The odd Spalding...

As I kid I was inquisitive...

And I had this odd hobby of collecting balls, I mean those used in mainstream sports and games !!

Sometimes it was odd when a Madurai kid had in his collection a rugby or a golf ball. For, those are something, games unheard of when it came to his peers. So there was no point WOWing them with an exhibition of this sort of a collection. In all probability they might end up saying, "What unshape cricket balls you have !!" and to add to the insult they would say "I would always flush off those unshape ones"

So to divert their attention I always invented a new form of cricket that would fit my ball for the day.

This particular day it was a Spalding, a Spalding golf ball.

The only association a Tamil would have to this game would be from that famous Rajinikant movie "Mr. Bharat". In a particular song sequencce Rajini plays golf.

So when I got this Spalding and I wanted to show off, I told my select few in my class... "Thalaivar played with a lean stick on grass, why don't we play cricket with this in the class"

It was my seventh class and we decided to use the golf ball to play cricket during our 5 minute class break.

The physics / chemistry record note would become our bat and we would hammer our way till the next class commenced. This used to be our routine till the Spalding arrived, the only change... The ball till then, used to be the crushed pages of our notebook. Tactfully removed from the center.

And this was the one bounce catch out varient of cricket.

So, came the Spalding and without even thinking about its bounce we started playing cricket. That was the break between our Maths class and we were expecting our Hindi master to come in anytime.

The bowler at that time pitched in a short one, "S" who was batting tried to prove a point to the girl from the second row he was eyeing those days "R". He did that wild slog and unluckly for us he connected right on the logo of his physics record book, the middle. The ball just missed "D" on the fourth row and flew on to hit the stained glass sliding window.

I heard "A" my crush crying a "Arghh". It was already broken and the Hindi master would get in any time. So what do we do??

The answer was to put "S" bag on the window wedge to hide the hole-some view.

Thanks to "S" and her bag we diverted things effectively till 4.30p when the school would disperse.

And then came football to get the window pane open from outside and save us.

Finally we had to marry cricket with football to have our soul saved