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They called him the Bullock. When he walked into the court, his fans, most of them young men and boys pushing and shoving near the endline to see him up close, would scream his name. At one such matches in the village of Puliyangudi near Tirunelveli, Mari Selvaraj was in the audience. The Tamil film director was probably nine or 10 years old then. He looked at star kabaddi player ‘Manathi’ P. Ganesan in awe. Years later, he went on to make a film inspired by his life. Mari’s Bison with Dhruv Vikram reprising the lead, is winning accolades. At the centre of it is 55-year-old Ganesan, who played for Tamil Nadu for ten years, India for four years, winning the Arjuna award in 1995, the second sportsman from Tamil Nadu to be given the recognition for kabaddi. The film is a fictionalised account of Ganesan’s life. At its core is his struggle to succeed against the odds. Ganesan, who is now based in Tirunelveli, was in Coimbatore on a personal visit. The current coach of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board kabaddi team, he is posted as Senior Sports Officer with the TNEB. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing since Bison came out and we catch up with him for a brief chat. Ganesan and Mari are relatives. “Thambi spoke to me after completing the shoot for Karnan, saying that he wanted to make a film based on my life,” he recalls. Mari and his assistants held several interviews with Ganesan, during which he opened up about his life and the sport that defines it. Once the story was ready, Mari got Ganesan on board to train Dhruv. Ganesan worked with the actor for over a year, at the end of which Dhruv turned into a well-rounded kabaddi player himself. “He worked hard for the role, and was prepared to do anything for it,” says Ganesan. “Kabaddi is my life,” says Ganesan. The sport came naturally to him, and he played barefoot in the mud ground of his village of Manathi in Thoothukudi district when he was just eight. “I started playing seriously from the time I was 12,” he says. Kabaddi is the lifeline for young men in Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli. “My father played it, so did my grandfather,” says Ganesan. “Each of the 50 to 60 villages and hamlets surrounding Manathi have their own teams formed by a few friends.” There is Jolly Friends, Lion’s Club (the team from Manathi), Young Prince, Morning Star, among others, all of which prefix their village’s name to theirs. “Back then, we didn’t have open playgrounds and kabaddi was something that did not require much space.” For young men like him, who mostly worked in the paddy and banana fields that surrounded their villages, kabaddi was an outlet for the immense energy and brute strength that ran in their veins. Once work in the fields was over, they would gather to practise, even travelling to nearby villages to play multiple teams. It is during such tournaments that heroes are made. Ganesan grew up admiring kabaddi players such as Raja, Panneerselvam and Suyambu Lingam, taking in their techniques and unique characteristics. “They played for Thoothukudi club teams,” he recalls. It was when Ganesan did his higher secondary at Pope Memorial Higher Secondary School in Sawyerpuram, that his game won recognition from his Physical Education teacher Thangarasu, who assembled a team for the school. “I played for the school team and went on to represent Manathi and the district teams,” he says. Ganesan was then invited to play for the VP Brothers team and the Sun Paper Mill’s team, earning entry into the TNEB, State, and Indian teams. He played centre, a position taken by the key raider. The journey was far from easy. But Ganesan was fortunate to have players such as Raja, Panneerselvam and Suyambu Lingam who fought for his name to be in the selection lists. He was in the team that won India a gold in the 12th Asian Games at Hiroshima in 1994, and also won gold in the Nationals in 1993, coming third in the Federation Cup tournament in 1995. Ganesan says that it was only after joining the TNEB team could he afford to spend on a special diet. “Till then, I mostly ate pazhaya soru with dry fish and a chunk of karupatti on the side, and large ellu urundais my mother would make at home with jaggery,” he recalls. For strength and endurance training, he filled sand in sacks to sling them across his shoulder, drag heavy wooden ploughs across the field, and ran for hours together on beach sand and pond rims. He would practise head-butting — that earned him the monicker Bullock — on a coconut tree. “The tree eventually cracked and fell,” he laughs. Ganesan is now organising yearly kabaddi camps for boys and girls from across Tamil Nadu with the Jesus Redeems club at Nalumavadi in Thoothukudi, and wants to identify more talent. Did his rural upbringing contribute to his game? “Maybe,” says Ganesan. “But that doesn’t mean someone from the city cannot achieve the same glory. Look at Kannagi Nagar’s Karthika whose team clinched gold at the U-18 Asian Youth Games recently. Anything is possible for someone who is willing to work hard.”
