Vishesh Bhriguvanshi: Arjuna on the Hardwood
Vishesh Bhriguvanshi. Image courtesy: FIBA.
Basketball star Vishesh Bhriguvanshi won the Arjuna Award this month, joining a prestigious list of sporting greats. Here’s the story of the Varanasi-born baller, and what he represents for the less-celebrated sports in India.
Winters in Delhi are always colder than one expects them to be, and it’s at midnight on a chilly November evening nearly five years ago, at platform 16 of the New Delhi Railway Station, where I ran into a familiar face. Here, open to all elements of the environment and the populace, stood Vishesh Bhriguvanshi, the captain of India’s national basketball team, and one of the most-accomplished basketball stars in the country. The shooting-guard was taking the same overnight five-and-a-half-hour journey on the Nanda Devi Express with me to Dehradun; by sheer coincidence, we had even bought tickets for the same AC three-tier compartment.
Bhriguvanshi and I also share a hometown—Varanasi—and I’ve known him from his early days of becoming an under-18 Most Valuable Player of the Asian Basketball Without Borders (BWB) camp in New Delhi in 2008. At the station, Bhriguvanshi was by himself, unbothered and undisturbed in a quiet corner of the platform, waiting for the train to pull up. I was the only one to recognise him: my reaction to this chance meeting was with hugs and selfies, tweets and Instagram posts.
While seated across from each other in our compartment, I spoke loudly that night, hoping that fellow travellers would understand and appreciate the unknown celebrity among them. But of course, no one was interested; outside the niche basketball obsessives in India, Bhriguvanshi has largely been an unknown figure. He was dressed in a simple green shirt, carried an old sports backpack, and wore his trademark full-beard over his face. Nothing expect for his height—six-foot-four—made him stand out. That height which had been Bhriguvanshi’s gift on the basketball court for nearly a decade was unfortunately a curse on the train: his foremost concern that night was hoping for a berth where his legs would fit without having to buckle in his knees all night.
Bhriguvanshi smiled at my attempts to get him attention. Even for a leading basketball star like him, anonymity in India isn’t an exception, it’s the norm.
This month, Bhriguvanshi joins a rare club, becoming only the 21st Indian basketball player in the sport’s lost history to be conferred the prestigious Arjuna Award, handed out by the President of India. Bhriguvanshi will join a class of Indian athletes that includes more popular sportspersons nominated for national honours this year, including Rohit Sharma (Cricket), Ishant Sharma (Cricket), Dutee Chand (Athletics), Sakshi Malik (Wrestling), and Madhurika Patkar (Table Tennis).
In Indian basketball circles, he is considered to be one of the true greats of the sport. But among the ‘mainstream’ junta, he is hardly known at all, is another (slightly taller) face in the crowd, a mere blip under the billboards of India’s male cricket stars, who are the only national sportspersons that can consistently achieve celebrity status in the country.
In Indian basketball circles, Bhriguvanshi is considered to be one of the true greats of the sport. But among the ‘mainstream’ junta, he is hardly known at all, is another (slightly taller) face in the crowd, a mere blip under the billboards of India’s male cricket stars, who are the only national sportspersons that can consistently achieve celebrity status in the country.
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Bhriguvanshi was born in Varanasi in 1991, the son of educationalists. His father was a biology teacher at the Udai Pratap (UP) College and his mother a school principal. Vishesh and his brother Vibhor, however, found a different calling: basketball.
By the time Vishesh Bhriguvanshi was a teenager, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) brought in coach Amarjeet Singh to head the basketball programme at the UP College. Under Singh’s tutelage, UP College turned into an unlikely nursery for Indian basketball, producing the talented Singh Sisters (Divya, Prashanti, Akanksha, and Prashanti) all who played for India, and other international players like Trideep Rai and Arjun Singh.
‘Vishesh’ means ‘special’, and Bhriguvanshi indeed lived up to his name, becoming emblematic of Varanasi’s golden era, finding domestic and international success as a teenager. He earned national captaincy by the time he was 19, and soon becoming a stalwart for the national team. His basketball’s skills earned him a job with Western Railways, where, like most other national athletes in India, he had to play two roles. On court, he was a shooting guard, capable of creating for himself and others. Off the court, he was a railway ticket checker, posted in Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh where he led this double life, working four hours a day checking tickets at the Ratlam Junction.
He won three consecutive national champions with Indian Railways. In 2011, he was hired by Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and shifted to Dehradun, where he began to represent them and the Uttarakhand team, collecting many more gold medals in India’s biggest national basketball events.
