We are heading towards Satpal Akhada inside the sprawling Chhatrasal Stadium in North Delhi when suddenly the guard comes running, waving his hands frantically from a distance: “The pehalwans are sleeping. You cannot go that side.” It is 3 pm. The sun is blazing. The wrestlers who have been up since the crack of dawn are resting and no one is allowed to disturb them. They will step out to resume practice only at 4.30 pm, when the heat lets up a bit. Star wrestler Sushil Kumar is not among them today because he has injured his eye, and their guru, Satpal Singh, has allowed him to skip his akhada for two days. “But Sushil being Sushil will not miss even a day’s practice, no matter where he is or how long his day has been,” says Satpal. Apart from being his most capable student, Sushil is also Satpal’s son-in-law; the note of affection is hard to miss.
At six feet, Satpal. 57, is not extraordinarily tall. But given his broad wrestler’s physique, he seems to fill up the space in his first-floor office at the stadium. While his students take a siesta, Satpal wraps up his duties as additional director of sports and physical education (Delhi). His office is strewn with trophies — on the floor, on the shelves and on his table. Today, Satpal is famous as Sushil, Amit Kumar and Yogeshwar Dutt’s coach, wrestlers who have qualified for the London Olympics. But those who followed wrestling back in the ’70s and the early ’80s remember him as one of the initial superstars of the sport. From competing in the 1972 Olympics in Munich to winning the gold at the 1982 Asian Games (a year before Sushil was born), the decade saw Satpal at his peak. He has been a national heavyweight champion 16 times over, has won over 3,000 big and small matches in his heydays and, in a record of sorts, has played 21 wrestling matches in one day. His nameplate outside his office, which reads “Mahabali” Satpal Singh, is reminiscent of those days of glory.
“Wrestling then was very different from wrestling now,” Satpal says in his strong Haryanvi accent. “It’s very fast now. One round is limited to two minutes.” He remembers his longest match played in Belgaum in 1981. “It went on for 40 minutes! I was pitched against (Rustam-i-Hind) Dadu Chaugle. It took me that long to bring him down.” His shortest round ever, played in Varanasi against a wrestler from Pakistan, lasted just five seconds. But the present day two-minute make-or-break rounds also mean that wrestlers have to gauge the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses in seconds and need to act much faster. If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s the injuries which the wrestler’s end up with, he says pointing to his cauliflower ears — a badge of pride for all wrestlers in the subcontinent. There are other injuries too, like a faint scar that runs over his right eye, a twisted finger of his right hand and scars near his elbow.
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Wrestling isn’t something Satpal or his family had planned for him. Though his father was a wrestler in their village, Bawana near Delhi, he did not want Satpal to take up the sport. “I was good in studies, you see, and even won a scholarship of Rs 50 back in 1968.” But one day, after some boys had clobbered him in school, Satpal’s mother went straight to her husband and asked him to start taking the boy to the akhada. “That was my first wrestling school, near a pond in the village.” As he shaped up, his confidence grew. A year later, he was at the Guru Hanuman Akhada in Delhi. It was under the tutelage of the legendary wrestling coach that he bagged several awards — winning in a range of weight categories, from 35 kg when he started out to 100 kg. He came home with silver medals in the Commonwealth Games at Auckland (1974), Edmonton (1978), Brisbane (1982) and gold at Commonwealth Wrestling Championship at Edmonton (1979) and Perth (1981).
There were several other awards too. A black-and-white picture on a wall in his office has him kneeling by his guru’s feet with the Asian Games gold medal around his neck. “This is the guru’s status for us wrestlers,” says Satpal who used to wash down 10 litres of milk a day during his wrestling years. Now he says he makes do with only 3 litres. Tea, coffee, aerated drinks, alcohol and food other than that cooked at home are still a strict no. A sworn vegetarian, Singh recalls the problems he would face while competing abroad. “I wouldn’t get the diet I was used to and that affected my performance. For the Munich Olympics I didn’t even have a playing kit.”
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Satpal, a Padma Shri and winner of the Arjuna and Dronacharya awards, reaches Chhatrasal Stadium at 4 am every day. Along with him are two other coaches, Ramphal Mann and Yashvir Singh. In the evening, as he walks into the stadium where his students are sweating it out after the nap, each one of them reaches out to touch his feet. Having paid their respects, they go back to their rigorous regime. Some of them have already stated winning competitions. Amongst the students is Satpal’s younger son, Kush (13). The older one, Luv, “is interested in cricket”.
Satpal remembers his favourite daav-pench (moves). The names are startling: hathi chinghaad, bakra pachchad and dhobi patka. Sushil’s special moves, Satpal says, are Bhaarandaaz, where you put one hand under the opponent’s stomach and swivel him around, and kainchi (scissors), which acts like a double-edged sword to bring the opponent down. He used this one at the Beijing Olympics. Techniques and inspiration can come from any source — even the choreographed rounds of World Wrestling Entertainment. Whatever new the wrestlers learn on their trips abroad, they come and demonstrate to their fellow wrestlers at their guru’s akhada.
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, it was common for wrestlers to be offered film roles — a la Dara Singh. Ask Satpal if he too had a brush with films and he falls silent for a second and then smiles, “Yes, I did a Haryanvi film called Premi Ramphal in 1985.” He played the lead role of Ramphal. The film had songs which required him to dance. “The lead lady was a very good dancer and I fell pale before her. Then the cameraman took me to a room, showed me some steps and took 30-40 takes.” One film and he says he knew this wasn’t what he wanted to do.
Satpal has plans for himself after the London Olympics. “Sooner or later, I know I will enter politics,” he says. It’s not a completely unchartered territory for him. Among those who came for his daughter’s engagement were Rahul Gandhi, Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and BJP leader Rajnath Singh. “And Indira (Gandhi) and Rajiv (Gandhi) had attended my wedding,” he says.
So, politics might just be another chapter in Mahabali’s life.
