India’s underpaid hockey players

Hockey faces a situation where even hotels are not interested to show the game. Players are paid a pittance.

My hotel in Bengaluru, Karnataka did not show the Asian Champions Trophy hockey match live from China. It is a five-star joint which ran three channels on cricket. The hockey was not an ordinary contest. It was the final of the Asian championship and that too between the archrivals, India and Pakistan. What made the contest even more interesting was the match went to the wire — a shootout to decide the winners.

I came to know later that the championship was not telecast live in India. That hockey, our national game, will face a situation where even hotels are not interested to show the game, had never come to my mind. Yet I recall watching Major Dhyan Chand many years ago, the game’s wizard, dribbling like a magician casting a spell on both the opponents and the spectators.

Even in those days, hockey was not a paying proposition, as cricket is today. Cricketers earn millions of rupees for even their disastrous display, one after another. They remind me of gladiators in the Roman Empire. They were supposed to kill their opponents and people would pay for viewing the diabolical scene.

I have nothing against cricket or its extravagantly overpaid players. Whenever I have watched them playing, they looked more like hired hands who seem to convey the impression as if they put in efforts to the proportion of money paid. They have really become the spoilt children, too soft to even take a jerk. And they, besides hiding injuries, appear to submit wrong medical reports in order to get into the team. The list of walking wounded that kept mounting by the hour on the recent England tour is a stark example.

Yet, this does not justify the treatment meted out to the game of hockey in India. The players are paid a pittance and driven like slaves. In spite of the system that is prevailing in the country — the tiff over who is the genuine body to control the game and subsequently, the mess created by the sports ministry — the team was able to put up a great show in China and emerge as champions from the continent. There were some disciplinary issues as well, with a couple of players pulling out, before the team embarked on its trip to China under a new foreign coach. This epitomises the players’ commitment to the game, more so about the hard work they put in to make it clear, beyond doubt, that the fair name of India matters to them the most.

How I wish hockey could reach the pinnacle of glory it had until three decades ago. Our players had last won the Olympic gold in Moscow, way back in 1980. Since then it has been a struggle for the team to even qualify for the Olympics, forget about making a podium finish. As the game of hockey went into decline, the craze over cricket took over, thanks to India becoming the world champions in 1983.

Coming back to hockey, we have come to accept hockey coaches from the West or Australia, admitting that their type of hockey is the real hockey. Naturally, hockey players in those countries are heroes, not like our players who invariably return to empty airports from tours abroad. No doubt, the proposed sports bill would have probably regulated most sport federations — the vested interests for decades — in the country, but sport is a state subject. Even the BCCI would have been answerable for the waste of money and blatant favouritism had the bill been passed.

But then the government had to beat a hasty retreat because people like Sharad Pawar, Praful Patel and Rajiv Shukla, who have their vested interests, are firmly opposed to the bill. I would have rather wanted the bill to suggest measures to raise the standard of sport in the country. Instead, what we have is an exercise in controlling.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 19^th,  2011.