Sporting encounters in the City

Bangalore boasts of sporting clubs of every kind. But most of them are transforming into social clubs, memberships to which talking points among certain sections of society.

M BHAKTAVATSALA

Bangalore has the distinction of being home to some remarkable sporting clubs. At about the highest point in the city a sacred plot of 63 acres was in use for a ‘Ball Game’ much before the Bangalore Golf Club was founded there in 1876. The ‘Ball Game’ was surely golf and that makes it the oldest golf course in India! Today it is the prettiest place to feast one’s eyes on green acres undulating towards the sunset as the ‘oldest member’ drones on about how he got a ‘hole in one’. That is why it is special. The talk is only golf and one can see the bodies of golf widows strewn all around - unless they are wise enough to join in on the game of bothering a stationary ball into a hole a long distance away!

Golf in Bangalore went international when the Karnataka Golf Association started in 1986. It is all of 124 acres with a thoroughly modern building and predictably is slowly transforming into a social club while the old club is shying away from being one. Tennis also has an ample home in Cubbon Park with activities strictly confined to the game. But the Cricket Club, which is now a full-fledged social club, merits no more than casual interest in the game by its members. That's easy. Everyone in the country is mad about cricket. So everyone is qualified.

The smoky old Billiards club on Brigade Road, ideally located in a corner and a haunt of addicts from 1950, has now transformed into a modern building in the Millers Tank and is called Karnataka State Billiards Association nestling next to the recently built Badminton Association. But the strangest of the sporting clubs is the Race Club. Over 80 years old, it has a fixed number of members who naturally take their turn to die thus making way for new members. Invariably the applicants are the progeny or the near and dear ones of the members. Every year then, there is a frenetic campaign of personal entreaties, parties, and sundry cajolements of the much pampered 300-odd members to vote for those knocking on the doors. Once in, there is nothing one can really do.

Horse racing euphemistically called a sport, consists of putting one’s money on a horse and mostly losing it which no right minded member would do. The kick then is in being a part of the elite few who will be cajoled, entreated, dined, wined, beseeched at annual intervals for the rest of their lives!

All other clubs take care to build in the needs of the progeny, making sure that over the years they would all be a series of family trees. Both the social and sporting clubs have come a long way from their origins. Trollope whose Palliser novels render graphic accounts of the clubs in London in the 19th century, writes of The Prime Minister (in the book of that name) being bothered by two members, one from the Carlton and the other from Reform Club, for cabinet appointment. The Carlton was Conservative and the Reform - reformist! Members of clubs in Bangalore subscribe to no philosophy but the urge to keep up with the Joneses.
To underline the Railway Compartment mentality of 'owner's pride and neighbour's envy' they proudly display their memberships by stickers on their cars - greater the number higher the status! A day is not far off when one of the 'items' to be ticked in favour of a desirable marriage will be the membership of a club!