropped about Brian Lara and Carl Hooper's being, not just out of a milestone Proteas tour, but out of West Indies cricket itself. Player power prevailed, in the grand sum, for the first time in Caribbean cricket - at what cost to the future of the game in the Isles, only time will tell. Do not forget, the West Indies is 'one nation' only in cricket, as the recent Commonwealth Games brought home. They held together because there was so much money in the game for the players.

But was there real money in the game for the Windies players even when they were a superpower in the game? Now that they are not the Champs they were, the money crunch has come, those nonstop wins no longer being there to sweep the rolled-gold dust under the red carpet. Against this backdrop, remember how Kapil Dev and his devils came from behind to put daylight between the West Indies and India while lifting the Prudential World Cup in a 1983 style that had the whole nation in a tizzy? After that body-blow to the Windies psyche, Vivian Richards felt distressed. Distressed as much at the West Indies' benumbing loss as at the opportunity, consequently squandered by Clive Lloyd and his men, to make the financial killing of a lifetime. For the Prudential World Cup that Lloyd's West Indies had won not once but twice (1975 and 1979) fetched the five-star performers of the Caribbean next to nothing.

During the late-1983 tour of our country that followed India's landmark World Cup win, Viv Richards was heard to be asking, repeatedly, about how much booty each participating Indian player had collected as a follow-up to that June 25 Lord's grandstand finish. Nobody could give Richards an accurate idea of how much, but the Black Blaster could make out that Kapil Dev and his 'cupful' of heroes' had enriched themselves beyond the dreams of avarice, having been feted like no Indian team before, even Sunil Gavaskar's homecoming under Ajit Wadekar from the West Indies in 1971 paling into insignificance.

Ajitpal Singh, captain of the Indian hockey team that accomplished a similar 'first' in bagging the 1975 World Cup, had likewise been taken round the country with his team in a circus; but collected accolades at best. As he saw the way Kapil Dev and his men came to be lionised in mid-1983, Ajitpal Singh felt constrained to speak up. Said Ajitpal: ''We yesteryear hockey stars rejoice at India's historic cricket win, at how much our players are getting for the stand-out effort. But will someone please, even now, ensure at least that the plot of land promised to each hockey player of that 1975 World Cup-winning team is given, better late than never!''

Ajitpal Singh and his hockey team's plight, through the 1975-83 phase, typifies the pass to which the Windies cricket side came by end- 1998. They never had been paid enough by their ever- overbearing Cricket Board, which had merely inherited the administrative style of its colonial British masters. The Windies players thus had a raw deal even when they were the Great Power in the game. Now that the West Indies is no longer a cricketing force in the world arena, its Cricket Board officials thought that it could, with even greater impunity, trample over the feelings of its star players.

So these Pooh-Bahs had it coming to them, you could say. For Brian Lara to have risked his future in the only game in which he is a world-class performer speaks volumes for how deep must have been the wound to the Windies players' self-esteem. Time was when the world was their oyster. But the Windies players themselves never caught sight of the pearl in that oyster! They were up against a brick wall. So they decided to risk bringing the wall itself down.

Yet was the treatment accorded, for a long long time, to our own players, by our own Cricket Board, any different? By an Indian Cricket Board prosperous from the word go? G. S. Ramchand was the captain to fetch India its maiden win over Australia (then led by Richie Benaud) in the December 1959 Kanpur Test. What saddened Ramchand here was not so much the attitude of his own Sindhi employers marketing a famous brand of radio at the time. For, each time he went on tour Ramchand had to lose all his salary (plus leave) for the months he was away.

''You asked me,'' said Ramchand, ''whether I was not deposed as India's captain, after just that one (1959-60) series at home against Australia, because I failed with the bat'' (20 and 6; 24 and 5; 0; 13 and 22; 12 and 9). ''I could and should have done better in the context of the confidence reposed in me by a Lala Amarnath who had handpicked me as India's new captain. But the point is that my employers were such that I just did not find any time at all to practise. Far from their being proud of my having become India's captain, they would insist on my working full eight factory hours, six days of the week!''

And how much were the likes of Gulabrai Sipahimalani Ramchand paid for the honour of representing India? ''It used to be,'' revealed Ramchand, ''Rs. 25 a day when I started playing Test cricket for India in 1952-53. And it had gone up to Rs. 50 a day by the time I strangely found myself out of the Indian team - at the end of that 1959-60 series against Australia in which we had our moments as Richie Benaud and his men won the five-match series 2-1. Even that Rs. 25-to-50 a day was, please note, only for the six days of the Test match (including, mercifully, the rest-day). For the rest, while travelling first class ordinary (not once by AC or by air!), we had to find our own money for eats in the train. For that Rs. 25- to-50 allowance commenced only from the day the Test match got underway! Out of that Rs. 25-to-50 a day had to come our cricket gear and what we spent on laundry. And, for making a full tour, it was a fixed sum - Rs. 1,250 was the amount paid before the visit began, Rs. 1,250 at the end of the series abroad. Thus did that Rs. 2,500 partly make up what I lost by way of pay.

