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Touch Play The Prakash Padukone Story
by Dev S. Sukumar
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Our Price Rs. 270.00
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*USD 5.54
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I've been covering badminton for various publications since 1999. It took me four years to realise that I wasn't getting any wiser when it came to the game's history, its Indian connections, or the colourful personalities associated with it.
Literature on the game is sparse. There are few books on the game, and those were written three or four decades ago. The only badminton books you find are 'how-to-play' guides... and so I realised that if I had to improve my knowledge of the game, I'd better write a book instead of hoping to read up on the game.
Obviously, the first name that one associates with the game in India is Prakash Padukone. Strangely enough, even though he is so well known, very little is known about him. Most people recall, accurately enough, that he won the All England in 1980, but beyond that they draw a blank.
How could anyone become so popular for having won just one major tournament? Everybody knows that he was one of the legends of the game, perhaps India's most accomplished sportsman in an individual physical sport, but very few can list out his accomplishments, as they can with a Sunil Gavaskar or a GR Viswanath.
Other traits contributed to the enigma. Padukone is always invoked whenever sportsmanship is mentioned, or excellence, or dignity amidst the tawdriness of Indian sport... and no work on Indian badminton can be complete without an exhaustive cataloguing of his accomplishments.
So I thought... why not? Why not a biography of Prakash Padukone?
Logistically, it didn't seem very difficult. After all, I run into him every other day at his academy. I thought the task would be simple: get him to narrate his experiences and pen it in the form of a book!
That fantasy did not even last a few days. Prakash is extremely reticent, so questions like: "Tell me about your childhood" would draw perhaps a two-sentence response. I realised, pretty quickly, that I had to learn more about him to ask him the right (and specific) questions. So I went around meeting just about everybody connected with him: uncles, aunts, brothers, sister, friends, teachers... and later, teammates, rivals, coaches, trainees.
Of course there had to be a certain chronological method in tracking down events. In Prakash's case, he had spent his teenage years in Bangalore, and then, as his talent flowered, he started travelling extensively. After his All England win in 1980, he went to Denmark to play for a club, Hvidovre. During those six years, Prakash was among the elite of the badminton world, playing tournaments in Asia and Europe, winning some, and mostly reaching the semifinals or finals. It was during this period that he became one of badminton's most recognizable faces. Unfortunately, since he was based in Europe, the Indian media carried only sketchy reports of his accomplishments, and that is why our knowledge of him is so limited.
My biggest challenge in tracking him was the lack of material, in the form of newspaper reports or other literature. The Badminton Association of India, which runs the game in the country, has no office of its own, much less a library, so an institutionalized archive was out of the question. So I had to depend on recollections by contemporaries, friends, and others associated with him... as time went, my work followed a pattern. I would track down important events in a particular calendar year, then interview everybody who was associated with him during that time, and finally would go back to Prakash for corroboration. It was slow work, and I felt more like an archaeologist than a writer.
My writing happened in fits and starts... actually, the writing bit was the easiest. The much harder task was in preparing for the interviews, and then transcribing each interview. That was almost painful, but I wasn't comfortable with any other method.
As I got deeper into my work, the world of Indian and world badminton opened up. Tracking him down would be impossible if I restricted myself to Bangalore and interviewed people over the phone, so I decided to travel to wherever his former contemporaries were. I found myself in Bombay, Pune, Calcutta, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jamshedpur, Trivandrum, Cochin...
Then I got a lucky break: Jakarta was hosting an 'Evening of Legends' featuring the greatest players of Prakash's era.
I had only read and thrilled to the names of Rudy Hartono, Han Jian, Morten Frost, Icuk Sugiarto, and others. Now, almost two decades after their most magical performances, they would come together again on the same stage.
I found myself talking to Rudy Hartono – the Indonesian acclaimed as the greatest-ever badminton player for having won eight All England titles; I raced alongside Han Jian as he rushed in to dinner; I met Morten Frost – Prakash's acclaimed rival – and spent two hours with him after having promised to trouble him only for 15 minutes...
When I was writing the book, it struck me that it could not be another chronological narrative. So much had happened through the course of the two years it took me to build the material... so there are flashes of personal narrative through the book. There is a process of discovery that happened while I wrote it, and I have included that progression as well.
Since I didn't want the biography to be one match report after another, and instead a window into the mind of a sportsman, I discovered a few things…
I discovered that, thanks to our obsession with cricket and a grandstand-style of reporting, the dynamics of most sports are missed. Our knowledge of what happens during a match, what goes into it, and particulary, what goes on in the head of a sportsman, is extremely poor.
I discovered that a sportsman has to be willing to kill himself, over and over again, to become the best in the world. I discovered that "talent", "potential" and "genius" are extremely fuzzy words, and have but a limited meaning in the context of international competition. The true champion is motivated enough to wake up every morning at a certain time, to punish himself through a grueling routine every day, even though there may be no immediate payoffs.
The true champion is a different creature. He has to have a total disregard for his own physical limitations. He is indifferent to most things that affect those lesser than him... (as one of Prakash's understudies said of him: With Prakash, there is no such thing as an unforced error.) He has to believe, when everything convinces him to the contrary, that he is among the best in the world.
The most beautiful description of the dynamics of a match came from TA Balachandran, a coach at the Padukone Academy:
Your lungs catch fire and your legs turn to jelly,
And your opponent is not letting you go home.
What do you do?
I didn't want the book to address only the badminton-following public. I have tried to avoid narrating only his badminton exploits... I've tried, though, to bring out the dynamics of the game... I hope it's an enjoyable read.
There were a couple of interesting incidents that happened during my travels. One (which I have mentioned in the book) took place while I was traveling with the Karnataka team to Jamshedpur for the 2005 national badminton championships. I was awakened by a loud argument between a Malayalee couple. This must have been at four in the morning. But I didn't think much about it until we'd reached Tatanagar. Even as we prepared to leave the train, I saw the Malayalee woman lying flat on the berth, and her desperate husband standing below, pleading with her to get down, swearing never to see "the other woman" ever again!
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