Aslam Sher Khan and the sidelines are old acquaintances, playing hide and seek through a life that has seen the strapping six-footer rise to fame and plunge into oblivion time and again since his defining moment at Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka Football Stadium in 1975.
The star of the Hockey World Cup that year, Khan booked his place in sports history with a crucial equaliser against hosts Malaysia after being brought in as a substitute in the dying moments of the semi-finals. The goal powered India to its maiden World Cup victory.
Khan returned home to a hero’s welcome. After a brief stopover in New Delhi, where the team was even hosted by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, he arrived in Bhopal to be swept off his feet by hockey-crazy fans who danced in the streets to celebrate the World Cup win that they believed would erase the stain of 'betrayal' left behind by Akhtar Hussain and Latif-ur-Rehman.
Members of the champion side at the 1948 London Olympics, Bhopal lads Akhtar Hussain and Latif-ur-Rehman migrated to Pakistan. Rubbing salt into wounds that were still bleeding from the communal strife that gripped the subcontinent following Partition, the two went on to play for the green shirts at the 1956 Melbourne Games.
The defections had relegated Bhopal hockey to the sidelines, where it remained for decades before Indian Airlines gave wings to the dying hopes of scores of hockey players in this then-impoverished city, where impassioned young boys fashioned curved branches into khapotas and used them as a substitute for hockey sticks.
Among those who felicitated Khan on his return to Bhopal that day was Shafiq Pathan, a hockey enthusiast and club administrator whose murder at Bhopal Railway Station in the late 1970s was arguably the beginning of the utter degeneration that eventually plunged Bhopal hockey into the disarray in which it lies today.
Amid plans to reinstate Bhopal’s historic Obaidullah Khan Gold Cup, Hockey India is counting on Khan to resuscitate the tourney at its original venue, the Aishbagh Stadium.
Khan has, in turn, constituted a committee comprising several of his old-time companions to oversee preparations and expressed hope that top teams in the country will participate in the tournament, which was once the highlight of the hockey calendar.
Though he has stayed away from hockey for a while now, expect the spitfire septuagenarian to be marshalling from the sidelines when the floodlights come on at the Aishbagh later this year.