''During India's first-ever tour of Pakistan, I recall how,'' went on Ramchand, at Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), the whole team was put up in two bogies of a train standing idle at the siding! For hot water to bathe in the morning - it was really cold there - we had to cross the tracks, after having been disturbed all night (before the following day's play), by the shunting of steam engines. And when we used the hot water I persuaded that 'Anglo- Indian' engine driver to give us in a bucket, we discovered, to our horror, that our whole body came to be drenched in particles of coal! Why, during the (January 1955) Bahawalpur Test, the whole Indian team was resident in one big room with but one toilet for the 16 of us in the touring side. I tell you, our players today just cannot imagine what we went through, but it was worth it, seeing we were playing for India. Good luck, therefore, to the players of today. They are performing and being paid well for performing. My only point is that it is the Indian cap, the Indian blazer you sport when you represent the country. At least going by this nationalistic norm, we feel we should have been better treated by the Indian Board.''

But then, in India, for long were players considered to be ''unpatriotic'' if they dared make any money demands. In vain did Sunil Gavaskar argue that there should, logically, be a 'graded system of payment', according to the number of Tests in which a player had turned out for the country - as prevailed in England. Sunny's ''unpatriotic'' plea fell on consistently deaf ears, because the idea of ''team spirit first and last'' that Vijay Merchant had sanctified at the end of our pathbreaking first win (at Port-of-Spain) over the West Indies (early in 1971) gave the Indian Cricket Board just the big-stick handle it needed to wield on our players.

The concept of the Indian team's sharing all prize money was fine in the 'era of sacrifice' in which it first happened (1969-75) under Ajit Wadekar and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi. But it 'looks' dated on TV today, as the player walks up to collect the prize for his 'individual' performance. Our players as a team do not object to the idea because this prize money is now a pittance compared to what they earn from sponsorship and the like. Even the Rs. 90,000 for a one-day international and the Rs. 1,20,000 for a five-day Test match that our players get today appear as nothing to them. For the payment here comes by cheque from the Cricket Board to players who are still 'amateurs', earning a regular monthly salary from the firm they serve on a 'work-is- play' basis.

There is thus such tremendous patronage for the game (at least at the highest level) in India today that our players see no call to worry yet. But how long is this kind of tele-razzledazzle going to last the way Doordarshan (in its monstrous new avatar) covers cricket, all but negating the World Tel picture? If DD continues to 'smoke-screen' cricket this way - with the viewer in a 'spot' every 20-30 seconds interest in such an 8-hour- long telewatch is going to evaporate sooner than TV as a medium and our players think. At this spot-ad rate, our players could, in the not too distant future, find themselves to be in the same churchmouse- poor state as the Windies stars are today.

Brian Lara was on velvet so long as his earnings from the game read: '375,501'. But the moment Lara lost the golden touch began the business of reaping the whirlwind for the '375,501' wind he had sown.

The hard-won, hard-earned money that is to come, at last, from the West Indies Cricket Board, I say, represents but the thin end of the wedge, holding Brian Lara's bat-handle and willow together. There is going to be a heavy price to pay for this pay- off, just wait and watch how the Windies powers-that-be settle scores the moment Lara fails to deliver with the bat. If they could do it to Viv Richards, they could do it to Brian Lara too. Remember how they would not let a player of the dimension of Viv Richards stay on for the one World Cup (1992) that he wanted to be his 'Black Swan' song?

Sunil Gavaskar had, before that, made a similar request to the Indian Cricket Board vis-a-vis the 1987 Reliance World Cup - after his 188 (first class) Sayanora at Lord's, following the 10,122 tally. And Sunny's one-day wish was granted in the face of his having been at constant variance with the Cricket Board. By this stage, even our Cricket Board had developed a flair for the right gesture.

Look at the West Indies Cricket Board by contrast. It is the cricket administration in the Caribbean Isles, I say, that has pulled down West Indies cricket from the lofty perch it attained, in the game. The Windies players were the best in the world, yet their administration treated them as no better than black slaves. The boomerang had to come. Ironically, it was the 'white' segment of South Africa, spearheaded by Dave Richardson, that had to think up a sponsorship deal to save this Windies tour of Mandela's South Africa. Like the Indian Cricket Board, the Windies cricket administration had 'short-changed' its players all along the line.

