For most people who come to tank up their vehicles at the Centre Half in the capital’s busy Sadiq Nagar area, the petrol pump’s lineage is of no interest. The owner of the filling station, Ajit Pal Singh, isn’t on the guest list of the usual do’s that Delhi’s glitterati flock to every weekend for the wine and the visibility. In the congregation of business scions, whisky and cigar aficionados, paid pretty young things and the latest cricket heart throbs, there is no space for the man who captained India to the top of the hockey world 34 years ago. In fact, barring the non-descript petrol station, there is little anywhere to honour the man.
Nor is he the only unknown in this world of instant stars and style icons. Take Surjit Singh, a name that most Indians would not know from the next guy on the street. Barring the serious followers of hockey, even the committed Indian sports fan would be hard put to put a face or sport to the name. Yet on a rainy day in Kuala Lumpur in March 1975 the burly 24-year old Sikh, already rated one of the best full-backs in the game, stepped up to take the penalty corner in the finals versus Pakistan and created history. His rasping drive blew the net and helped India to its most important international title outside the cricket World Cup in 1983. Two years ago his compatriot B.P. Govinda had choked at the critical moment in the finals against Holland, muffing a penalty stroke that would have clinched the title. But Surjit, even at 24, kept his composure in part because he had already been playing at the highest level for the last 3 years and also because Indian players had still not been burdened by the spectre of failure which has been the lot of subsequent generations. Hockey was then a favored child of the country and despite recent setbacks Indian hockey was formidable enough to be among the favourites for the 3rd edition of the World Cup after having lost the second edition narrowly to hosts Holland.
But it was to be a pyrrhic victory for it masked the ills that had been dogging the running of the game for years. And while that one moment was evanescent, it was to be the last hurrah of the dying gladiator. Within a year the world champions were to come crashing down, never to rise again.
The 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal was when a young Romanian girl held the world in thrall with her performance on the gymnastics floor. It was also the year when India’s national sport went into a free fall, never to rise again to its pristine glory. The country which till then had been a shoo-in for a medal, could never again qualify for even the semi finals of a tournament which in many ways it had come to dominate. The precipitous fall that began at a time when the nation itself was going through a crisis of identity (with democratic rights suspended under the Emergency) culminated in its failure to qualify for the Beijing Olympics in 2007. No longer would the country figure in the Ranking of Top 10 teams in the world according to the FIH – Germany, Australia, Spain, Netherlands, South Korea, Pakistan, England, New Zealand, Belgium and Argentina.
The fall from grace was alarming and so steep as to leave the entire hockey class grasping for answers. From the high of 1975 to the low of 1976 was a period of barely 10 months. So which was the flash in the pan – the world title or the 7th place finish in Montreal? Perhaps neither and therein lies the story of Indian hockey. The defeats in the 1976 Olympics, with more or less the same team that had played so brilliantly a year ago broke the back of the team. Confused, hapless, left largely to their own devices, the players lived their own private hells, knowing they had let down an entire country and wasted an inheritance. It was as if they were living in constant fear of failure and the humiliation it brought in its wake. The morning papers told them what the country thought of them, their reputations in tatters and ultimately most succumbed and gave up, never to return to what had been their raison de’tre.
Vitally, once the myth of invincibility surrounding Asian hockey was broken, European nations moved in for the kill. The astro turfs, the changing rules of the game, the process of replacing skill with speed, all added to the eclipse of traditional hockey. Gone are the artistry and the magic of dribbling. The game is now driven by power and speed. The dreaded penalty corner is tailor made for the bigger, powerful Europeans who went about the task of dismantling the so-called Asian system of hockey scientifically and methodically. At the forefront of this putsch were European coaches, led by academicians like Horst Wein who worked on strategies to counter the 5-3-2 system and by the mid-1970s, a pattern of play – total hockey – had been evolved that left the Asians in particularly the Indians standing. And when in 1976 the diktat came leading to the introduction of synthetic pitches, Indian hockey’s final-nail in the coffin had been cast.
