'Remember Jonty Rhodes' catches? That happens 15 times in an Ultimate Kho Kho match': CEO Tenzing Niyogi

Remember that famous run out inflicted by Jonty Rhodes in the 1992 World Cup? He sprinted from backward point to collect the ball as Inzamam ul Haq hesitantly looked for a single in that rain marred Gabba encounter, dived full stretch in an absolute moment of athleticism and broke the stumps before the Pakistan batter could make his way back in.

It was among the first ever glimpses of Rhodes and his stellar fielding abilities. Moments as such remained engraved in the minds of ardent cricket followers, given the rarity of it back in the 90s. However, with rising stress on fitness and the demands of fast paced T20 cricket, such sightings have become more fairly frequent in a tournament or a series and they most certainly makes the highlight reels for sure.

But what if you were introduced to a sport filled with such moments of stunning athleticism and fast paced action every five minutes? Chennai Quick Guns' Ramji Kashyap (L) in action during 2023 24 Ultimate Kho Kho "If you want a clear understanding, take your dinner and sit in front of the TV at 7:30 pm when the match begins and try and put a spoon into your mouth when the match is on", Ultimate Kho Kho league CEO Tenzing Niyogi smiled.

"I call Kho Kho the ice cream meltor. It is so engaging that you won't be able to have that scoop of ice cream." Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Speaking to Hindustan Times Digital exclusively, Niyogi recalled how he conceptualised and successfully executed Ultimate Kho Kho over a stretch of two seasons so far while also mentioning the financial hurdles he overcame, the continued struggle of finding the right window in a calendar year and the road ahead with a women's league.

Here are excerpts… Q) How has season two been so far? It has been great. I think the kind of responses that we've been getting...fabulous new social media numbers have come in. We've reached close to about 50 million views on social media in just two weeks. I think the format has been appreciated nationally.

More importantly, I think what has happened is the gameplay has improved from a player standpoint and franchisee competition. The tournament saw heroes being built up last year in the shape and form of Aniket Pote or Pratik Waikar, Ramji Kashyap...these were big names and they were instead sort of emerging names the previous year.

And this year, they've got their own fan falling on the ground. Q) The previous season was entirely held in Maharashtra, but this time it's being held in Cuttack. Any reason for this venue change? The way it has worked out is because the Odisha government has supported us. In fact, the Odisha government owns a franchisee as well.

So there was a request from the honourable Chief Minister last year when we were here for the felicitation on whether we could conduct the second season in Odisha under the sports Odisha banner. We are nothing but grateful to CM Naveen Patnaik for his unparalleled support and assurance to make Ultimate Kho Kho a sporting spectrum for the fans and all the stakeholders.

And also the fact that it is one of the more significant sporting hubs in India. The government supports it from an on ground marketing standpoint to ensure that crowds are coming in and watching it every day. Q) What inspired Ultimate Kho Kho? This story began in 2018. There were a lot of sports leagues between 2014 and 2018, close to about, I would reckon, 10 12 leagues.

Some of them stayed for a year or two and then fizzled out. So, there was sort of an internal urge to create and build something on my own. That's where we were dabbling, and one of my colleagues suggested, 'How about Kho Kho?' It just rang a bell because the sport had all the prerequisites and all the success factors which I was seeing in a sporting league to get successful because I was dabbling with multiple other sports league business models per se, from a financial model standpoint, as advisory services.

So I put all the best practices and then realised that Kho Kho had a team format, fast paced gameplay, a sport which has been culturally and deeply rooted in the Indian scenario, and it has carried that vibrant sports culture in itself as a sporting discipline. The population of players in Kho Kho was humongous.

Ultimate Kho Kho league CEO Tenzing Niyogi Then, a subplot to that was that both genders were playing Kho Kho. That was a considerable impactful moment for me to sort of start believing in this sport that, yes, we can make something out of it because more women have played Kho Kho than men over the last 60 70 years.

Then the journey began where I structured the deal between the Kho Kho Federation of India (KKFI) and my primary investor, Amit Burman, chairman of Dabur, although this was his personal investment. I struck that deal between the two parties. That's how Ultimate Kho Kho was born. Kho Kho as a sport is full of antics, drama, action and humongous spectacle value on air and the ground because of the skydive that happens, where these athletes just cling themselves in the air and then go and tag the other person.

