Goa's Mr Taekwondo

They barged inside almost all of a sudden. Theophill Lowe was preparing for his final against the local favourite when a group of well-built men surrounded him inside the changing room. He looked around and did a mental count; there were probably a dozen of them. Cornered from all sides, he had nowhere to run, but for a champion taekwondo exponent, running was never an option.

“I just stayed calm,” Theophill recalls, as he rewinds to 1989 when Assam was hosting the Senior National Taekwondo Championship and their local favourite had fought his way to the final.

There was only one hiccup for the locals. Theophill looked too classy in the initial rounds and nobody was left in any doubt that the Goan star would walk away with the gold medal. That would be too much to take for the locals, so they tried the next best thing.

“They threatened me. They asked me to lose the final bout or I would have to face the consequences,” Theophill says.

Instead of getting scared and succumbing to the threats, Theophill was emboldened as he punched his way to the gold medal in the 54kg bantamweight category. The locals couldn’t believe their eyes, but despite the obvious disappointment, didn’t dare to cross Theophill’s path again.

The trouble in Guwahati had little bearing on the man who introduced taekwondo to Goa. Since being introduced to the sport, Goa have won 242 gold medals and have approximately 12,000 exponents. But in 1986 when Theophill was sent to Goa by his father, he cut a lonely figure.

“I was born in Mumbai and grew up there as a kid. In the eighties, Bruce Lee made martial arts fashionable, so everyone wanted to look cool and practice karate,” the 53-year-old recalls.

He tried his luck with dojos run by karate greats Pervez Mistry and Vispy Kapadia but was turned back for being “too thin and too small”. In his hometown of Vashi, on the outskirts of Mumbai, taekwondo was just beginning to take shape and Theophill was welcomed with open arms. Two years later, he won his first gold medal, prompting his father, Joseph Francis, to depute him to Goa.

“My father, a Goan, loved Goa and wanted me to do something for the state. That’s why he sent me here, and I have never felt like going back,” he recalls.

When Theophill set foot on Goan soil for the first time in 1986 and founded the Taekwondo Association of Goa, the sport was non-existent here. He had to train all by himself, travel by foot from his home in Saligao and hope to impress onlookers. In Vasco, he first demonstrated in front of a packed class by Oscar Luis and at the end of the drill, students started queuing up to join taekwondo.

Since that day, the numbers have kept growing.

“Taekwondo is much more sophisticated now with heavy protection and technical scoring. During our days, it was a power-packed sport,” the father of Goan taekwondo says.

During those power-packed days, Theophill — who represented the country twice and won an international gold — was unbeatable.

He won the gold medal at the Nationals from 1986 till 1996 with the triumph over Pravin Borse at the 1994 National Games in Pune remaining the most memorable. Borse, as it turns out, was a star in a much higher weight category who shed weight only to dislodge Theophill. He tried his might, only for the Goan sensation to have the last laugh.

Theophil, however, could only watch helplessly when the gold medal was being unfairly snatched away from him at the 1997 National Games in Bengaluru. In the second round, Theophill was leading his battle against an opponent from Delhi when the judges were changed midway into the bout. From a position of strength, Theophill was made to lose. He couldn’t take it. He simply pulled out his belt and symbolically handed it over to the organisers, bringing an end to what was an outstanding career.