INDIAN HOCKEY GENIUS - DHYANCHAND.

They say you can judge a man's legend by the quality of myths that surround him. By that measure itself, Dhyan Chand was an extraordinary man. To hear tales of his craftsmanship was to wonder whether his stick was designed by Merlin himself.

They broke his stick in Holland to check if there was a magnet inside; in Japan they decided it was glue; in Germany, Adolf Hitler even wanted to buy it.

It sounds all silliness and hocus-pocus and maybe it was. But, one thing strikes you - they never said this about anybody else, did they? Whenever a tale journeys through time, exaggeration inadvertently rides along. Yet however inventive the teller gets, there is a point, he knows, beyond which belief is suspended. A magnet in the stick? If they said this about Mohammed Shahid we would have guffawed; for Dhyan Chand it just fits. There's another thing here. Modern players use advertising to give their deeds and personalities greater flourish; they do not allow us to forget them either, for television, the accumulated memory of our times, is their evidence.

Dhyan Chand had nothing, no reams of literature to record his brilliance, no highlight film for us to gasp at. How come then this reverence has come to rest?

And so we return again to the stories, the building blocks of his legend. We are told that a statue of him exists in a Vienna sports club, whose form speaks of a certain awe; it is of a man with four arms and four sticks. We are instructed that at penalty corners he would stop the ball with his own hand, then rise and strike it with a smooth swiftness (normally it takes two men).

We are informed by his son Ashok Kumar, that in his 50s he would shame Indian goalkeepers in practice by dropping the ball and then on the half volley drive into the corner of the net. Not once but ten times out of ten. We are advised that his stickwork was studied but was so fast that even slow film offered no clues to his magic. You had to wonder, as someone wrote, did the poets come to watch him, and the playwrights, for he was drama. And, of course, he was not just beautiful, he won.

We see that not just in three Olympic golds (1928 Amsterdam, 1932 Los Angeles, 1936 Berlin) but in his goals. Two statistics stand out. In 1932 India scored 338 goals in 37 matches, 133 his contribution. In 1947 he accompanied a young team to East Africa (No Dhyan Chand, no team said the invitation)and he, 42 and semi-retired, was the second highest scorer with 61 goals in 22 games.

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