Bhriguvanshi is a do-everything kind of player, able to play any perimeter position on the court with ease. He excels as a ball-handler, a penetrator to the basket, and an outside shooter. His combination of intelligence, skills, and experience has him standing heads and shoulders above his competition; he has always been among the top players in any domestic event he has taken part in.
Bhriguvanshi’s international breakthrough came when he helped India win a 3x3 basketball gold medal at the 2008 Asian Beach Games. From that point onwards, he played in every major FIBA Asia Championship for India as long as he was healthy. For India’s national team, which has had a long history of mediocrity (at best) and utter helplessness (at worst) in the Asian and global basketball circuit, Bhriguvanshi quickly became an indispensable cog in the machine. For the majority of the past decade, he has been India’s best shooting-guard and playmaker, the most-trusted floor general to stabilise the team’s offense and create for himself and others. While attention and hype is usually reserved for taller players who can dominate easily in the post, the presence of Bhriguvanshi became a more valuable entity: without his leadership from the perimeter, the excellent talent in the post was almost rendered useless.
Photo courtesy: FIBA.
In 2014, during the FIBA Asia Cup in Wuhan, China, Bhriguvanshi was the rudder of the national team that pulled off a most miraculous victory. Facing off against hosts China—Asian powerhouse and one of top teams in the world—India played a calm and composed game, with special discipline on the defensive end. India had never defeated China in its decades of basketball history, and had often been the whipping boys, usually handed 20-30 point losses. In Wuhan, however, India stayed on track and led in the game’s final minutes. Instead of feeling the nerves at the face of a giant, Bhriguvanshi surged with confidence and made a bold alley-oop pass to star forward Amjyot Singh for a resounding dunk. The play was the dagger that all but cemented the win for India. It displayed that Bhriguvanshi was built for the biggest moment.
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In the larger scheme of international basketball this victory over China—and a couple more years of impressive upsets by Team India between 2014-16—was a mere blimp. India’s Men’s team currently ranks 73rd in the world, below nations like Kosovo and Qatar. They have rarely broken into the top-50 globally or made it to the top six of any Asian championship in decades. There is no professional basketball league in India, and apart from a few minor league exceptions abroad, Indian players have hardly reached the type of international stardom that would spurt the growth of the game back home.
Without a full-time pro league, most of India’s top players are semi-professionals whose annual calendars are complicated jigsaw pieces, brought together with an ambition to maximise basketball opportunities as much as possible. When Bhriguvanshi isn’t playing for the national team, he represents ONGC or Uttarakhand. He also tried his hand at every disparate opportunity for professional basketball he could find, including the short-lived UBA Basketball League (where he was named the Most Valuable Player), the part-time Mizoram Super League, and a short stint in the pro league in Maldives. He was signed to the Adelaide 36ers of the National Basketball League in Australia, but an injury limited his opportunity to make the final roster.
It is a strenuous schedule, and hardly ever rewarding. Even with this complete dedication to the game, basketball fame is a rare thing. In India, where the biggest sport is cricket (and the second, the third, fourth, fifth and sixth biggest sport is also cricket) success in something ‘niche’ like basketball can be fleeting. Without proper grassroots development of the game, players like Bhriguvanshi are not easy to reproduce. And in a team sport, just having a couple of great players on the roster isn’t enough: India needs a complete overhaul from the grassroots selection, coaching, training, diet, and professional upgrades to generate more interest for the sport, to create the market for a pro league, to win bigger abroad, to produce more stars.
Basketball’s rise in India has hardly been a clean trajectory: the game has grown and fallen, just like a dribbling ball itself, sometimes scoring the toughest shots, sometimes getting deflated by bureaucratic messes. The Basketball Federation of India (BFI) calls it the fastest-growing sport in the country, but they have failed to create the type of grassroots programme to turn that potential into real results. Worse, political tussles within the federation a few years ago lost them lucrative sponsorships and hurt the sport’s credibility within the government’s Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. Continued infighting and bans on star players have created an environment of distrust.
There has been some optimism, however, from the involvement of the world’s biggest basketball league, the NBA, in growing their presence in India. Outreach programmes to schools and colleges have helped spread the ‘culture’ of basketball among younger Indians. The NBA’s Academy in Greater Noida has helped polish a number of promising prospects, many of whom now have a shot at international colleges and leagues. A few Indian players like Satnam Singh, Amjyot Singh Gill, Amritpal Singh, and most-recently Princepal Singh have flirted with small roles in minor leagues abroad, but their success has been individual—it has yet to show a trickle-down effect on the sport back in India.
