Haripur Khalsa

Balbir Singh Dosanjh was born on 10 October 1924 in Haripur Khalsa, a Punjab village in the Jalandhar country, to Dalip Singh Dosanjh and Karam Kaur. His father was a freedom fighter who spent a great deal of his son's childhood in colonial jails. The boy grew up in a household defined by absence and political conviction, and would later become the most decorated Indian sportsman of the first decades of independence.

The moment he identified as decisive came when he was twelve: he watched a newsreel of India's hockey victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hockey was already the sport of the Punjab villages, but the newsreel gave it an object. He attended Dev Samaj High School and DM College in Moga, then Sikh National College in Lahore, and finally Khalsa College, Amritsar, where his game developed rapidly under the college coaching staff. He captained Khalsa College to three consecutive championships and moved into the Punjab state side.

His playing career became entangled with the Punjab Police, for whom he was pressed to turn out. The pressure was not always subtle — accounts of the period describe him being handcuffed by British officials determined to secure his participation, an incident that reached a wide audience decades later when it was dramatised in a Hindi film. He served in the Punjab Police alongside his hockey, as most Indian sportsmen of the era did, sport and salaried employment being inseparable.

Three Olympic Golds

Balbir Singh's Olympic record is the core of his claim. At London in 1948 — independent India's first Olympic appearance as a sovereign nation — he made his debut against Argentina and played in the final against Great Britain, scoring the first two goals in a 4–0 win. Beating the former colonial power at its own game, weeks after Partition, carried a weight no scoreline can convey.

At Helsinki in 1952 he was vice-captain and India's flag bearer at the opening ceremony. He scored a hat-trick against Britain in the semi-final, which India won 3–1, and then five goals in the 6–1 defeat of the Netherlands in the final. That figure — five goals by one player in an Olympic men's hockey final — has never been matched, more than seventy years later. Across the tournament he scored nine of India's thirteen goals, over sixty-nine per cent of his team's output.

At Melbourne in 1956 he was captain. He opened with five goals against Afghanistan and was then injured, sitting out the group stage while Randhir Singh Gentle led the side. He returned for the semi-final and the final, in which India beat Pakistan 1–0. Across eight Olympic matches in his career he scored twenty-three goals.

In 1954 he captained an Indian Hockey Federation XI on a tour of Malaya and Singapore that won all sixteen matches, with Balbir scoring forty-four goals himself. He was part of India's silver-medal team at the 1958 Asian Games. Over sixty-one international matches he scored two hundred and forty-six goals.

The Manager of 1975

His second career mattered almost as much as his first. He coached the Indian side that took bronze at the 1971 World Cup, and in 1975 he was manager of the Indian team that won the Hockey World Cup in Kuala Lumpur — still India's only World Cup title in the sport. Few figures in any game have both played in three winning Olympic campaigns and overseen a world championship from the bench.

Honours

In 1957 he became the first sportsperson ever awarded the Padma Shri, opening the sports category of India's civilian honours. In 1982 a national newspaper poll adjudged him Indian Sportsperson of the Century. He received the Major Dhyan Chand Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. When the International Olympic Committee mounted its exhibition on the history of the Games at the Royal Opera House during the 2012 London Olympics, Balbir Singh was one of sixteen athletes from the entire history of the modern Olympics chosen to represent the qualities the Games claim to embody. He was the only Indian.

Named Best Sikh Hockey Player in 2006, he accepted the honour with some reserve, noting his own secular and national rather than communal sense of himself.

He wrote two books: The Golden Hat Trick, his autobiography, in 1977, and The Golden Yardstick: In Quest of Hockey Excellence in 2008.

Last Years

He lived his later decades in Chandigarh and Mohali, a constant presence at Indian hockey occasions, invariably courteous and invariably asked the same question about 1952. He died on 25 May 2020 at a hospital in Mohali, aged ninety-five, after a period in intensive care with high fever and suspected pneumonia. The following day the international hockey stadium at Mohali was renamed the Olympian Balbir Singh Senior International Hockey Stadium.

He is remembered as the greatest centre-forward the game has produced. The record that best captures him, though, is the smaller one: a boy from a Jalandhar village who saw a newsreel at twelve, and spent his life making sure the next newsreel was of his own team.