On 11 August 1932 at the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles,
the Indian hockey team slammed 24 goals past the hapless hosts. Astonishingly, the
United States managed to pull one back. Their lone goal, story has it, was
scored while the Indian goalkeeper was busy signing autographs for spectators!
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.
