Actor Abhishek Bachchan spent his childhood in a home that had a study filled with VHS tapes of Muhammad Ali and Pele. It was his father, superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who had compiled this extensive sports library. If not Ali and Pele, there would always be cricket on television. It was that sporty study that turned Abhishek into a life-long sports buff, owner of franchise teams and now a co-founder of Europe’s T20 venture.
To explain the birth of his passion, Abhishek strolls down the memory lane to track back to the time when Bachchan Sr was the ‘angry young man’, did back-to-back shifts and was on road for weeks. “The few times that we got to spend a day with him, I have vivid memories of him sitting on a chair in front of a television watching Test cricket,” he says.
There was a reason, those long-awaited days stayed embedded in his mind. “Some of my earliest memories of my father at home are very far and few, because when I was growing up, he was always working. I mean, we used to sleep under the same roof, but I used to not see him for weeks because he’d come home from shooting after I’d gone to sleep and he’d leave before I woke up,” he says.
Age or time hasn’t weakened the pull of sports. “Till date, my father’s capacity to watch highlights and reruns of all these sporting events is immense,” he says. As for him, someone who played sports in school and college, he was “trying to live vicariously”. He further goes on to say, “I have an unbelievably supportive father. And my love for sport and my education in sport has been through my father.”
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The Bachchans are also deeply involved in the ongoing tennis-ball cricket tournament the Indian Street Premier League where they own the current champion Majhi Mumbai. Abhishek calls it an eye-opening experience that has proved very gratifying when one of its players got picked to be a net ball bowler for IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders.
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“To see and give an opportunity to somebody to go from street all the way to stadium and to see the aspiration and the hard work that they put into achieving those dreams and being given the opportunity to play amongst the best of the best is something that was very inspiring,” he says. “And these are the things that inspire me about sport and things that motivate me to be involved in sport, either as a team owner or now in the league, to be able to make a difference.”
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