Sports

Kabbaddi Makes Football Look Like T-Ball

by DANIEL GIRARD

 

It's game time.

With summer arriving, men, women and youngsters meet on playing fields across Toronto (GTA, Ontario, Canada) to compete in an array of sports, from the more traditional soccer, baseball and slo-pitch softball to co-ed upstarts such as flag football, beach volleyball and ultimate Frisbee.

But for those very select few guys looking to battle a buddy, but still not sure that ultimate fighting is for them, there's kabbaddi, a game of speed and power intensely followed by GTA Sikh-Canadians and other South Asians.

Though Humraj Singh Deol also plays basketball and soccer, it's the ancient game of his people that has made the biggest impact on his life.

Literally.

From the strains and sprains to that deep-down body ache, Humraj, 20, carries a reminder of his latest kabbaddi tournament long after the cheering crowds have gone home.

Little wonder. Kabbaddi, a sport from Punjab and the Indian subcontinent developed some 4,000 years ago to train warriors, features the speed, agility and body contact of football - minus the helmet and pads.

In fact, the only thing worn by the fit and muscular players is shorts, along with frequent bandages for injured knees and elbows.

The game features two teams of ten players, on a circular field twenty-three metres in diameter.

Teams alternate, sending one "raider" to the other side's half of the field, where he has thirty seconds to tag one of four "stoppers", who link their arms together.

The raider must then return to his own territory.

Once a tag is made, it's a one-on-one battle between the raider, trying to get back, and the stopper, trying to hold him on his side.

A successful trip earns a point. If tackled, pinned or stopped from getting back to his half in thirty seconds, the other side scores one.

The team with the most points after two twenty-minute halves wins.

Deol, an electromechanical engineering technology student at Sheridan College, is a "raider" on a Brampton West under-21 team.

"It's a more physical way of wrestling", says Humraj, who was introduced to kabbaddi by his father, an immigrant from Punjab, where it's as big a game as hockey is in Canada. "We've been raised watching this. We're playing for our own pride but at the same time we don't want to let our fathers down".

Traditionally, in lieu of a thirty-second clock, a raider was allowed to stay on the opposition side of the field for as long as he could hold his breath, verified by the continuous chanting of the word "kabbaddi".

"No kicking, no punching, no poking eyes or pulling down shorts", explains Narinder Singh Chahal, 50, who emigrated from Punjab in 1983 and helps organize weekly semi-professional kabbaddi tournaments in Brampton and Mississauga.

But, from the reaction of the cheering crowd, which swells to about 4,000 men and boys for the day's final few games, the highlight is clearly when two men are locked in a vicious struggle - one trying to break free, the other to hold on.

"It's a team game", Narinder says. "But it's about individual battles".

Tournaments are held Sundays - July 6, 20 and 27 at the Powerade Centre Outdoor Sports Park in Brampton, Ontario, and July 14 at Wildwood Park in Malton, Ontario.

 

June 18, 2008

 

 

 

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