Jennifer Capriati was 13 when she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. By 16 she had an Olympic gold medal. By 18 she was in rehabilitation and had spoken to the New York Times about wanting to take her own life.
Andrea Jaeger was the world No. 2 at 16 and retired at 21 with a destroyed shoulder, carrying for decades the memory of being mistreated in a professional environment where no one seemed clearly responsible for protecting her.
Tracy Austin won the US Open at 16 and was finished as a major force before she could legally drink.
These are not footnotes in sporting history. They are warnings.
They are also the reason the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) in 1994 introduced what became known as the Capriati Rules, age-based guidelines that, among other things, limited how much professional tennis a player under the age of 18 could play in a calendar year. Tennis waited for its catastrophe before it built its protections. Cricket may be living through the opening chapter of its own version of the same story.
What we are seeing in Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is not simply a talented boy playing above his age. It is something cricket has genuinely never had to deal with before - namely, a child placed at the centre of one of the most commercially powerful, globally visible and socially amplified sporting environments ever created: Indian cricket and the IPL. Cricket has seen prodigies. It has seen young players arrive early and carry labels they did not ask for. But it has not seen this precise combination before, of innocence, extraordinary gift, and a social media world that has abolished nearly every distance between a child and the opinions of hundreds of millions. Sooryavanshi is 15, living a life that is not proceeding at the ordinary pace of growing up. This needs careful consideration before it is too late.
T20 cricket rewards what young players bring naturally - fearlessness, aggression, and a mind uncomplicated by doubt. Test cricket is no longer their first choice; the rewards on offer there are significantly less. Some of them may be ready for the cricket. That does not mean they are ready for everything around the cricket. Sooryavanshi is the first sign of what's coming.
I have a small personal sense of what an early label feels like. I broke Graeme Pollock's record as the youngest South African to score a first-class century at 16 and was immediately called the new Graeme Pollock. In hindsight, that accomplishment and the comparison that followed, did far more harm than good. It gave other people a story about me before I had been given enough time to understand my own.
Luckily in that context, I played in an isolated South Africa, in an era when the wider cricket world knew little of us and when the noise between a young cricketer and public opinion had natural limits, even at home. The newspaper came the next morning. The radio discussion ended. There were gaps in which to breathe, to be unknown, to have a poor day. Today's newspaper was tomorrow's fish-and-chips paper, they used to say.
Sooryavanshi has no such gaps.
Sachin Tendulkar debuted at 16 against Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Imran Khan, and the scrutiny on him was enormous by the standards of that time. But it still arrived through journalism. It was mediated by editors, slowed by the natural pace of the media as it was then, and filtered by people who carried at least some professional responsibility.
That mediation no longer exists. Every innings, every press conference, every gesture, every failure, every heated on-field moment - and Sooryavanshi has already been part of such a moment - can be clipped, uploaded and judged within minutes by people who answer to no one.
The crowd used to leave the stadium at the end of the day. Now it never really leaves at all.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. Developmental psychology teaches us that childhood is where a person builds a sense of who they are, independent of performance and independent of what other people need them to be. Child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called it identity formation. He also had a word for what can happen when that process is interrupted too early and a single role is assigned before the young person has had the chance to explore anything else. He called it foreclosure - a door closed before the person inside has had the chance to look around the room.
Sooryavanshi's door has closed very early. His identity has been decided for him by his own gift, the most involuntary thing a person can possess, before he has had much chance to explore alternatives. That is the quiet sadness beneath all the celebration.
Greatness at 15 does not wait politely while the person catches up. It sets a frame. It fixes an image in the public mind. Everything that follows, the mistakes, the growing up, the confusion, the disappointment, the ordinary human work of becoming yourself, has to happen inside that frame. The boy becomes the legend before he has had the chance simply to become a man.
That is why we need to go softly with him. Not because he is fragile in the sense in which people sometimes use that word, dismissively, but because he is young. Because the bat speed may look adult, the courage may look adult, the market value may look adult, but the person carrying all of it is still 15.
History should make us humble here. The WTA did not respond to its broken child stars by asking people to care more. It passed rules that worked regardless of how much anyone cared, because it had learned painfully, and too late, that goodwill and commercial interest cannot be left to find their own balance where children are concerned.
Cricket has not built those safeguards yet. It has no clear structural mechanism, independent of its commercial interests, whose explicit mandate is to protect the long-term well-being of a minor inside the professional game.
Everyone will say they are doing what is best for Sooryavanshi. Most will mean it. His family will love him and travel with him. His coaches will care. His franchise will speak of development. The BCCI will tell us they have a plan. But none of that is the same as protection. Care matters but it's not enough.
Cricket does not need to wait for its own Capriati moment. The evidence already exists. The question is whether the game will act while there is still time to act wisely, or whether it will one day find itself passing a set of protections we come to call the Sooryavanshi Rules, because it waited until a name was needed.
In my view - and I say this with care rather than judgement - he should be at home preparing for his exams, playing gully cricket with his mates, and being a young boy while he still has the chance. That does not mean ignoring his talent. It means understanding that the talent will only be truly served if the person carrying it is allowed to grow whole and he is physically allowed to develop without the risk of premature injuries.
What we should hope for is that he retires at 40 and not washed up at 25. That's another 25 years of him! We should hope that his talent becomes something he inhabits on his own terms, rather than something that inhabits him. We should hope there are still parts of his life in which he can be ordinary and unobserved, in which he can fail quietly, laugh freely, finish his studies, play without a camera nearby, and digest all of what's happening, in the quietness of his home and among his family and friends. The best chance of that happening is in the next three years. They should be about him, not cricket. Is that too much to ask?
Sooryavanshi's talent is a remarkable thing. What would be more remarkable is a complete life on the other side of it and a man who carried the gift all the way through and arrived whole at the far end. The long game is about when the batting is finished, and that person is being built right now, whether cricket is paying attention or not. And there is only one chance at it.
It is my sincere hope that he will turn to Tendulkar for guidance. He could not be more lucky than to have a mentor in a fellow Indian cricketer who has been through it all and seen it all, and who will have his best interests at heart.