One consequence of this decline of Indian hockey has been its reduced role in the administration of the game at the international level. As it is, not one Indian figures on the Executive Board of the FIH. The pattern is the same for all the 10 Committees including the vital Hockey Rules Board, none of which has an Indian at the head. The abolition of the off side rule, the rolling substitutions, all despite protests from the traditionalists have tilted the game decisively in favour of the power merchants from Europe. And apart from some minor league successes, the Indians have proved hopelessly inadequate in changing their traditional style to suit the new game. The inevitable losses have hurt. They’ve been dispiriting for the players, for aspirants, for hockey lovers and for sports fans in general. Why go and waste two hours in a pathetic old stadium with little by way of spectator facilities just to watch your team being whipped when you could be watching our cricketers scoring over the same teams – Australia, England, Pakistan. For a new generation of sports fans hockey as a spectator sport has passed into oblivion.
With rapid urbanization, the traditional rural base of the game has also been seriously eroded. Once upon a time villages like Sansarpur in Punjab were the nurseries where India’s hockey greats took their first promising steps. Beginning with Gurmit Singh who represented India in the 1932 Olympics, the village used to pride itself on its roll of honour of 14 Olympians and over 150 national level players. The famous five of the 1964 and 1968 Olympics – the two Balbir Singhs, Ajit Pal Singh, Tarsem Singh and Jagjit Singh are proud sons of this dusty little village. Players from the village have won eight Olympic gold medals, one silver and six bronze besides medals in the Asian Games and other tournaments. Not any more. The young have no desire to play the game. They would rather watch cricket and emulate the immensely more prosperous and visible Harbhajan Singh. Despite the glory that the hockey stars brought to the village, it has no facilities for hockey and no illusions about the future it offers. No wonder its popularity is on the wane and with that its inducements for the young. There isn’t much of a career playing hockey, so the young stay away.
As opposed to ‘genteel’ cricket, hockey was always the game of the foot soldiers. Introduced by the British, it grew through the army and was very much the poor cousin even at the time that India was a powerhouse. Not being the choice of the princes at English public schools, it never received royal patronage in India. Even the British despite having introduced the game into the country didn’t exercise the kind of suzerainty on the sport in the country that one would expect. In fact, ever since the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam when Anglo Indian Eric Penniger who was born in Sahranpur led the contingent (when the official captain the mysterious Jaipal Singh didn’t play the last pool game as well as the finals), the hockey team was always led by Indians. In the next two Olympics before independence, the team was led by Lala Shah Bokhari and Dhyan Chand. It is interesting that the British introduced both cricket and hockey to India but while it took 20 matches before India beat England in cricket for the first time (in 1952), it took 37 years before England beat India in hockey for the first time (at the 1985 Champions Trophy in Perth).
In a way then hockey also brought with it the pride of the pupil beating the master, the hated colonizer. Every defeat of the British team reinforced that feeling of vengeance. After all, modern field hockey is really an English product, created and honed at schools during the 19th Century, and passed on to the East by way of the British Empire. India did not play internationally until 1926, but at Amsterdam two years later, the country announced its presence in the previously British-controlled sport with aplomb, winning all its games on the way to the Gold.
From those auspicious beginnings it grew to be much more than just a sport. Indeed, for a nation with no tradition or culture of sports unlike its colonial masters, hockey was always a metaphor for something other than sport. War for instance, in games against Pakistan. And collective pride every four years when the tricolour unfolded at the Olympics. The Gold Medal phase in Olympics stretched from 1928 to 1964 (Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Helsinki, Melbourne and Tokyo, with the only exception being the Silver at Rome in 1960). Much like the Americans who ruled Olympic basketball from the initial tournament in 1936 up until the controversial gold-medal loss to the Soviet Union in 1972, India was the hockey supremo of the world. Other, smaller nations could win dozens of gold medals, set world records and achieve new milestones. For India’s hungry millions however, the Olympics were inextricably linked to the fortunes of the ‘men’s’ hockey team.
