The year 2008 will be one that goes down in Indian hockey history. It will be a year of infamy. In March, the men’s team lost to Great Britain by a brace of goals in a qualifying tournament and consequently missed a berth at the Olympics in Beijing. For the first time in 80 years, Indian men will not battle it out for a medal.
The month after, on 24 April, the women’s team, too, failed to secure a Beijing berth. Four days later, the Indian Olympic Association dissolved the Indian Hockey Federation and an ad hoc committee was put in charge of the sport that lay in tatters.
False start: Leo Pinto missed the 1936 Games because of injury and had to wait till 1948 for his Olympics debut. (Photo by: Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint )
At his home on the first floor of a building close to Lilavati Hospital in Bandra, Mumbai, 94-year-old Leo Hillary Knowles Pinto (
read Leo Hillary Knowles Pinto’s story) watched the events unfold with a broken heart. “They have destroyed the game. Nobody cares for it anymore,” Pinto tells us when we visit him. He looks dapper in his green 1948 London Olympics blazer and spotless yellow Olympics tie with a little stylized sketch of the Big Ben on it. Both the blazer and tie have a somewhat faded look after 60 years of irregular use, but are still spotless and ironed.
Pinto was the valiant goalkeeper of the Indian hockey team of 1948. By that time, our young, one-year-old nation was a bona fide hockey superpower, with three golds in a row from 1928 to 1936. But the 1948 Olympics would be different. India would play under her own flag and her sportsmen would stand in attention to her very own national anthem.
As he narrates his experiences of London, Pinto’s enthusiasm is palpable, and he laughs when we tell him that we managed to hunt down the remaining members of the team and are going to pester all of them with requests to reminisce.
Tracking down members of the 1948 Olympic gold-winning Indian hockey team is an exercise worthy of a minor medal in itself. There are no easily available databases, online or off. It takes several calls to numerous state hockey associations and days of follow-up before we have a list of the members who are still living, and the contact details. Five remain: two in Kolkata, one each in Chandigarh and Delhi, and Pinto in Mumbai.
The moment Pinto begins to recall experiences that took place 60 years ago, intermittently stressing a point with a wiggling, wrinkled but firm forefinger, the effort redeems itself manifold. Numerous injuries and advanced age have not dimmed Pinto’s memories.
National hero: Balbir Singh Sr was the first sportsperson to be awarded a Padma Shree in 1957. (Photo by: Zackary Canepari / Mint )
Nor have they diminished the drama in Balbir Singh Sr’s (
read Balbir Singh Sr’s hockey saga) story of his debut as a professional hockey player. Singh, 84, who currently divides time between family homes in Chandigarh and Canada, started his stellar career in handcuffs.