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When Toronto Raptors won their first NBA championship in 2018, Bhatia not only became the first fan ever to receive an official championship ring, but also led a parade of 80,000 as Grand Marshal.Ī year later, he also became the first fan to be inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame. I'm treated like one of the players, one of the members of the family and it's amazing,” he adds. If your players are playing, you don't leave till the referees leave in the tunnel. “I stayed there till the end because that's not respectful. But not me,” says Bhatia, who was given official ‘Superfan’ title by Raptors’ general manager Isiah Thomas in 1998. There were times when Raptors were losing 30 points in the last quarter and everybody was getting up and leaving. There were times where there were only 4,000 people in the arena.
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“It was tough, but you know I'm a Sikh, we are loyal people. Raptors would seldom win but Bhatia never left his seat until the game was over. Since then he hasn’t missed a single home game. You forget about everything,” Bhatia says. But on the very first day I fell in love. “I said ‘I'm going to try for one season, and if I like it, I'll keep it, if I don't, I'm not going to renew it’.
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When Toronto Raptors became the NBA’s 28th franchise in 1995, Bhatia bought a season ticket. So, I decided to give it a try and I fell in love. Being in a car business, perhaps it’s not difficult to understand that he likes speed. Cricket wasn’t (and isn’t) big in Canada and he used to watch basketball on television. “And the rest is all history,” Bhatia says, adding, “Now, I own 5 dealerships (including the one that hired him as general manager), and have 270 employees.”įinancial security gave Bhatia some breathing space time and energy to look for some entertainment. He hired an entirely new staff and turned the dealership into one of the largest in Canada. On the first of his new job, he faced another “speed bump” as all but one of the employees resigned en masse, refusing to work under him.
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His success as a car salesman got him hired by a different, bigger dealership as general manager. And it's still a record,” Bhatia says proudly. I sold 127 cars in three months and it was a record at that time. “I knew that I had to be better than good if I wanted to survive in that environment. He kept his head down and focused on his work. You may call it discrimination, but I prefer to call them speed bumps,” Bhatia recalls the days when other employees used to mock him as “underwear”, “diaperhead” and “towelhead”. When he started his sales job, he faced discrimination. Eventually, he settled for a car salesman job in what he calls “the rough part of the town”. To survive, he did all sorts of odd jobs, from cleaning people’s homes and washrooms to landscaping. “Nobody wanted to hire a guy with a long beard and turban,” Bhatia says. Despite having a mechanical engineering degree, he couldn’t find a stable job. It forced Bhatia to leave India and move to Canada with his wife.Īlthough he was safe, life wasn’t easy in Canada initially. In Delhi especially, a lot of Sikhs were killed and there was no safe place,” Bhatia recalls. “It was the darkest period for any Sikh in India. He went to California, US, to study mechanical engineering and returned to India to help manage his family’s business.Ĭircumstances, however, changed in 1984 as the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi triggered the anti-Sikh riots, which were the most severe in Delhi and its surrounding areas. He did his schooling from Mother’s International School near Hauz Khas, New Delhi, and graduation from DAV College in Jalandar, Punjab. “But in comparison to Covid-19, nothing is more agonizing because that's much more important to fight against than this thing (ceremony),” says Bhatia, who is proud of his Sikh brethren in India for their exemplary relief work during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.īhatia was born and raised in Delhi. The wait was agonizing as he couldn’t tell anyone about his biggest achievement. The enshrinement ceremony was supposed to happen in September 2020 but because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was postponed to 2021. “But I later found out that it was true.” Don't make any jokes about it’,” he says. “I told him (his manager) not to screw around with me. Bhatia was made aware of his NBA honour last year in February but he could not believe it.