- Lived:
- 29 August 1905, Allahabad (Prayagraj) → army cantonments across north India, Jhansi, and the hockey grounds of five continents; died 3 December 1979, Delhi
- Field:
- field hockey — centre-forward and captain; the first athlete in this book
- The Big Idea:
- A teenage sepoy who taught himself hockey by moonlight made colonized India the undisputed best in the world at something — three Olympic golds in a row, 1928, 1932, 1936 — and played the game so far beyond everyone else that the world's word for him was simply "the Wizard."
- In their words:
- "I am not a very important man, good enough to write an autobiography" — the opening of his memoir Goal! (1952)
- If you remember one thing:
- The greatest hockey player who has ever lived learned the game on a parade ground after dark, won India its first world supremacy while India was still a colony, and died poor in a general hospital ward — and both halves of that sentence are this chapter.