Dhyan Chand is most prominent hockey player that India has ever produced. He was called the Hockey Wizard. Whenever he entered the field he always stole the limelight. His game had an electric swiftness in it. Seeing his swift moves and the constant movement of the ball with his stick, the Germans even once suspected that Dhyan Chand’s hockey stick had some magnet in it. The stick was broken and nothing of that sort was found in it. He resumed the play with another stick and went on scoring goals, one after another.
Dhyan Chand was born on 29th August 1905 at Allahabad. He pursued his studies there in a higher secondary school. To support his family, Dhyan Chand joined the Brahmin Regiment of the Indian army as a sepoy. Nobody knows when he developed a liking for hockey. But somehow he was so much infatuated with the game that he started devoting his entire spare time to it. There were no official facilities for training the hockey players during those days. Dhyan Chand had to learn it all on his own.
Dhyan Chand, a player of the Infantry Regiment, was included as a member in the Indian team that visited New Zealand in 1926. India earned the first gold medal in hockey in the Olympic Games played at Amsterdam (Holland) in 1928. Dhyan Chand was a member of this winning team. When the final match was about to be played between India and Holland on 26th May, Dhyan Chand was running very high fever. But as a valiant soldier, he did not shirk his duty. He entered the field like a lion and helped India to register a 3-0 victory by personally scoring two magnificent goals.
In the Olympic hockey in 1932, India earned the gold medal after playing only two matches. In one of these matches India defeated America by 24 goals to 1 which is still an Olympic record. Dhyan Chand alone scored 8 of the 24 goals. In 1935, India played 48 matches against Australia and New Zealand. In these matches Dhyan Chand alone contributed 200 goals out of a total of 584 scored by India. When told of this feat, the great cricket player Donald Bradman remarked: “It appears that the Indian hockey players score goals like cricket runs”.
India once again won the gold medal in the 1936 Olympic hockey and out of the total of 38 goals scored by India, 11 goals were scored by Dhyan Chand alone.
In recognition, the then British government of India promoted him from the rank of a sepoy to that of a naik. When the German dictator Hitler heard of this, he shook hands with Dhyan Chand and told him, “Had you been a resident of my country, I would have made you a Colonel”.
In 1947, when India won freedom, Dhyan Chand was promoted as a Major and was awarded the coveted ‘Padma Bhushan’ in recognition of his services to hockey. On 3 December 1979 this great player of hockey breathed his last.