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Are academics & sports compatible?
M ost students, and most certainly their parents, believe that the path of life bifurcates into studies or sports, and the two are not mutually compatible!
My passion for sports in my young days used to frequently cause conflict with my guardians and teachers. As happens in most middle class Indian homes even today, they saw academic performance as the only passport to a life of stable job and economic security. Sports and games were regarded as a distraction from the path, before Sachin Tendulkar and Saurabh Ganguly showed how children from the educated middle class could keep games as an option too.
The hero of my confused days of high school and college was Sir Roger Bannister who died recently at the ripe age of 89. He excelled in these two different worlds.
Let me start with what adults would want to know first, the success of his ‘grown up’ days. He was a great neurologist having trained at Oxford and worked as a senior consultant at Pembroke College, Oxford for 40 years as an academic neurologist. He published over 80 papers and wrote several books, the most famous of which was “Brain and Bannister’s Clinical Neurology” that we read as medical students.
It is funny though that if you look up his profile on Wikipedia or on search engines, he is projected not as a doctor, but a great sportsman. As a student in medical school he had represented England in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, where he did well. In 1954 he went on to set a world record of running a mile in less than 4 minutes!
And this achievement of being the first 4-minute mile runner is what history records in bold as the greatest feather in his cap, and that brought him many laurels and the knighthood.
Interestingly, when Dr Bannister was asked in an interview what he thought was his greatest achievement and proudest moment he placed his contributions as a neurologist much above his success in sports that got him fame.
Merit and success often cross over and span beyond one field, as happened so well with Dr Bannister. Thanks to the model that his life served, I brushed away the creeping feelings of guilt and participated as a member of my college teams in cricket, hockey and volleyball in my JIPMER days. And life has been much richer for that.