Jalandhar, August 28
As the country celebrates hockey legend Dhyan Chand’s birthday and National Sports Day tomorrow, Jalandhar has a special reason to cheer: A precious artefact belonging to the wizard lies preserved in the heart of the city.

Wielded at the Berlin stadium during the 1936 Olympics, Dhyan Chand’s magic stick even had the Fuhrer (Adolf Hitler) awestruck. As a crowd of 40,000 spectators cheered, the Indian team dealt a blow to the Germans in the final. An initially miffed Hitler, had later, famously offered Dhyan Chand a key post in his army and a German citizenship, which the Indian captain politely refused.

The sporting icon’s stick, preserved in a glass case, now lies in the house of a government contractor, Gurdev Singh, who is the custodian of this sporting legacy which has been with the family since 1960s. The stick was gifted by Dhyan Chand to his businessman friend and Gurdev Singh’s maternal grandfather Puran Singh during his military posting in Punjab.

Of huge heritage importance today, it bears the signatures of Dhyan Chand (Captain) and his teammates of the 1936 squad. “During my childhood, I had no idea about the value of the stick. I wanted to play with it, so I kept on demanding it from my grandfather. But he always told me it is too precious for playing,” says Gurdev.

“I remember seeing it in my mother’s trunk, where it lay for years. It was only in the 1990s that we got to know about its importance and got a glass case made to protect it,” he says.

In 2008, an article on Gurdev’s “treasure” appeared in a newspaper and it was only after that the people came to know about it. In 2009, the Punjab Government — with efforts of then, Director Sports, Pargat Singh — contacted Gurdev for displaying the stick during Punjab Gold Cup in Chandigarh.