A win, and there were plenty of those, brought less a collective whoop of euphoria and more a sigh of relief. With the result that each win didn’t, as it should have, plunge the young of the nation into a frenzy of playing the game with the ambition of emulating the Olympians. It is hardly surprising then that the success of 1975 was followed by such debacles as 5th, 7th, 10th, 11th place finish at the last four World Cups along with a 7th, 8th, 7th, 7th finish at the last four Olympics before the singular ignominy of not qualifying for the last Olympics in Beijing.
Indeed, as the successes of the 60s were followed by the losses of the 70s and 80s it was evident that the pool of talented players had been in steady decline despite the exploits on the turf. Look at the stature of the players who starred in the country’s last great international triumph, the World Cup win in 1975. The team’s captain Ajit Pal Singh showed such dexterity and skill at a young age that he was included in the World Hockey Team when he was barely 24. Similarly, full back Surjit Singh, who tragically died in a road accident at the age of 33, was acclaimed as one of the best full backs in the world. In 1973 he was included in the World Hockey XI. Next year he was a member of the All-Star Hockey XI. He was also the top scorer-both in the Esanda International hockey Tournament at Perth in Australia and the 1978 Asian Games. Ashok Kumar, son of the legendary Dhyan Chand and scorer of the winning goal in the finals at Kuala Lumpur was also a member of the World XI and the Asian All Star XI as was B.P. Govinda another member of that same squad of 1975.
Today, as a team struggling to qualify for the major hockey events, usurped even in Asia by first South Korea and now China, we would be hard put to place a single player in any World All Star team. Not surprisingly in the ten years that the FIH introduced annual awards for the best player of the year (much like the FIFA award won by Cristiano Ronaldo this year), not a single Indian player has been among the winners. The list is dominated by players from the world hockey powers Netherlands, Australia and Germany. Even in the juniors section where the Indian team has been much more successful, no Indian player has made it to the top of the world rankings.
Sadly this is happening at a time when the game is far more global than it has ever been in the past. Given its colonial legacy, the biggest surprise today is how far the game has spread outside this catchment area. With teams like China, Argentina, Spain, South Korea besides of course those like Holland and Germany, the game’s colonial beginnings are well in the past. Time was when barely four-five teams squared up against the marauding Indians in international meets like the Olympics. Even those were mostly making up the numbers as scores like the 24-1 game against the US at the 1932 Olympics shows. In the 1932 games in Los Angeles for instance, there were only two other participants – hosts US and Japan. That situation has changed dramatically and today almost 20 teams are in contention for the coveted berths at the Olympics or the Champions Trophy. In fact, outside the elite group of six (Australia, Germany, Holland, Pakistan, South Korea, Spain), just about any team can beat the other on a given day. Thus when the Indian team missed out qualification to the Beijing Olympics, another country – New Zealand – was also agonising over yet another opportunity lost to play in the big league.
So what’s wrong with our hockey set up? In a survey conducted among ex-hockey players by a management school graduate, 66% of the respondents rated the facilities provided for hockey in India as poor to very poor. 34% felt they were average and not one respondent rated them excellent or even good. Another telling response came to the query, ‘have you been encouraged to play hockey during your school/college days?’ Given that all the respondents had played A-level hockey, that 68% should say they hadn’t, is in itself food for thought. Poor facilities, lack of support at the grass root level, corrupt and greedy administrators and little by way of financial rewards – these seem to be the causes for the malaise that has set in over the last 30 years.
The problem with accepting this as the rationale for our fading away in the international arena is the relative success of Pakistan in the same period despite having roughly the same setup as India. In the period of India’s rapid decline, Pakistan has won the World Hockey Cup in four of 11 attempts, the Olympic gold in 1984 as well as the Champions Trophy three times. Sure, the game is in decline across the border as well, lacking as it is in marketing, sponsors and the lack of knowledge about the latest techniques. “The game techniques have been changed with the changing times and we are not aware of new methods of training. In our country, there is no proper system or schedule for organising the hockey tournaments, especially in domestic circuit. The reason is that it is only the Cricket which sells”. That could be a hockey analyst in India but is actually Mohammad Mansoor Ul Haq, coach of hockey club Multan Hockets, consisting of Olympian’s and junior international players. But Pakistan’s decline is relative; it is still among the top 4-5 teams in world hockey and the fact that its lien on the top spot is over, is just a reflection of how well the other nations in particular Australia, Germany and Holland have strengthened their position at the top.
What has played havoc with the game’s growth and the players’ performance is that old bugbear of Indian sport – factionalism and the politics thereof. Lace that with dollops of corruption and the result is what we see before us. The darkest moment in Indian hockey came not when the men’s team failed to qualify for the Olympics last year but when Indian Hockey Federation secretary K. Jothikumaran was caught red-handed on camera demanding and taking a bribe to select a hockey player for the national side. The man who started his career as a lowly-paid clerk had risen to a position of great power in the country’s hockey hierarchy and had clearly been using this position to line his pockets for nearly 15 years. The channel showed Jothikumaran receiving Rs 2 lakh and claimed that after 4-5 days he confirmed the selection of the player in the list of probables for Azlan Shah Cup tournament.
Clearly it wasn’t the first time this was happening. Later, former hockey star Dhanraj Pillay recounted how Jothikumaran had selected a certain Adam Sinclair to play in the 2004 Athens Olympic. He claimed that Sinclair did not know how to hit the ball and coach Gerard Rach taught him thrice a day the basics of the game.
What made this one-time obscure hockey player who worked as a clerk with the State Bank of India such a monster? His rise to power in IHF has been phenomenal and he became the second-most powerful man in Indian hockey. Former IHF president MAM Ramaswamy favored Jothi’s selection into the hockey officialdom in early 90s. Jothi made much of his good fortune and went on to open a chain of hotels in Madurai. He even supported Gill’s entry into IHF in 1994 and Gill rewarded him with the post of Secretary in the Federation.
Sadly for Indian hockey he is the country’s key man at all international forums, including Indian Olympic Association, Asian Hockey Federation, Asian Games and FIH. In a cruel irony he was also the co-ordinator of FIH’s ‘Revive Indian Hockey’ project.
And while such officials have been gleefully exploiting the system to make huge gains, the players have languished. Tracking the lives of the hundreds of champion players – Olympic winners most of them – is frustrating and very depressing. Members of the national hockey team work for the armed forces, the paramilitary forces, police, railways, airlines, banks and public sector corporations. Nor is this purely the ornamental positioning that some of the cricketers have. These jobs are important and often the only source of income once their playing careers are over even if these are mostly as junior commissioned officers, sub-inspectors, stewards, and clerks. The jobs give them the respectability of joining the vast middle classes. And even this relative prosperity is of recent vintage. Time was when the Indian hockey player, for all his virtuosity, was condemned to a life of poverty.
Take the example of Ahmed Sher Khan the father of Aslam Sher Khan, the man who scored the equalizer against Malaysia in the semi finals of the 1975 World Cup. An Olympian who played alongside the legendary Dhyan Chand in the gold medal winning team in 1936, his legacy to his son was the hockey genes and little else. Brought up in dire poverty, Ahmed Sher Khan left behind a lower middle-income family that lived in a kuchcha mud and brick house. In his autobiography, tellingly titled ‘To Hell With Hockey’, Aslam describes his family’s condition thus: “We had no electricity at home those days, and Amma had to stitch clothes in the weak sickly light of the lantern. I would pretend that I was asleep, but would watch her stitching impassively, her face totally expressionless. In summer, water from the municipal tap came in small rationed doses, allowing my family either the luxury of a bath, or the necessity of storing it for domestic use. Monsoon always brought tears to Amma's eyes. The rain dripped through the tiles drop by drop in a constant rhythm, like Chinese torture. We had no cooking gas, and smoke would billow from the earthern chulha from the wet firewood, smarting her eyes. It was the same at night when we kept moving our beds to avoid the rain drops. I hate the rains till now.” This was the life of a man whose father was an Olympic gold medal winner.
Aslam’s story is not unusual in a nation where achievements in sports count for little. There are many such sad tales. Stricken by poverty and an increasing inability to feed his family, Moscow Olympics hockey gold medallist Sylvanus Dung Dung was forced to look at auctioning his medals to make ends meet. Dung Dung, one of the architects of India's 4-3 victory over Spain in the 1980 Olympic final, couldn’t even find employment as a security guard with a company leave aside the assignment which he wished for – that of a coach of a major team. Having played the Olympics (1980), World Cup (1978) and the Asian Games (1978), Dung Dung is only 44 years old and has a whole life ahead of him and not much by way of hope. And it is not just the players themselves; their families have to suffer as well. After Noel Toppo, who was in the 1966 Asian Games hockey team died, his wife Biswasi had to struggle on her paltry nurse's salary of Rs 700 a month.
The stories are the same. Only the names change. Olympians all, gold medal winners most, languishing in poverty after their playing careers were over. Most died anonymously, their deaths meriting no more than a one line news snippet in the dailies. Shankar Lakshman goalkeeper and captain of the Indian hockey team in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics died in April 2006. A month before his death the people of Mhow were shocked to learn that he was suffering from gangrene in one leg. Doctors suggested amputation. He and his family refused. They opted for alternative therapy. A member of the Olympic gold medal winning hockey team in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the 1958 Asian Games gold medal (Tokyo), 1960 Olympics silver medal (Rome), the 1964 Olympics gold medal (Tokyo) and the 1966 Asian Game Gold medal (Bangkok), he was awarded the Arjuna Award in 1965 and the Padmashri in 1967. And yet post retirement life was a struggle as he led a quiet retired life in Mhow forgotten by even hockey’s officialdom.
Not enough? There is Gopal Bhengra who lives in a house made of mud, straw and wood in a village near Ranchi. As reward for playing for India in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, Bhengra broke stone in a quarry to eke out his meagre existence. Often he would have to catch fish from a dirty pool nearby to supplement his income. His monthly pension: Rs 1,475. When he retired in 1979 from the army he knocked at the doors of ministers, bureaucrats, businessmen. There were no replies. He wrote to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi asking for a peon's job. No one answered. And yet when his two sons wanted to play hockey for India, he wouldn’t stop them. There’s Babu Nimal and Joe Phillips who were part of the gold medal winning hockey team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Govind Perumal who won gold medals in 1952 and 1956. All unknown soldiers who passed away into oblivion.
Even the legendary Dhyan Chand, spent his days after active hockey under severe financial strain. When he died in 1979, India’s disastrous slide had already begun. Yet it hadn’t occurred to anyone that if the world’s best known exponent of the game was allowed to languish in poor health, what incentive could there be for any youngster to play the game. After scoring more goals than any other player in the world there was a time when he was allowed to languish in a Delhi hospital unnoticed until media highlighted his plight.
Why then does the sport still have its lovers? Why are there young boys and girls who get out there at the crack of dawn to work away hour after hour honing their skills in a sport that has little present and no future. Perhaps the answer lies in the beauty of the sport and the lineage of one man. And no account of Indian hockey can begin without delving into the life and genius of Dhyan Chand.
How was it that a man who learned the game from British army officers went on to win three gold medals as a centre-forward for India and is considered the greatest hockey player ever. There was nothing in his early childhood that could be said to provide the impetus. He appeared like a breath of fresh air in an environment vitiated by communal hatred and an India grappling with the first flush of freedom. Dhyan Chand's stick as it were appeared to embody the new found spirit of liberty and freedom from foreign rule. By the time he was 22 and displaying his magic at the Olympics, they were breaking his stick in Holland to check if there was a magnet inside; in Japan they concluded it was glue; and in Germany, Adolf Hitler even wanted to buy it. What could lead to such inexplicable madness?
