A cheesy line from Love Story, that must-read for teenage lovers, goes, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ And one need not ask what’s love got to do with Sheikh Abdul Rahman Bukhatir’s coming to India this week. “I love the game. I cannot imagine people not being able to watch it,” he tells you over the phone from Dubai. And he, in the tradition set by Erich Segal’s love-struck characters, didn’t want to say he was sorry.

Consider the Ten Sports chief’s simple statement on landing in New Delhi. “I have no intention of blocking the telecast to the people of India.” There. And in a jiffy, everything falls into place. Never mind court decisions, negotiations, coughing up that Rs 50-crore compensation. It’s Bukhatir who makes sure everyone witnesses India, shining or not.

But then, as the sages say, you just can’t please everybody. So Bukhatir decided to act for the greater common good. And he says he will continue to do so in the way of an out-of-court settlement, come April 15 and the end of the cricket madness. If Doordarshan (DD) gets to show all the matches, Ten Sports gets its logo and ads transmitted to 80 million plus homes.

But Ten Sports hadn’t bargained for this. Bukhatir, the visionary, had it all worked out. His channel, Ten Sports, would gain all the mileage it could from the historic Indo-Pak Samsung Cup. He had paid almost Rs 60 crore for the rights and expected to get Rs 130 crore back. For this was the series that was to have made Ten Sports a household name in India.

When Bukhatir’s television company was launched in March 2001, it was all set to be the most professionally managed sports channel of all time. The Sheikh hired 100 of the best pros in the business, got a state-of-the-art steel and chrome building erected in Dubai’s happening Media City, and delegated work to his men and women. They didn’t disappoint. Within a month of its launch, the channel had bagged the football World Cup telecast rights and gone from a free to a pay channel.

This time it was different. For one, it was cricket. And then, it was between India and Pakistan. Bukhatir, self-admittedly, had waited all his life for an opportunity like this. And he wasn’t going to let go of it so easily.

It’s always been cricket for Bukhatir. As a student in Karachi, where his grandfather was a pearl merchant, he played the game in school. “And I must say I played some very good cricket then,” he recalls. However, the people of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he came from, didn’t even know how ‘kirkhait’ was pronounced, let alone how it was played.

After Bukhatir returned to Dubai, he decided to build his own stadium in the desert. “Everyone called me mad,” the Sheikh recalls.

But Bukhatir proved them wrong. He collected about $2 million and went about turning a barren piece of desert near Dubai into a lush green turf. Synthetic grass, tons of soil trucked down from faraway lands, a few stands and a couple of tents — and the Sharjah Cricket Association Stadium was born in 1981. It took another three years to make the ground playable.With Pakistan ex-captain Asif Iqbal as manager, the Cricketers’ Benefit Fund Series was born in 1984.

It took some time for the place to pick up. Gradually, Sharjah became the place to be seen at. The Indo-Pak rivalry was whetted, and the high-voltage matches played there are talked about even today. Bukhatir knew his business. He rolled out the red carpet to welcome the fussy Ian Botham, who had once declined to play in India. For the glamour quotient, he flew in film stars from Mumbai. Soon, everyone who was anyone in the cricketing world had played at Sharjah. And the Sheikh’s efforts got the UAE — which didn’t even have a team until recently — a place as an associate member with the International Cricket Council.

Bukhatir next concentrated on bringing cricket to Africa by building a stadium in Tangiers, Morocco. But then, life can’t just be a bed of roses — even in a transmogrified desert. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) blacklisted Sharjah and Morocco as venues. And Bukhatir doesn’t have a good word for former Board president I.S. Bindra. “It was politics within the Indian Board (that led to this move). He made scapegoats of us.”

Bukhatir relentlessly promoted the game, for cricket obviously came first for the soft-spoken Arab. Countries which were not part of a tournament were, in those days, reluctant to broadcast the matches. “We had to pay broadcasters to show the matches. I can say I have made the game a TV sport. And look at what I have had to face now,” Bukhatir laments.

There is, clearly, a lot that has to be resolved. Lalit Modi, head honcho of Modi Entertainment Network, the distributors of the channel, will have his pound of flesh. “We will claim damages worth Rs 208 crore from DD,” he warned on Wednesday. Bukhatir admits he was banking on this series to see his channel through financially. “It is important for a series like this to help us get returns. Thanks to the fiasco, we’ve lost that too,” he says.

He still wishes that Indo-Pak cricket would return to Sharjah. But, says BCCI president Jagmohan Dalmiya: “Who is Bukhatir to ask us to resume cricket in Sharjah?”

Bukhatir is unfazed. “It was a TV controversy that took Indo-Pak cricket away from Sharjah. It was another such controversy that threatened to take it away from the Indian people this time,” he says. Till he stepped in, that is. And, as a series of magnificent shots lit up the fag-end of India’s game on Friday, they were blessing him in some 80 million homes.