‘Shah Rukh Khan was devastated when Mumbai crowd booed him after KKR lost’: SRK was heartbroken when he let his audience down | Bollywood News

Shah Rukh Khan was over the moon when he first bought the IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders during the inaugural season in 2008, and while he hoped that his cricket franchise would be a winner from the start, the reality was starkly different as KKR struggled in those initial seasons. The team has now won three IPL titles but SRK went through an emotional upheaval in trying to turn it into a winning team. In a 2014 documentary titled Living with KKR, Shah Rukh recalled getting booed at cricket stadiums which was a shocking experience for him as he had never seen this kind of hate from his audience.
In the documentary, SRK shared that he did not want to be a part of IPL for any kind of “personal success” and felt that it brought a lot of negative energy in his life. He shared, “I have never wanted to be a part of IPL for personal success. As a matter of fact, I think, maybe, it lends to negatives in my career. I had never been booed in a stadium. I can walk into a crowd of a lakh people, sling a guitar around my neck and people would cheer me on. Sometimes, I go to stadiums here where I am booed and I think is this the same country where I am a big movie star?”
Joy Bhattacharjya, who was a Team Director at KKR during this time, spoke about a match between KKR and MI (Mumbai Indians) in 2008 at Wankhede Stadium, where Shah Rukh was booed the crowd. “He wasn’t devastated because we lost, but because of the way the city he had adopted, and been a part of for 20 years, the way they booed him,” he said.
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Sports journal Gautam Bhattacharya recalled that Shah Rukh requested his team to win this particular match. “He said, ‘In Mumbai, they call me king, I have never asked anything from you guys, please win this match for me’,” he recalled, but despite this pep-talk, the team ended up losing. Shah Rukh was also disappointed, and said, “I like to believe that in my line of work, I have never let down an audience and for the first time in my life, it was like, ‘Are we letting down people?’”