Monday, January 28, 2002 Mark Mascarenhas was always travelling. I first met him in April 2000 at Mumbai's domestic airport, entirely by design. He had no time to lose. The drive to his new office in central Mumbai took 45 minutes and in between calls from Ravi Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar and hollering at the driver, he talked about his plans for total-cricket.com, the cricket website that would beat the s*** out of CricInfo. We passed the Bandra-Kurla complex on our way. Mark pulled down his window, pointed at a swanky new building and, eyes gleaming behind those big spectacles, said aloud, "I want a building like that."

Once in his office, he introduced me to his friends and consultants as the editor of the website and put me online with his operations head who, I learnt later that night, was on the flight next day to Mumbai to work out the details with me. I had hardly spoken, had been given no chance to consider, decide and say no to the job offer. Impulse, speed, decisiveness and oneupmanship: that was the very essence of Mark Mascarenhas, who died on Sunday in a car crash.

Big is the word for Mark. He was a huge man with a booming voice. His ambitions knew no bounds; he had a big heart, took big risks and had a bigger ego. "If I go down," he would often say, "I would rather go down with all guns blazing."

He wasn't an easy man to work for. Those were heady days for the internet, but his understanding of the medium did not extend beyond the prevailing notion that it was a hot medium and made a lot of investment sense. He wanted his website to be the biggest and the best, but had little of the patience that was needed to build it. Like in television, where he had made his name and his money, he wanted the website up and running in an instant. He was often unreasonable and sometimes obnoxious. But he allowed us to play cricket in the office and was generous with his whisky.

Late evenings were boisterous when he was around. The conference room which he used as his office would resonate with loud laughter and Mark's berating of the canteen boy because the office refrigerator had run out of ice, which it invariably did.

The cricket world will not judge Mark for the failure of total-cricket.com or Cricket Talk magazine, in which he invested a large amount of his own money, but for the way he transformed the marketing of cricket in India and the subcontinent. India had already co-hosted the World Cup in 1987 but the 1996 World Cup marked a watershed. Mark, till then a fringe player in the American sports TV business, advanced $2.5m US to the Indian cricket board for the television rights to the World Cup. In 1993, this was an unheard-of sum. He brought with him the kind of sophistication Indian viewers had only seen on Channel 9 from Australia. Bedazzled, advertisers queued up. Mark had taken the gamble of his life and had been rewarded.

But Mark didn't wait for the rewards. Even before the World Cup, he had taken a still more audacious gamble in signing up Tendulkar for $10m for a period of five years. The contract made Tendulkar, not yet the superstar he is today, the richest cricketer in the world, but it could have bankrupted Mark's company, WorldTel. Four years later, they signed another contract, this time worth at least five times more.

But marketing is a double-edged sword. It made cricket even more glamorous in India, brought in new fans by the million and turned India, with the largest captive television audience in the world, into a cricket superpower. But it also brought a shameless proliferation of one-day cricket, allowed the game to become increasingly meaningless, and made the subcontinent the perfect breeding ground for match-fixing.

Mark himself got embroiled in several controversies, the main one being the fixing of television rights for the mini World Cup in Dhaka in 1998. Charges were never proved, but whispers persisted. Personally, what hurt him more were his rumoured links with bookies in Sharjah.

To those who know the ways of government-run organisations, the idea of impropriety in television rights was not implausible, but to be fair to Mark, he gave his editorial staff complete freedom to pursue the match-fixing investigations and urged them to get to the bottom of it. Above all, he was a passionate cricket fan. Behind all the bluster lay a childlike adoration for cricket and cricketers, which included staying up all night in his Connecticut home to watch Tendulkar bat.

He enjoyed the company of cricketers and revelled in the limelight that his proximity to the game brought him. He was an ostentatious man and a garrulous one, who liked to flaunt his clout. Money meant a great deal to him, and status even more. Would he really have compromised it for shady profits from bookmakers? I doubt it. His death has robbed cricket of a major player.

Sambit Bal is editor of Wisden.com India and of Wisden Asia Cricket magazine. His column appears every Monday.

More Sambit Bal
India needs to sack 50 umpires

World Cup no-hopers

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd