The Tribune

Ravi Dhaliwal

Sportsmen of the calibre of Dhyan Chand transcend all eras. Players like him are not just practitioners of a sporting craft, rather they become its own definition. They are not just heroes, they are the calliper by which other men’s heroism is measured.

These days sighting a player as capable as Dhyan Chand is akin to sighting an Igloo in the hot sands of the Sahara. It is said that a man’s legend is judged by the quality of myths that surround him. By that evaluation itself, Dhyan Chand was a player par excellence. After hearing stories of his dexterity and craftsmanship, ordinary mortals wonder whether his stick was designed (or created) by some hockey god in his moments of isolation.

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler wanted to buy his stick, in Japan Dhyan Chand mesmerised thousands with a walking stick handed over to him by a woman in the stands. In Holland they broke his stick into two to check whether there was a magnet in it. There are so many stories about the legendary player.

Whenever a story journeys through time, exaggeration inadvertently rides along. Yet however inventive the story teller gets there is a point, he knows, beyond which belief is suspended. A magnet in a stick! For someone else it might have been akin to a square peg in a round hole. For Dhyan Chand it just about fits perfectly. The stories are just building blocks of his legend.

Dhyan Chand, the man who always saw a hockey field the way a chess player sees the board, was born on August 29, 1905 near the banks of the Ganga in Allahabad. Having made a name for himself while playing for the Indian army, where he was a Lance Naik, Dhyan Chand’s graduation to the Indian team was steady. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics when Dhyan Chand’s India stunned a dazed Germany by 6 goals, Adolf Hitler immediately offered a job in the German army to Dhyan Chand. Obviously, he refused.

It is said that his stick work was so fast that the Germans failed to capture it even on slow film. After Berlin, the Austrian authorities built a statue of Dhyan Chand having four hands and an equal number of sticks. To them, it was difficult to believe a man having two hands and one stick playing as well as Dhyan Chand. Such was the aura surrounding the man who scored 1000 goals in a career spanning 20 years.

He represented India in three Olympics -1928 Amsterdam, 1932 Los Angeles and 1936 Berlin. After his playing days, he had a stint as a coach at the NIS,Patiala and later settled down in his native Jhansi, still the fisherman, the hunter of the deer, who loved to cook- but always short of money.

Another facet of his personality must not be forgotten. Modern players use advertisements to give their performances and personalities greater flourish. They do not allow us to forget them either, for television, that accumulated memory of our times, is their evidence. However, during the Dhyan Chand era there was nothing to record his brilliance. There were no films to record the poetry that he wrote. Yet the reverence for him rests in the hearts of thousands of his followers.

His autobiography ‘Goal’ starts with the lines “Needless to say I am a common man.” Indeed, Dhyan Chand was never a common man but he died like one. It was in a general ward that they had dumped him when he died of liver cancer.