15 August, 1936: The Olympic stadium at Berlin was jam packed. It was the Olympic hockey finals between India and Germany. 40000 spectators had assembled, the biggest to watch an Olympic game. About an hour and a half later most people sat there stunned, unable to comprehend the magic they had just witnessed. The score line read 8-1 in favor of India, and one barefooted Indian had scored six of those goals, albeit a broken tooth!

The barefooted Indian was none other than Dhyan Chand, unanimously regarded as the greatest hockey player of all time. On the field he was named the "Wizard of Hockey" for he exerted complete control on the ball. It appeared that the ball used to stick to his hockey stick while playing. So great was the magic of Dhyan Chand that the Tokyo officials broke his hockey stick to search for a magnet inside, and tried to console themselves saying he had added some sort of glue. During a 1935 tour of New Zealand and Australia, he scored 201 goals out of the team's tally of 584 in 43 matches After watching Dhyan Chand in action, Don Bradman remarked "He scores goals like runs in cricket”.

He was not just exceptionally skilled; he was also a very intelligent player. Keshav Dutt, Olympic gold medallist, tells us, "His real talent lay above his shoulders. His was easily the hockey brain of the century. He could see the field the way a chess player sees a board. He knew where his teammates were, and more importantly where his opponents were -- without looking. It was almost psychic."


Unfortunately the Indian government failed to recognize his greatness. He asked his sons not to play hockey, for it had given him so little in return. He spent his retired life facing an acute shortage of money. When he fell ill, liver cancer it turned out, and came to Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, they dumped him in the general ward. A journalist's article eventually got him moved to a special room, but that public memory had to be jogged tells its own story. He was never awarded the arjuna award( even bhajji has received it!).

In sport there are good players, great ones, and then those who come closest to perfection's embrace. They are not practitioners of a sporting craft, they become its definition. Dhyan Chand was one such player. Yet for all his greatness, Dhyan Chand was a humble and simple minded individual, epitomized by the first few words of his autobiography Goal: “You are doubtless aware that I am a common man”