When the bat meant more than money: Rahul Dravid turned down blank cheques, never charged a penny

When blank cheques are being offered to IPL sensation Vaibhav Sooryavanshi for bat and equipment sponsorships, former Indian captain and coach Rahul Dravid took a very different path during the peak of his playing career.

Sources told CricBlogger that from 1998 to 2011, Dravid did not charge a single penny from leading cricket equipment manufacturer Sanspareils Greenlands (SG). While he had a primary bat sponsorship deal with an FMCG company, he continued to use an SG bat, carrying the familiar round SG logo at the bottom of the spine and SG stickers on the edges.

Sources also said that Dravid used SG’s protective gear — pads, gloves, inners and thigh guards — without accepting any endorsement fee from the company.

It was an era when players were beginning to cash in heavily on commercial deals. For instance, MS Dhoni earned around ₹4 crore annually through equipment, apparel and footwear endorsements. Dravid, however, turned down lucrative offers, including some worth five times more than his existing arrangements with two sponsors, and remained loyal to SG.

The reason was simple: Dravid believed SG made the best bats for the demands of international cricket. For a batsman whose reputation was built on marathon innings and unwavering consistency, performance mattered more than the size of the cheque.

“Generally, top players have combined equipment deals with bat manufacturers, tyre companies and other brands, while many are also compensated separately for using soft-leather gear from companies like SG. But Dravid was a class apart,” a source said.

It is also learnt that Dravid began receiving some payment from SG after the company started prominently displaying its logos on his equipment in 2011, and continued to do so until the end of his IPL career. Even then, the money he earned from SG over those five years was significantly less than what he could have made in just a couple of years elsewhere. Such was Dravid’s commitment to quality over commercial gain.