Cricketer, Lawyer, Rhodes Scholar and much more..Why you need to read Nandan Kamath's Boundary Lab

Nandan Kamath, a lawyer with a passion for all things related to sports, recently authored Boundary Lab, a book on the regulation of sports, Dhoni's helicopter shot, and much more.

In this interview with Bar & Bench's Pallavi Saluja, Kamath talks about his early days in law school, his interest in sports and how Boundary Lab came into being.

Edited excerpts from the interview follow.

Pallavi Saluja (PS): You represented Karnataka in cricket at the junior national level, and you’re passionate about sports. Why didn’t you pursue a career in sports?

Nandan Kamath (NK): I came up against a very significant choice quite early on. While I was in college, I was still playing quite serious cricket; I went ahead and did the NLS entrance test. I didn’t study very hard for it, and with a bit of luck, I got in. At that interview, we had the Founder-Director NR Madhav Menon. His words still ring in my head:

“Young man, are you going to be a cricketer or a lawyer? Because you’re not going to be both.”

It was a very pivotal point. It wasn’t really my decision. Given the chance, I would have probably tried to be a lawyer and a cricketer, but I came to walk this road. And I personally made that decision to become a lawyer. So, I am now an enthusiastic lawyer, in the same way I was an enthusiastic cricketer.

PS: What inspired you to write Boundary Lab?

NK: Over the years, I would call myself a lawyer first, but even more than that, I would call myself someone deeply interested in sports and its various intersections with the law, society and commerce. I have been curious about all of those things and then over the years, started working on writing down those thoughts.

My legal practice involves working with sports bodies, sports organizations, sports businesses and athletes. I have worked with the government on drafting policy. So, I have seen this from various dimensions. The book was an amalgamation of my ideas and thoughts, a fair bit of my practical experiences. But more than that, it is my vision of what I think the role of sports in society is. I would say that it’s a unique lens - my vantage point as a lawyer, someone who has also played sport, now as a parent of young kids trying to play sport. I felt I had a unique voice and I wanted to express it.

Bringing all that together, it just felt like a book that needed to be written at the particular time. I somehow made the bandwidth for it and put my ideas into words. It has been an interesting journey because it also helped me clarify a lot of my thoughts, because until you write stuff down, a lot of it remains unformed and remains as this aether of ambiguous thoughts. The minute you put down words, sentences and paragraphs, you have to concretise those thoughts. It was a meaningful process of clarity for myself.

PS: The IPL has been a grand success thus far. What are the three things other sports leagues can learn from the IPL?

NK: I think one of the chapters actually addresses why the IPL has worked while many of the other leagues haven't. And one of my premises is that you shouldn't be trying to borrow from the IPL. In fact, each sport needs to find its own space, its own voice and its way of doing things. Not every sport is ready for a league. Some might be a tournament. IPL is a product that is built on a very successful sport, which is cricket. By the time the IPL came in 2008, cricket had a very significant following already. 

Second is the model of the IPL. Bringing private participants in, getting them to invest - there was a very clear pathway as to how money could be made by everyone. It wasn't that the franchises were not investing in trying to build a new audience. It was, in some sense, capturing the audience's imagination in a new way and in the bargain, many more people came to the sport. So, what IPL has been very successful at is democratising decision-making in bringing in these 10 franchises. It's no longer just one body that's making all the decisions; selection decisions, identifying talents - all of that has got democratised. And it's all sitting on a very successful domestic structure. There's a brand new trophy, and thousands of matches being held all over. You can't take learnings from one sport and transport them on another sport that is still far from actually having a domestic structure.

There needs a strong centralised system, where there is a federation like the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) that has vision, direction and ambition, and where all of the other people are good support actors, like the franchises we're going to build together. The obvious one is how legally, structurally, financially strong the BCCI is at the center. So, it actually did not need the IPL, but it was able to successfully pull off the IPL because it was already a successful body.

To sum up, I would say a strong leadership. Two, an imagination to bring more private capital in on well-regulated terms. And three, making a high level of mix between sports and entertainment accessible to new audiences.

PS: Do you think Dhoni should get IP protection for his helicopter shot?

NK: I’m not giving away any answers here, but I think this was a very interesting chapter to me because I actually studied a lot of intellectual property law. Before I did work in sport, I had been doing a lot of stuff in intellectual property and really getting into the theory of why IP as a system exists at all; and then overlaying that onto sport. So the simple question asked is, what is it that makes people innovate and create? And for the longest time, we've been told that the intellectual property system is the only reason or the primary reason why people are innovative or creative - because they're going to make some money off it through the exclusivity - and that if you don't give it, people are not going to innovate and create. So, this was really an exploration of how people innovate and create within sport, what incentives they get as a result and whether you need intellectual property within sport. If you don't need it within sport, are there other little ecosystems where you actually don't need it, in the same way that you don't need it in sport?

It was quite a unique chapter in that sense. Looking at that, and looking at other sports as well and the unique things people do - many of them do it without any objective or motive other than trying to get better. Maybe there are learnings for the world at large, that people create good things not just with financial incentives or control in mind, but there is some element of just wanting to take humanity forward and do your bit and to be remembered, perhaps. You'll probably remember Dhoni even 50 years from now for playing the helicopter shot and maybe that's enough, right? Maybe that's enough for Dhoni, the legacy that he leaves. Not that he isn't making enough money, but it’s not from IP.

PS: Would you say litigation is a sport?

NK: It’s a great question. I don’t play that "sport", but you could call it that, in some sense. You have a prize at the end. You are on both sides or multiple sides, playing these roles. They are certainly players. Like they say, “All the world's a stage, and all of us are players.”

Chapter 1 (of my book) talks about the definition of sport. If we’re being technical, litigation perhaps wouldn’t fall into the strict definition of sport, but it certainly has many of the elements of entertainment - some rules to play by, and certainly some of the grandstanding that sport offers. So, I can see some parallels and I can see where that question is coming from.