Do you remember Jonty Rhodes in the 1990s and the kind of catches he used to take? That happens every 90 seconds. Every 90 seconds! These players are absolutely airborne, close to about a metre and a half in the air to tag the other person. Then there is something called the bowl dive, which is where they throw their chest to the pole and try to tag the other person by pivoting their body.

These two images were sort of ingrained in my mind. So when we started deciding on the logo and the name, we said let's pick up the skydive as our motive and move ahead because we wanted to relate that with the younger India. It was about taking a leap of faith. It was about younger India looking at quick, snackable content, which was inspirational, trying to move ahead, make a mark for themselves, and have a point of view of their own.

There were multiple factors which excited us to build that logo. So we created the flying man with splinters going ahead, going at the back, because the force of the fling and the skydiver went so fast that the dirt in the body went backwards because of fundamental physics. That's how we created our tagline, ' India mar chalang '.

Here ' chalang ' is basically taking the lead to the next phase of life. And then this had to be the ultimate property. I don't think any other English word supersedes 'ultimate'. So we said, 'Ultimate Kho Kho sounds fantastic. Season one was a spectacle in itself. It became the third largest non cricketing sports league in India in our first season itself.

Got all the big boys on the table as stakeholders. We also got great broadcast with Sony across seven channels, plus the OTT offering not behind the paywall, so that our distribution reach goes to the maximum from a second screen standpoint. The television product is built in such a fashion that we wrap up a match within 40 minutes of gameplay.

The rest of the 20 minutes includes advertisements, programming, super slow motions, and analysis, which is done with lot of graphics. How many times do you see a flying catch happening in cricket? There are close to about 10 15 skydives of such fashion in one single match. So in a span of 40 minutes, you've got 15 such picture perfect instances.

Q) I read an interview which mentioned that broadcasters initially laughed off the idea of the Pro Kabaddi League. Did something similar happen to you as well with the Ultimate Kho Kho league concept? Well, kudos to Charu Sharma and Anand Mahindra, who took PKL through, built it out and saw value in it.

The rest is history. But in my case, Kho Kho was something which I conceptualised. By then, PKL was 4 5 seasons old. So there was a bit of a buzz around what other sports could do. I personally always believe that the non cricketing genre has massive potential in India, where you are catering to 1.6 billion people.

Not everyone will follow just one sport. Look at how overseas football has grown in terms of TV viewership. So there was enough and more room for a sports league to be created. So when I went to Amit for the first time with the UKK and the business plan, I didn't get any sort of pushback. I think we were in that particular phase in the Indian sporting growth journey where people were taking non cricketing sports a bit more seriously.

Q) Could you outline the popularity of Kho Kho in metropolitan cities? How do we decide what is popular and what is not? In my mind, I believe that's a pretty generic statement. In Maharashtra, for example, the Mumbai Pune are, which I would consider tier one, there are close to about 200 300 Kho Kho.

A small tournament in Pune will have 55 60 teams participating, both boys and girls. In West Bengal and Karnataka, it is enormous. Bangalore was rather a surprise market for us last year. We did not expect that television viewership would rise in Karnataka. So it is actually huge. It depends on what we are comparing it with.

You cannot compare it with cricket. That is a different volume altogether in India. It's no more a sport. IPL is a mammoth product. But if I compare it with any other sport, I think Kho Kho has been fairly deep rooted, even in tier one cities primarily. Last year in our broadcast report, we saw that a considerable population saw Ultimate Kho Kho from tier one cities, and we had a 59 41 split in favour of women and men who were watching, who were primarily from the 18 to 35 age group.

I, too, believed initially that Kho Kho is a more tier two, tier three kind of sport. But when the data was shown on TV, it surprised us because we were reaching out to metropolitan cities. And the reason maybe is because of the way we have produced the product, the television production is absolutely world class with the usage of light, spidey camera, 18 camera shoot, different angles which Indian audience has never seen in their life.

Q) How difficult was getting sponsors? How about financial sustainability or commercial challenges? It has been a roller coaster ride. And not only for us but for every other league today, barring cricket. The market is difficult. That is why we have taken some conscious decisions in terms of keeping our title sponsor with us.

We have not gone ahead and sold that out. Other sponsors are on the barter side of the story. But what I believe is that the sports league needs to sort of develop and get its outreach first. The footprint reaches out from a distribution standpoint. So TV and OTT and social media basically gives you that right.

