Authenticity is not the point of the story; capturing the essence of a hopelessly uneven contest is. Imagination paints a game played mostly in the opposition half, the bored goalkeeper, the fawning fans, the unexpected attack on an unguarded goal and, perhaps, a desperate scramble to get back into position. It is important to know the identity of the Indian goalkeeper who inspired the story. Was it the first-choice, Richard James Allen, who could be beaten, the story would suggest, only if he was not there? Allen had conceded none in five matches in the previous Olympics in Amsterdam and would let in only one goal in four matches in the next Olympics in Berlin. Or was it the maverick, Arthur Charles Hind, who could play practically in any position, including centre half and centre forward? A man easily bored, one suspects.
Intertwined with this is another question: did Allen play any active part in the 1932 Games? Before India’s Independence, Allen was the only player other than Dhyan Chand to be sent to three consecutive Olympics between 1928 and 1936. India won each time. But did Allen win three gold medals, or did a strained muscle in Los Angeles cost him one?
The prohibitive cost of sending a team to the United States meant no European country took part in the hockey competition in Los Angeles. To ensure hockey remained an Olympic sport (it had been reintroduced in 1928 after an eight-year hiatus), defending champions India sent a team on borrowed money to Los Angeles where they were joined by Olympic debutants Japan and the United States.
The three teams played each other in a round robin league. Thus India had only two opportunities to give a game to each member of their squad of fifteen—an important tactical move designed to ensure everyone became eligible for a medal (with no substitutions allowed in those days, each player had to start in at least one game). This is where the confusion arises: the official report of the Tenth Olympiad in Los Angeles in 1932 shows India played the same XI against Japan and the USA—Arthur Charles Hind; Carlyle Carrol Tapsell, Leslie Charles Hammond; Masude Ali Khan Minhas, Broome Eric Pinniger, S. Lal Shah Bokhari; Richard John Carr, Gurmit Singh Kullar, Dhyan Chand, Roop Singh, Sayed Mohd Jaffar—and accordingly the medals tally does not include the names of Richard James Allen, Frank Gerald Brewin, William Patrick Sullivan and Mohammad Sirdar Aslam (spellings as in official report).
In those day it was unusual for India to field the same team in subsequent matches and deny the rest of the squad members a chance to win a medal; in two Olympics either side of Los Angeles only one Indian hockey player did not play a single match despite being in the squad—the unfortunate Kher Singh Gill who missed the entire 1928 Games because of an injured knee. And there is evidence that contradicts the official report of the 1932 Games.
Dhyan Chand’s autobiography, Goal! serialised in the weekly sports magazine, Sport and Pastime, between May 1949 and January 1951 and later published as a book by Sport and Pastime from Madras in 1952 gives the following Indian XI in the matches in Los Angeles:
Against Japan, on August 4: Allen; Tapsell, Hammond; Masud Minhas, Pinniger, Lal Shah; Dickie Carr, Gurmit Singh, Dhyan Chand, Roop Singh, Jaffar. India won 11-1.
This tallies with the Olympic report, except the presence of Allen in place of Hind in goal. Sports-reference.com, a sports statistics website, also says Allen played against Japan. However, a report on the match by the Special Correspondent of The Statesman that appeared in the Calcutta-based newspaper on August 6 corroborated the Olympic report and said Hind played in goal instead of Allen, who was from Calcutta. The report is in keeping with a preview of the match carried in the same newspaper on August 4 that said Allen had a strained muscle and would not play against Japan.
Dhyan Chand’s XI against USA, on August 11: Hind; Tapsell, Aslam; Brewin, Pinniger, Lal Shah; Sullivan, Gurmit Singh, Dhyan Chand, Roop Singh, Jaffar. India won 24-1.
If correct this would clear up the confusion about Aslam, Brewin and Sullivan’s participation in the Games (the explanation being: the official Olympic report printed the same XI twice by mistake and missed these names), but what of Allen? Did Dhyan Chand get the goalkeeper wrong twice? Should it have been Hind in the first game and Allen in the second?
Dhyan Chand in his autobiography, written nearly two decades after the events in Los Angeles, is curiously insistent that Allen played against Japan. Apart from the team line-up, Allen’s name is mentioned twice more in Dhyan Chand’s description of the game. “I cannot explain why and how the lone goal was scored against us, and how, of all the persons, a goalkeeper like Allen was beaten,” Dhyan Chand writes. He later adds, “The solitary goal of Japan was scored in the second half—Inochora, their outside-left, converted a penalty corner with a shot that surprised our defenders. It was a quick flick, and just entered the net between Allen, and as far as I can remember, Tapsell.”
Were Dhyan Chand and his editors at Sports and Pastime aware of the exclusion of Allen and three others from the medals tally of the official Olympic report? Were they trying to set the record straight? The impression is strengthened by another sentence found later in the chapter: “In the two matches in the Olympic Games, all our 15 players took part, which qualified them for the Olympic gold medal, and we all felt happy over it.”
To borrow a term from another game, Dhyan Chand was still batting for his teammates, twenty years after Los Angeles. Unfortunately, until the confusion about the Indian line-up in the two games in 1932 is cleared up, the names of Richard James Allen, Frank Gerald Brewin, William Patrick Sullivan and Mohammad Sirdar Aslam will continue to go missing from the official medals tally of the Los Angeles Olympics.
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