There is a common thread between these breakout talents: all of them are from the Punjab region, all players that honed their skills at Ludhiana’s famed basketball academy, and all are 6-foot-9 or above, blessed with the tantalising combination of size and skill. In comparison, Bhriguvanshi’s success has been an outlier: he is a shorter (in relative basketball sense) player from Uttar Pradesh who used technical skills and leadership to overachieve in the land of giants and become one the country’s most-important players.
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Bhriguvanshi’s true value for Team India emerged in his absence.
In the first game against the host-nation at the 2017 BRICS Games in Guangzhou, China, Bhriguvanshi left the game with an injury, later discovered to be an ACL tear. Without their best backcourt player, India lost the game, and then they lost their next two games in Guangzhou, then lost all nine games at the Willian Jones Cup in Taiwan, then lost all their games at the FIBA Asia Cup in Lebanon, then lost all six qualifiers over the next year for the FIBA Basketball World Cup, and on and on and on. India’s only victories came far and few in-between, against weaker South Asian neighbours or in smaller tournaments.
While there seems to be no shortage of talented bigs for the national team, India has long-struggled to find an apt backcourt partner or replacement for Bhriguvanshi. A carousel of guards have played beside him, but never found a way to adequately replicate his talents, from the rugged leader Sambhaji Kadam, the uber-atheltic TJ Sahi, sharp-shooters Narender Grewal and Hareesh Koroth, creators like Arjun Singh, Joginder Singh and Akilan Pari, or the latest entrants into the fray, including Lalrina Renthlei and Muin Bek Hafeez. All of these players had their strengths, but all of them fell short against elite international defences; India lost multiple winnable games after a late loss of focus.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 that Bhriguvanshi made a tentative return to the national team. He had lost much of the bounce in his step, his fitness, and of course, game experience. But the feel on the court was there, and the hyper-intelligence ability to see the floor never went away.
In February 2020 India finally ended their three-and-a-half year losing streak in major FIBA tournaments with a victory over Iraq in a game for the FIBA Asia Cup 2021 Qualifiers. Bhriguvanshi started the game and ended with 13 points in the blowout victory.
The Arjuna Award, of course, is named after Arjuna, the mythological hero of The Mahabharata, famed for his sharp-shooting ability with the bow-and-arrow. Times have changed, and so have the vocations of the warriors, and the new-age Arjuna shoots basketballs, hitting jump-shots with the accuracy of seeing the eye of the wooden bird.
The victory was a deep exhale, but the feeling was short-lived, as within a month, COVID-19 shut everything down—including Indian basketball. Now, like everyone else, Bhriguvanshi (who will turn 29 in September) waits for the game to return again, itching to take the court and continue his journey.
There has been a sliver of joy for Bhriguvanshi this year, the news of his Arjuna Award nomination. It is rare for athletes in smaller team sports in India to be considered for such individual awards, as they don’t often make the criteria of winning medals in bigger tournaments, surrounded by teams that are often unsuccessful at the international stage. In basketball, for example, only two players have received the honour since 2001: Geethu Anna Jose and Prashanti Singh. Bhriguvanshi’s nomination was a sign that the selection committee could perhaps open to rewarding talents like him. The hope is that he will open doors for a number of other Indian players—particularly the former products of the Ludhiana Basketball Academy—to start getting the recognition they deserve by the mainstream sports nexus of India.
The Arjuna Award, of course, is named after Arjuna, the mythological hero of The Mahabharata, famed for his sharp-shooting ability with the bow-and-arrow. Times have changed, and so have the vocations of the warriors, and the new-age Arjuna shoots basketballs, hitting jump-shots with the accuracy of seeing the eye of the wooden bird.
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What does the future hold for Bhriguvanshi? Even before turning 30, he has already climbed to the highest rung of the ladder one can in domestic basketball in India, winning dozens of national tournaments, captaining the national team, and now, winning the prestigious national award. What remains elusive, however, is international success. Bhriguvanshi dominance in India has been both a gift and a curse: as good as he has been in the domestic circuit, his game has stagnated by the lack of opportunities, competitions, and experience against the best players in the continent, or around the world.
No matter how the next few active years of Bhriguvanshi’s basketball career play out, he will be remembered as one of the greatest guards the country has ever produced. He has been the bridge connecting one generation to the next: his successors will have the roadmap to find more professional opportunities for their trade abroad than he did—and perhaps, if India can figure out their own pro league, have those opportunities at home, too.
In India, the true celebrity spotlight is usually reserved for the ‘big three’ of film-stars, cricketers, and politicians. Cricket has a stronghold over the sporting audience like no other: even a fringe cricket in the public eye is an instant magnetic draw, attracting fans, onlookers, and media. One hopes that the Arjuna Award can bring Bhriguvanshi—a national captain in an otherwise ‘fringe’ Indian sport—the spotlight that he deserves.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
