As any life lessons guru will tell you, you do what you can to chase your dreams; if naysayers must do what they exist to do, ignore them
Some day, once the dust has settled and petty politics and pettier grievances have been stuffed where they belong, Vijender Singh will be given his due. That grand proclamation might seem unnecessary, considering his status as one of the most prominent athletes in India, an occasional movie star and much else, but it isn’t totally out of place if you think about it. Because if you go through some of the things the Indian boxing community said when Singh announced his decision to chuck up the amateur game and become a professional, you’ll see how self-centred and smallminded people can be, and how ungrateful they are at times.
Singh is 30. If not at the peak of his powers any more then still somewhere just a shade below it. He has been a part of three Olympic Games, won bronzes at the Olympics and at the World Championships, two silvers at the Commonwealth Games, an Asian Games gold, and silver at the Asian Championships. He, like MC Mary Kom for women, is one of the biggest reasons for youngsters taking up the relatively unattractive and nonlucrative sport of boxing in a serious way, as his 75- kilogramme successor Vikas Krishan Yadav has admitted more than once. Singh has, to put it simply, done the country proud. Over and over.
But he is greedy, a traitor, for turning his back on his country and joining the league of the mercenaries. Well, your mercenary is my professional, a view I have held from the time I came to know of Singh’s decision. It’s not just Singh, but any sportsperson who chooses a more lucrative career option over the rather over-rated virtue of patriotism. They are doing it for the money. That’s right, sir, the same reason you changed your last job. No?
Such hypocrisy! Even as we try to give our children the best education possible and take loans to send them to America, our athletes must be paragons of virtue (if shunning money is a virtue) who live and die for the tricolour. Oh, come on, get a life!
Having spent time and interacted with Singh (as a journalist with a subject), I think he took the call for two main reasons: one, with Vikas’s emergence, Singh wasn’t certain of qualifying for the Olympics at the middleweight (75 kg) category for the 2016 Olympics. Two, he has always wanted to be a professional boxer, at least since 2007, when he mentioned it to me for the first time.
Two fights into his professional career now, and Singh has two wins, one with a first-round knockout. Now, he belongs there. But he knows exactly what the community back home thinks of him, and while he could well choose to not care, he does. “If I had lost, everyone would have said they always knew I wouldn’t be able to make it,” he says with a laugh, chatting over the phone from Dublin soon after winning his second fight. “Now people are saying it’s all too easy because I won both my fights. I am clear about what I am here for — I want to be a champion. I need to keep doing my work, that’s all. I am a boxer. I box here, and that’s my job. Some fights I’ll lose — that’s just how it is. The show isn’t getting over anytime soon. I have a long way to go yet. No one should expect me to win everything. Don’t call me a hero or a villain before I finish my job here.”
One of the things Singh says again and again is about how he knew exactly what to expect and what he signed up for when he chose to leave his family behind at home and settle down in Manchester with a Queensberry Promotions contract. “I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for professional boxing, and I had trained well, sparred with good partners; so when I entered the ring... I have been in England for a while now, I have done everything the promoters and trainers wanted me to do. I saw in the ring that there were a lot of Indian fans — it was like the Olympics. It's a great feeling. I feel responsible, as an Indian, to do well. I get so many messages on Facebook and Twitter from my fans that it feels like I am still fighting for India,” he says, a little wistfully, after winning the Sonny Whiting bout, his debut as a pro boxer.
He also spoke, passionately and not a little irritated, about how his family back home in Kaluwas (a village in Bhiwani in Haryana) have had to field dozens of questions from news journalists, whose main agenda seemed to be to castigate the boxer for, yes, turning his back on the Indian team, for saying no to the Olympic Games. Amazingly, his brother Manoj was quoted as telling reporters that he wasn’t sure what Singh’s plan was, what exactly he was doing in England, whether he had actually turned professional. It was all very Cuba. As if Singh had committed a crime and was on the run and his family had to guard his secret.
As for Singh, he chose to give it his best shot. In an alien place, with people he didn’t know before, and getting ready to play a sport he didn’t really know — yes, you’d better believe it; while it all still seems the same, amateur boxing is as different from professional boxing as chalk and a cheese factory.
“From the moment I entered the ring, I figured that this was very different. Not the ring for the fight, but to spar, to train. Everything is different. The gloves are different. In amateurs, a normal punch wouldn’t hurt. But here every punch hurts. That’s probably why you get more knockouts here than in amateur boxing. If you see the bandage we wrap around our hands to protect them — they are different, and, so, the gloves we wear are smaller. It’s not easy to make out the difference on TV, but if you wear them, you can tell. And the way we are trained, we don’t try to score points like we did in amateur boxing; we go for hard punches, to hurt the opponent,” he explains.
“I didn’t really know about this before coming here, but I have been training in England for a while now. The first day I went for training and I saw the gear I saw the difference and realised that this was going to be tough. The bandage, we often put it on ourselves, but you can’t wrap this one yourself. If you do, the blood circulation will stop, and your hands will go blue. And when you get hurt, while fighting, you can tell the difference. You might think I have won two bouts easily, but that’s not true. I would, in fact, say that the training is tougher than the sparring or the fights. Sometimes we spar for six-eight rounds, even ten rounds. Because, in the future, my fights will be longer. The training goes on for hours. At the beginning, I could barely get back home after my training sessions I was so drained.”
But it’s worth it, isn’t it? “Yes, bhaisaab, this is what I wanted.” As any life lessons guru will tell you, you do what you can to chase your dreams; if naysayers must do what they exist to do, ignore them. Singh went to England to chase his dream and he is living his dream now. And he is doing it after having done time in the thoroughly inept and unprofessional world of amateur boxing in India where the people who run the sport seem to exist only to stall progress. Singh has escaped the nonsense, in a way.
He has achieved more, won more medals, than any Indian male boxer in the amateur arena. Now, he is doing it for himself. But if those who support the Indian cricket team or look at European club football and wish it were the same in India stop to think, they will realise that supporting Singh, and following his progress as a professional sportsperson, could be a very Indian thing as well.