From the archives of WSN, I culled out an ed­i­to­r­ial writ­ten in April 2008, which chron­i­cles the dam­age KPS Gill did to In­dian hockey. My in­ter­est in the game of hockey was kin­dled dur­ing my vis­its with my fa­ther to wit­ness hockey matches at the Bom­bay Hockey As­so­ci­a­tion grounds, next to the Church­gate rail­way sta­tion in the hub of the city. The ed­i­to­r­ial is re­pro­duced here with­out any change.

Five of the play­ers who were part of the 1968 Hockey Olympics hailed from Sansarpur, the karamb­hoomi of a large num­ber of joy­sticks men, re­call a very touch­ing tale about their re­turn af­ter win­ning the bronze medal. By to­day’s stan­dards, it would have been a good achieve­ment. With hind­sight, it would have been a great achieve­ment.

But in those days, stan­dards were dif­fer­ent. We had­n’t pro­gressed so much. So win­ning a bronze was pretty down mar­ket, and heart break­ing too.

 “We all re­turned in the dead of the night, afraid that we should not run into some vil­lagers who will curse us for not be­ing even fi­nal­ists, and when I fi­nally met some­one, he asked me if that was how we learnt hockey. I was told to be ashamed, and I was,” Col Bal­bir Singh re­calls, adding the fate of his friends (the other) Bal­bir Singh (Pun­jab Po­lice), Jagjit Singh, Tarsem Singh and Ajit Singh was no dif­fer­ent.

 Bal­bir Singh and his friends did not have a KPS Gill to de­fend them, or he would have proved that win­ning the gold was some­how a shame­less thing. Since stan­dards have since changed, the pos­si­ble KPS line cur­rently is that per­haps win­ning or even qual­i­fy­ing has be­come some kind of a shame­less ac­tiv­ity, so he has done every­thing in the book, and out­side it, to de­stroy the very spirit of hockey.

 The man knows his busi­ness. Hav­ing de­stroyed the soul of hu­man rights cam­paign in Pun­jab, hav­ing de­stroyed the very ker­nel of be­ing a Sikh, hav­ing been con­victed in a case of moral turpi­tude and re­main­ing shame­less about it, and hav­ing de­fended the gross­est of the hu­man rights vi­o­la­tors like Ajit Singh Sandhu, this is the fi­nal dis­graced adieu phase of KPS Gill, his mous­tache still rolled up­ward.

 If a man’s mea­sure lay in the mous­tache, peo­ple would have found sal­va­tion in a bot­tle of gel. The banh-maror muchh-maror sar­dar-look­ing man has turned out to be a puny lit­tle fel­low who rol­licks in a mess that he cre­ates with aplomb and has still to meet life and prin­ci­ple even decades af­ter land­ing amongst us. Of course, the of­fi­cial In­dian es­tab­lish­ment needs him. Regimes al­ways need fid­dle­sticks to kill the spirit of joy­sticks.

“If a man’s mea­sure lay in the mous­tache, peo­ple would have found sal­va­tion in a bot­tle of gel. The banh-maror muchh-maror sar­dar-look­ing man has turned out to be a puny lit­tle fel­low who rol­licks in a mess that he cre­ates with aplomb and has still to meet life and prin­ci­ple. Of course, the of­fi­cial In­dian es­tab­lish­ment still needs him. Regimes al­ways need fid­dle­sticks to kill the spirit of joy­sticks.”

 The in­glo­ri­ous and un­prece­dented exit of the team even be­fore the start of the 2008 Olympic Games in Bei­jing is a black-let­ter day for the sport. The team is out of the Olympic Games for the first time since mak­ing their de­but at the 1928 Am­s­ter­dam Games.

 Some­how, Pun­jab and Sikhs have al­ways closely as­so­ci­ated them­selves with the sport. The drib­bling men with the curved stick, a white han­key cov­er­ing the hair­bun on the head told the world about the pres­ence of Sikhs all across the world in pre and post as­tro­turf pe­riod. From their de­but ap­pear­ance at Am­s­ter­dam un­der the peer­less Dhyan Chand, the team reeled off six straight gold medals till the streak was bro­ken by Pak­istan at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In 1968 came the bronze and in 2008 the shame. There will be talk about rule changes and tran­si­tion to­wards the more pow­er­ful Eu­ro­pean style of play, but the fact re­mains that it has been more an is­sue of man­age­ment and less an is­sue of hockey.

 In­dia has en­sured that KPS be­came bloated, larger than life fig­ure. So it has to park him some­where. No state gov­ern­ment wants him. The Cen­tre’s at­tempts to foist him as a gov­er­nor or a se­cu­rity ad­vi­sor have been re­sisted by state af­ter state. The In­dian Hockey Fed­er­a­tion was a con­ve­nient spot in the park­ing lot of bloated In­dian fig­ure­heads, and KPS has stuck to his post like shame sticks to the devil.

To suc­ceed, a sport needs suc­cess. To fail, and fail ut­terly, it needs a KPS Gill. Fix him any­where, the man never lets you down, he en­sures you never get up again. Aadmi hai ke self goal!

12 March 2008