Even in India, it was not the Cricket Board that changed. The media opened out with the advent of satellite television here. And TV brought about a metamorphosis in the approach of even the Indian Cricket Board.

For all that, to this day, the Indian mindset is that our players are making far too much out of the game and that is why they are failing to perform consistently! Consistency is the first casualty in oneday cricket. That is something the Indian viewer has not grasped even as we head for the new millennium. Nowhere else in the world will you encounter the 'holier-than-thou' outlook you do in India on the part of viewers. The idea has yet to take root, in the Indian mind, that our players have first to be paid well, only then can they be expected to perform well.

Remember how much public resentment there was about Sunil Gavaskar's having, at last, got player-payment-per-Test raised to Rs. 14,600 (Rs. 11,600 down payment and Rs. 3,000 to go into the player's benevolent fund)? Talking of benevolence, there was this call to me from Rusi Surti (all the way from Australia) to find out whether it was true that the Cricket Board had decided to pay each past player Rs. 2,000-per- Test as bonus money, provided he had appeared in a minimum of 25 matches for India. Surti, a dedicated performer for India in his time, but in dire need of money by then (1990), anxiously pointed out to me that he qualified for Rs. 52,000, having played in 26 Tests for India. Even our best catcher in the spin-quartet era, Eknath Solkar, just about made it, he got Rs. 54,000 for 27 Tests! For long did Polly Umrigar, who had mooted the idea in the first place, hold the record for the highest (59) appearances for India and he received Rs. 1,18,000. You can make out in how many Tests, for India, each player I name figured if I say that Lala Amarnath got Rs. 48,000; G. S. Ramchand Rs. 66,000; Syed Abid Ali Rs. 58,000; E.A.S. Prasanna Rs. 98,000; B. S. Chandrasekhar Rs. 1,16,000; S. Venkatraghavan Rs. 1,14,000; Ajit Wadekar Rs. 74,000; Nari Contractor Rs. 62,000; and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Rs. 92,000.

''Ah, but Pataudi never needed the money!'' I can hear the chorus in India. It is this attitude of mind that continues to be basically flawed. How exploited our cricketers once were could be made out from the fact that, having lost before lunch under the Nawab of Pataudi (Jr), the Lord's Test on Monday, June 26, 1967, the players had no go but to stay on at the hallowed ground - so as to be sure of their afternoon meal! There was not enough foreign exchange provided for the lunch to be taken at their hotel! The whole of India laughed at that. They laughed all the more when they read that India had lost the Test, on that Monday, even before the Queen could traditionally arrive at Lord's! Thus there was, for our players at the ground, lunch and tea too. Tea, but no sympathy. For that Lord's Test had been surrendered by an innings and 124 runs. Oh, the to-do there was about Tiger Pataudi's having been dismissed for 5 and 5 (in that June 1967 Lord's Test), after his having hit, with delicacy and refinement, 64 and 148 in the preceding Leeds Test! Sharmila Tagore had joined Pataudi in London for that Lord's Test. And the Indian public reasoning was that Pataudi fell from that 64-and-148 peak precisely because Sharmila arrived on the scene to ensure he would not score!

True, Sharmila and Pataudi had still to wed then, but now look at the morbid interest, in this year of lack of grace, in Sachin Tendulkar's being away at Lonavla with Anjali for a well-earned holiday. She is his wife, damn it! But then is this not the age of the paparazzi, a time when Lonavla-to-Toronto is but a camera flash?

Krish Srikkanth, for example, was a condemned man from the moment in which, having been given the team he wanted for the late-1989 tour of Pakistan, he was indiscreet enough to ask the Chairman of Selectors: ''Now that you have given me, as captain, the side I want, what about also settling the players' payment dispute?

Just like Srikkanth to wear his heart on the long sleeve in which he batted! It was Kapil Dev who had actually 'set up' Srikkanth to pose that query. That Srikkanth let himself be so 'set up' is the man. But did Kapil Dev not have a point when he raised the matter, albeit shrewdly, through Srikkanth? Just look at the calibre of Kapil Dev's achievement for India by end-1989, did he not have every right to ask, like Sunil Gavaskar, for a 'graded system of payment' via Srikkanth? Kapil Dev here was merely stating, by proxy, the Samuel Butler principle: ''It costs a lot of money to die comfortably!''

''Time is money - it is now or never!'' reasoned Brian Lara, as he spoke up for the West Indies players continuing to perform merely for the dubious benefit of television, omnipresent television. Lara thus certainly won the battle. But the war with Authority has only just begun. And, against Authority, Don Bradman alone has so far waged a war and won. It is by now established that Lara is no Bradman. In truth, Brian Lara is the style of batsman who will soon realise the validity of what William Shenstone meant when he said: ''A man of genius and his money are soon parted.''

Source: The Hindu