The Sports Authority of India hostel literally lurks off the main road and behind a couple of turns through narrow lanes that look certain dead-ends. The building has an insipid marble nameplate, ‘Kirorimal Chhatrawas, 1954’. It is also curiously empty, but the friendly guard waves you on, and soon there is the warden.
“This is where they all stay, our SAI trainees. Unfortunately, we’ve been renovating for the past couple of days, and so all the boys are on a few days’ holiday,” says Brish Bhan, the warden.
It can’t be what you’re looking for. And so, finally, you get hold of an address. Bhiwani in Haryana has outgrown itself and farmland is giving way to residential sectors. So the lanes are wider now and there are identical houses in Sector 13, where help comes again from a couple of schoolboys who stop in their tracks to give directions. They could have added a piece of advice: “Don’t look for the obvious.”
Because when you’re done peering at nameplates and seeking out advertising hoardings or banners in futility, a group of men sitting under the shade of a tree insists you’re on the right track. “It’s the next one on the left,” they say. “Just go across this pool of water.”

One thing is amply clear for a country basking in a never-before-experienced glory of three medals from one Games. If there was a sport that came close to living up to its pre-Games promise, it was boxing. Once the celebrations from our Beijing wins wane, a measured look at where our three medallists came from will still find faultlines. The stories of Abhinav Bindra and Sushil Kumar are of individual brilliance more than the result of a systematic programme aimed at success. The stories of Vijender Singh, Akhil Kumar and Jitender Kumar, though, are those of a hope of better things to come. Cynicism comes easy these days and Indian sport probably invites more than its share. The Bhiwani Boxing Club (BBC) is, then, a refuge in more ways than one.

We have come to Bhiwani searching for some answers. Like how a town not many had heard of managed to place four boxers in one Olympic Games, three of whom made the quarter-finals. What sets this town apart from others? A look at the Bhiwani Boxing Club and the questions only multiply.

Tucked in a corner, almost hidden by fields, the yellow brick building is more a farm outhouse than a possible breeding centre of international sportspersons. If quaintness equalled success, the place would get top marks. And well, now it does.

“It’s away from the hustle-bustle of a town,” says Jagdish Singh, the man made famous by his protégés. Akhil, Vijender and Jitender got the whole country to pause and take notice with their gutsy show and disciplined approach; Singh was not surprised. These are the qualities he would like his club to be known for.

Singh never made it big as a boxer. Posted in Gurgaon as a coach with SAI, in 1996 he was transferred to his hometown Bhiwani. Singh picked a couple of young boxers to take along, one of them a greenhorn called Akhil Kumar. At the new hostel, he met another coach Devraj Singh, and in a few years the fleet of boxers grew in strength.

“That was when I decided that a new academy was a good idea. Many young boys were showing interest, and the SAI centre did not have place for everybody,” recalls Singh.

Then the 2003 Afro-Asian Games came home and Hyderabad’s sporting party gave Indian boxing two gold, five silver and two bronze medals. Akhil and a younger Jitender, from a village near Bhiwani, won golds. Vijender, another local village boy, won a silver, and the town went crazy.

Bhiwani, though, has deeper boxing roots. Hawa Singh, two-time Asian Games gold medallist (1966 and 1970 Bangkok Games), lived here and learnt here, inspiring many to take up the sport. Raj Kumar Sangwan followed suit with golds at two Asian-level meets—in Bangkok in 1991 and in Tehran in 1994.

But even before the history class has rolled, Singh says something startling: “You know, there are a lot of complaints against this club.” About what, you ask. “People say all sorts of things. They have problems about the place (it’s his plot of land, says Singh), the ring that we installed (he says it’s a gift from a local politician), and the fact that it is now the largest boxing club in Bhiwani (the others, about five or six, sprouted later). People spend lakhs on building bathrooms in their houses. I just made two rooms and a shed,” he says.

THE Bhiwani Boxing Club is just that, two rooms and a shed. A peepul tree and a Shiva idol stand to the left outside the gate, a sagging volleyball netting graces the right flank. The blue iron gate is never locked and opens out to a small brick path lined with wild rose, hibiscus and other flower shrubs. There is one room with a bed and a television, one tiny toilet and a tinier storeroom for gloves and other equipment.

