Hawa Singh remains the only Indian boxer to have won two Asian Games gold medals, consecutively at that, in 1966 and 1970. This was obviously in the era prior to the Soviet Union breaking into fragments and boxers from those countries dominating the amateur (and occasionally the professional) heavyweight scene.
But for a decade or so in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no better heavyweight boxer than Hawa Singh in Asia. In India, his dominance was so complete that he won the national championships eleven years in a row, from 1961 to 1972.
Hawa Singh moved to Bhiwani on commission from the Ministry of Sport to set up a Sports Authority of India centre for boxing in the late 1980s. And that’s pretty much where this story begins. The story of how Bhiwani has not only become the first port of call for budding boxers from the region, but also the nursery that gives the national team more than half their contingents each time a big tournament is around the corner.
Those really were early days though, and Rajkumar Sangwan is the only big name boxer to emerge from the Hawa Singh stables in that era. Among other big achievements, Sangwan brought home four international gold medals, including the gold medal at the 1994 Asian Championships in Tehran. And even today, not just Sangwan, but all other boxers from the state, speak of Hawa Singh with a touch of awe.
But seeing that not many of us, leave alone me, have met Hawa Singh, it made sense to touch base with his best-known protégé to tell us about the man. Remember, Sangwan belonged to the first batch of students that Hawa Singh instructed at SAI Bhiwani. He is currently also in the middle of a PhD on his mentor.
Captain Hawa Singh retired from the Army in 1986.
This was around the time that SAI opened its first set of Centres, one of them in Bhiwani. Haryana had by then made a bit of a mark in some other sports and was noted as a ‘sporty’ part of the country. Bhiwani was chosen because the then chief minister of Haryana, Bansi Lal, wanted the Centre located in his hometown. So Hawa Singh, because of his background as a champion boxer, and probably because he was from Haryana anyway, was chosen as the chief coach of the boxing wing in Bhiwani.
When Hawa Singh took over, he had a total of ten students to lord it over. His style of coaching was based on the Army format. Strength was key, reflected in the "straight punches" the boys became adept at throwing. Apart from strength, the focus was on footwork and endurance. That’s it.
Sangwan quickly became Hawa Singh’s favourite student. They were also similarly built, both of them touching 185 centimetres and weighing around 90 kilograms. And that led to Sangwan getting, probably, the best of what the master had to offer. Once, when he was still in the middleweight (75kg) category as a teenager, Sangwan tells me, "I was sparring with my usual partner, and because I knew Hawa Singh sir was paying close attention to me, I put on a great show. I was at my best and I hammered my partner. I recall Hawa Singh telling me from outside the ring, 'tera hawaijahaaz mein baithna pucca hai' – that I would be travelling abroad for boxing competitions soon. Of course, I did not believe he was serious. He repeated the same words, adding, ‘If you can play like you did today, then you will be very difficult to beat, even by the top fighters', which is what happened."
But Hawa Singh was not a gentle master.
Sangwan tells us that his coach’s torturous training methods had put his younger self off the sport enough for him to run away from the SAI hostel and return home convinced that he would never be a boxer, that boxing was just not for him. "He was trained in the Army style, and obsessed about making us run on concrete tracks for half the day. We used to wear those cheap white PT shoes that everyone wore those days and the soles of our feet would be full of blisters by the end of the day. My calf muscles would ache and I was barely able to stand straight. But just then he would ask us to start training. I had had enough and decided to run away. But somehow he found his way to my house – which was in Bhiwani at the time – and came and spoke to my father, whom he knew distantly. Then he came to me and told me that he understood what I was going through, but 'tu chhod ke mat jaa, tu bada boxer banega.'"
Hawa Singh was a simple man from an uncomplicated era.
He fought the most straightforward sport, dominated it when he was at his peak, and then imparted the same philosophy to whoever found his way to Bhiwani around that time. People who met him during his years as a coach remember him telling them that boxing is essentially a simple sport; it’s about punching and avoiding punches.
So no one should complicate matters. Sangwan, who had a vantage point few others did, says, "Hawa Singh sir used to tell us that boxing is basically a game of the eyes and of the feet, the hands are just incidental. Every punch you land is actually made possible by your feet; everything depends on your body position. And the eyes help you avoid punches."
Besides, being from the pre-gymnasium era, Hawa Singh’s concept of weight-training was to have his students carry one another on their shoulders or backs and run. Sangwan says, "Never have we complained of sprains or cramps or pulls like the boxers these days do. None of us ever used weights. It didn’t matter."
So that was Hawa Singh, the man who taught Bhiwani, and Haryana, how to box.
Excerpted with permission from Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India, Shamya Dasgupta, HarperCollins India.