Just about every big-name cricket player of the last 25 years was at Citi Field on Saturday for an exhibition match. But the thousands of mostly South Asian-Americans who fought traffic or rode the crowded, slow-moving 7 trains to the stadium were mainly there to see one man: Sachin Tendulkar.
Vinod Vellore of Atlantic City, who brought along a pole with an Indian flag on one side and a United States flag on the other, was one such fan. “We live for him; we die for him,” he said. “He’s a god.”
In clarifying his motivation for driving up with a group of six fans, Vellore said, “Eighty percent for Tendulkar, 20 percent for cricket.