Five punching bags hang next to the room, a huge mirror frames one wall, there is a basic weight-training machine on one side, and a new ring on the other. It’s 5 p.m. and young boxers start to congregate. Training begins at 5:30 p.m., six days a week. It’s a day before Jitender and Vijender are to get into the ring for their quarters matches and journalists have suddenly found that all roads lead to the BBC.

Singh has made the 50-odd kids queue up but it’s certain that training will be disturbed today. Still, the boxers have to focus on the practice. “It’s been raining, On a normal day we usually get around 120 kids,” says Singh, once he has set the kids to task. But in a town that was curiously unfamiliar with even the existence of the place some hours ago, where do all these kids come from?

“Mostly from villages around this place. We get a few from the town too. Now they have started showing interest, but it’s mostly village kids,” says Singh. “You need to be hungry,” he goes on, “you need to want it really bad and the deprivation that most village kids feel spurs them on. You know, for every human being, the wish to be the strongest is the most raw, but innate. We just tap that. To be honest, the first appeal was jobs. They realised that national level success would make getting a job easier, and that was big bait.”

And then all those international medals happened—Afro-Asian Games, Commonwealth Games. And now, Beijing. “Now they just don’t talk of boxing, they want to make it a career,” he adds.

But in a traditionally conservative land, how do parents respond to their children wanting to put on the gloves? “They come to me every day, asking me to enroll their children. It’s something they didn’t get a chance to do, and they hope this will get their kids out of the lives they have lived. Plus, now that they’ve seen the success stories, it’s a reality they want to believe in,” he says.

OVER THE PAST FEW years, Haryana has acquired a reputation in boxing and now the girls too want to be part of the action. There are about 15 regulars at the club, though not all of them are locals. They mingle in the crowd of boys and are keen to be seen as trainees. “A few of them are not from here, they rent a room together,” says Singh.
The training methodology is targeted at building stamina along with skill. So in the practice sparring, done in rounds of four as in a bout, each round is of two-and-a-half minutes—half-a-minute more than the standard—and the gaps in between are lesser than the stipulated minute. “There is a saying prevalent here,” says Singh: “Geedar ka shikar karna ho to sher se ladna seekho.” (If you want to hunt jackals, learn how to fight a lion).
As we talk, adolescent enthusiasm gets the better of a couple of boys. “So, you’re not being interviewed?” one taunts the other. “Oh, just wait till 2012,” he responds.
By now you know Bhiwani has changed in these past two weeks, so dismiss this as a fanciful dream at your own peril.

THE GURUBehind the success of the Indian boxers at Beijing is the coach who groomed them
SAY no to four-letter words,” it says on the wall. That, presumably, includes ‘loss’. As India hung on to its boxers’ positive talk in Beijing, smiling at home in Bhiwani was their coach Jagdish Singh. Because along with the hooks and jabs that Singh trains his wards in, thrown in for good measure are these little nuggets on the right attitude.
The wall at Bhiwani Boxing Club is covered with instructive adages, but that is just, says Singh, so that they become part of a child’s thinking process.
Singh’s training methods have been described as unconventional. It perhaps best describes the coach himself.
Six years ago, Singh, one of the many boxing coaches with the Sports Authority of India, decided the daily effort he was putting at the SAI centre in Bhiwani needed to be topped with something more. So, in a move that some would describe as whimsical, he got together his life’s savings, took a bank loan, and set about realising his dream of having his own boxing club.
Singh the boxer could not go places, but as he says, he wanted to keep the faith his coaches had placed in him. He was also driven by the urge to put Bhiwani, the land of Asian gold medallist Hawa Singh, back on the boxing map.
Singh has always had an eye for spotting talent and following an approach that focuses on dealing with the worst-case scenario, which helped him train a band of boxers who slowly began dominating the national scene. A diploma in coaching from Hungary, and tips collected from trips abroad ensures that the methodology does not get outdated.
Sundays are spent tending to the little garden at the club, though when you ask him about it, there is a look of impatience. “Oh, you’re asking about it at the wrong time. All the rain this season has been bad for the plants,” he says.
However, this season will be memorable for other reasons for the 47-year-old, even though he was strangely not at hand as his protégés made history in Beijing. India’s contingent to Beijing unfortunately couldn’t find place for a coach who put four boxers in that team.