Eventually, season three onwards is what I believe when the actual big sponsorship values. Q) You mentioned earlier that India has about 10 15 sports leagues, which fizzled out after a year or two. So, what exactly does it take for a sports league to work successfully? I don't think that every sport can become a league.

It needs to have the speed of play to be appreciated over on television. It should have the stickiness in the sport itself that can capture the audience's imagination. Another factor is that the sport should be very easily understood by people and the market so that there is no brain application as to what is happening.

It should look beautiful and effortless to understand as far as the rules and the point system are considered. Number three, an absolutely foolproof, sustainable business model has to be presented to the management, which is all the stakeholders. So whether it is the broadcaster, whether it is all the team owners.

A sustainable business model should ideally be a low cost model to start off with. A cricket league can take the risk of charging a premium. But non cricketing sports leagues have to be at a model cost value, price value, which is sort of appreciated and appeals to the buyer, which could be the team owner, and then it has to be spread across a long term period, maybe 10 or 20 years.

And if you have that sort of a business model, where to just add another feather to this conversation is that the media rights is very critical. So we were very aware of the fact that we will be partnering with the broadcaster on a revenue share, but we will not be giving away equity to any broadcaster because we believe that Ultimate Kho Kho is the next big thing, which it is proving itself to be.

However, going forward, we would like to explore media rights commercialisation, which effectively means that no broadcaster owns any equity. In our case, then all broadcasters will come and bid for us. So we purposely stayed away from giving away any equity. So today we are on our own, and we've raised a series A funding, which gives us an opportunity to spread our wings and then apply to season three and season four, which also, incidentally, makes us the first sports league ever in India to reach a PE round, which is basically bringing value back to our stakeholders, because now we have an absolute value in terms of evaluation.

And then what is happening is the broadcasters, all the broadcasters, whether the merger happens between Star and Jio or Sony, we don't know what the future holds. But whatever the case may be, we will keep ourselves clean, to be available for media rights exploitation. Q) With so many sports leagues already happening in a calendar year, is it difficult to find a window? It is challenging because IPL has already taken the March to May window.

Then there are other leagues. So we are still exploring as to which window works for us the best. Last year, we did it in August. This year we had to look into this window (December January). But then, truth be told, with the kind of growth that the Indian sports ecosystem is witnessing currently, there is bound to be an overlapping of sports leagues on the broadcast.

It will only get more difficult going forward. And this is what makes me believe that whatever I said about hero building and defining your own fan following becomes imperative. Then what happens is that whatever window the broadcaster slots in you, you are assured of that fan following and viewership, whether or not you're clashing with any other leagues.

I believe that somewhere down the line going forward in the Indian sporting ecosystem, there will be 3 to 4 leagues, or five probably, which will sustain and see the light at the end of the time. And they will all be very different looking properties because the audience also wants to see something different in terms of sport.

Yes cricket is the religion in India, but I do believe that there is an overdose of the particular sport. That is why women's cricket has also engaged so many audiences, because then it is slightly different than men's. The change makes the sport look very different. So I think going forward, there will be a lot of consumers who will be looking at other sporting properties.

Q) You talked about Kho Kho being more prevalent among women than men. So will season three have a women's division? I can tell you that there's a lot of work going on with developing our women's league. I can't give an exact timeline as to when we will be launching it, but I can certainly tell you that it is in the offering.

The reason why we are very confident about it is, again, because of the population of players. Everything in any sport across the world stems from this one fact: do we have players who play the sport? And do we have players who can play the sport at the highest level? In Kho Kho, it is huge in the women's division.

Nasreen Shaikh (Indian women's Kho Kho team captain) just received the Arjuna Award. In state tournaments, participation of women is top notch. We are very confident that whenever the league comes out, it will be a huge success. That also sort of reiterates the fact that we already have 3 4 buyers for the teams of the women's league.

That basically brings us back to the same point that you asked me earlier, the previous question, the window in the broadcast. So if we add a women's league, it will elongate the duration of the broadcast. Also, we plan to add more teams in Ultimate Kho Kho. We've got 12 to 14 corporate entities, blue chip companies, Silicon Valley Investors who have been interested in buying a franchise.

So we will be adding two more new teams, which essentially means if we go to eight teams, then the number of matches will go up from 34 to 60, thus making it a 35 day league. Catch all the Latest World Cup news and Live score along with India vs Australia Live Score and World Cup Schedule related updates on Hindustan Times Website and APPs SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Share this article Share Via Copy Link Sports.