Sport is like that. It has to be, marked as it is by moments of such perfection that it is almost impossible to conceive in any other form of human endeavour. It is one moment of perfection when everything comes together – skill, grace, steely nerves. It is the Eureka moment and every sportsperson knows how elusive it can be. But when it comes oh the joy! But great sportsmen and women reproduce this moment over and over again. That is what separates them from those that are just good enough. Maradona turning, dinking, swivelling, making his way past half the English team may be an image frozen in the minds of the TV viewers. But a Jorge Burruchaga or a Lionel Messi know that he could do it over and over again. Nay he did it over and over again. Against Belgium, against Germany and in Europe. And so he is a genius in an exclusive club of no more than a dozen sportspersons through history. Ali, Fischer, Jordan, Tiger… and Dhyan Chand. Yes our very own Dhyan Chand, a wizard with the stick, a man of such sublime skills that they doubted if he was man or magician. Wrote a clearly overwhelmed Dutch journalist: "An Indian who stops the ball turns it by magic stroke into a cube. The sphere is no longer round, and lies immovably like a block of beat-fuel, cigar box, or a child's building block." Black & White pictures do little justice to the intricate patterns he wove on the field but the records say it all. Just in 1932 he scored 133 of the 338 goals in 37 matches that India scored. Overall, in the 3 Olympic tournaments that he played, Dhyan Chand scored 33 goals in 12 matches. The numbers are truly Bradmanesque.
But Bradman is revered the world over wherever Cricket is played and that because at home he is the King. A Mark Taylor chooses to declare his innings close at 334 because he can’t bear the thought of going past the master. Bradsman’s legacy continues in form of his nation’s achievements. So Australians must excel always at Cricket. They must win. Otherwise heads will roll. Questions will be asked and young men like Alan Border and Steve Waugh will rise to the occasion, because to lose, to give up would be a slur on the great man’s memory.
Dhyan Chand, on the other hand, is a forgotten hero even in his own country. As the sport languishes, his memory fades away and his achievements fail to excite any one. So like Willy Loman in the cult classic “Death of a Salesman” one is forced to ask “What’s the answer?” Is there any hope for the game in the country?
Strangely the pipeline hasn’t been completely dry. Indian juniors are highly rated in world hockey. When the team won the 7th Junior World Cup in Australia in 2001, the entire hockey world lauded them for being the harbingers of a great future. Their emphatic 6-1 win over Argentina in the finals of that World Cup, seemed to have heralded a new style of playing hockey for the Indians. Adjudged the most "attacking" team in the tournament, it won encomiums from the best in the world. Even in the earlier World Cup at Milton Keynes in England, India finished with the silver losing to Australia in the finals. In the 2005 World Cup too India performed creditably finishing fourth. However, as if to echo the disasters of their seniors, the junior team finished a disappointing 9th in the recent World Cup.
This rollercoaster ride of wins one day and losses the next, reveal the extreme volatility that surrounds hockey in India. Lacking in a stable infrastructure and administration the game lurches on the shoulders of individual effort and excellence. The question is can it be revived? Or is it a metaphor for an evolving India where agriculture-driven growth has given way to the glory of the tech sector, where integration with the world is the new theme and ethnicity is at a discount? Is Indian hockey a thing of the past, already usurped in popularity by Cricket and now in the process of being replaced for sheer Olympic success by sports like shooting and boxing? Lacking in glitz and glamour of Cricket and the international appeal of Soccer, is the game of Dhyan Chand and Dhanraj Pillai in the throes of a slow death?
It is this tangled web that hides the true story of Indian hockey. The strands pull in different directions, weave, interweave and prove impossible to penetrate. But penetrate one must if there is to be light at the end of this tunnel.
