In Lord Tennyson’s poem The Brook , an anthropomorphic brook gurgles with mirth while narrating its journey. As it flows, it meets diverse characters. Brimming with hills, bridges, villages, towns, birds, plants and people, its story brings a smile to the reader. During its narration, the brook takes up a refrain — “For men may come and men may go. But I go on forever.”
This line has been flowing as freely – and as perpetually — as the brook. It has been employed, often solemnly, sometimes jocularly, to define the permanence of various things, from institutions and sporting events to corporate appraisals. It is frayed from overuse. Therefore, this writer was not surprised to see it pop up at a recent chat about certain playgrounds in Chennai, in an adapted form. “Players may come and players may go, but these grounds go on forever.”
The informal discussion ‘ran around’ many grounds, including St. Thomas Mount Police Grounds, the military grounds at Veteran Lines, Tambaram Railway Grounds and Somasundaram Corporation Ground, which have incubated and nurtured many a sport in Madras.
On hindsight, Tennyson’s line has been felicitously applied. Over the decades, streams of sportsmen have come and gone, imprinting shoe spikes of memories on their sands, but these playgrounds still survive, receiving fresh impressions of sporting excellence.
And the stories they have to tell are just as engaging as the brook’s.
Boisterous boys cycling from Royapettah, Triplicane and Adyar to play hockey must be among the images cherished by the St. Thomas Mount Police Grounds.
“It was like a foreign tour to us and we would be excited,” is how Indian hockey great V. Baskaran chooses to describe matches here. He’s referring to the 1960s, much of which he spent at school. Baskaran cut his hockey tooth at the Wesley school playground.
Besides Baskaran, other greats of Indian hockey, including the brothers V.J. Peter, V.J. Phillips and V.J. Thomas, and Susainathan have displayed their wizardry at the St. Thomas Mount Police Grounds.
The Mount team was formidable and the nemesis of the Wesley team. If ever a team derived immense strength from the home advantage, it was the one from St. Thomas Mount. They had a distinctly Anglo-Indian flavour and the whole of St. Thomas Mount would put their workaday businesses on hold to be at the Grounds to cheer their players.
Many a time, the boys from Royapettah found themselves pipped at the post; the Mount team often standing hill-high between them and the podium.
Victorious or not, the Royapettah boys would return home a merry bunch from these ‘one-day tournaments’.
“It would be a dawn-to-dusk tournament and many teams would be in the fray. For us, an element of entertainment was attached to the sporting event. Riding doubles on bicycles to St. Thomas Mount was fun. The dynamo would not work in most of our cycles and the headlights would not burn, but the police would relax the rules for us and let us off with a warning,” recalls Baskaran.
The Wesley ground is imbued with history and stories, having been the fulcrum of efforts to promote hockey in the past. Football too. Baskaran recalls how the ground had two sets of goalposts, one for football and another for hockey. The hockey goalposts were positioned in the middle. When a full-fledged, competitive football tournament was on the cards, the hockey goalposts would be removed and later re-installed.
The most engaging hockey stories come from Wesley grounds and the Madrasa I Azam school playground (on Mount Road). “When the Wesley team would play at Madrasa I Azam, Wesley school would work only a half day, so that students could go to cheer their team. Similarly, when the Madrasa I Azam team went to Wesley’s, they would declare a half-day holiday to ensure their team had cheer leaders. On-field, we were rivals, not willing to concede an inch. Off-field, the two teams were a model of friendship. Players in the Madrasa I Azam team would each be given a ‘batta’ of 51 paisa by the school. With that money, those boys would invite us, their rivals, to Ratna Café, which was a five-star hotel to us,” says Baskaran.
In those days, school hockey was closely followed by the media, especially The Hindu, because of the quality it produced, says Baskaran.
School playgrounds — especially, the ones at Wesley, Madrasa I Azam, Doveton Corrie, St. Bede's and St. George’s — were electrified by the stick work of young players with great promise, including Mohammed Riaz, Muneer Sait and Baskaran.
The military grounds at Veteran Lines –— popularly known as The Maidan — must have a raft of charming anecdotes to share, having produced many hockey players from the Anglo-Indian community. In the past, before the Anglo-Indians started migrating to other countries, The Maidan was at the centre of Anglo-Indian life at Veteran Lines. Hockey was invariably a part of any festivities, which would start with a tournament and end in a carnival of dance and music.
Tambaram Railway Grounds has carried the flags of many sports, notably football, cricket and hockey. With the advent of grass and the astro-turf court, hockey faded away from here, as it has from other such playgrounds. But football and cricket linger on. Footballers from the Railways make use of it.
On the topic of football in Tambaram, there is a playground in Kamarajapuram, within Sembakkam limits, which is largely identified with the sport.
“The playground is well over 40 years old. It has witnessed a parade of district football players come and go. Footballers with teams attached to Government institutions play here,” says P. Jegatheesan (56), one of the founder-members of Anna Football Club, which is known for organising one-day tournaments here.
Similarly less-known playgrounds have contributed in quiet, but mammoth, ways to sports. One of them is the Adambakkam playground, primarily associated with hockey.
It has been the stomping ground of the Adambakkam Hockey Club, formed in 1957, and registered in 1963. It has popularised the sport at this ground, which has witnessed many players rise in stature and be absorbed into teams of Government organisations.
S. Kumarselvam, treasurer of the Club, says that from this playground, many players have gone on to play at the National level. One of them, Jagath Jyothi, has gone beyond, having represented India at the junior level.
And, then, there is Somasundaram Cricket Ground, called a people’s playground, which has had a ringside view of great cricketing careers. It has been a university for unstructured cricket, promoting tennis-ball cricket, considered by many cricketers as a valuable asset in the development of skills required for the highest forms of the sport.
Akilan Pari, Indian basketball player, says people’s playgrounds should be prepared to offer something for every sport. He explains that the outdoor court at the J.J. Stadium draws numerous people, underlying an interest in the sport.
Accounts from basketball courts, made accessible for all, will definitely add another sweet chapter to the anthology of stories narrated by playgrounds.
