Chandra, a fighter forever

“Life is like a table tennis game. It’s about finding the right balance between deft touches and powerful smashes,” former national champion Venugopal Chandrasekhar once told TOI during a conversation. It summed up his life — a fighter on and off court — battling till the last point. On Wednesday though, the 63-year-old’s willpower was not enough to fight off Covid — the ace player and coach fell to the pandemic that has wreaked havoc. Chandra is survived by his wife Mala and son Sanjay.

Cricket was Chandra’s first love but a head injury while fielding at the slips made him take up table tennis. At 12, Chandra enrolled in the now-defunct Emesor Sports Club in Adyar and his rise in the sport was swift. In 1970, Chandra became the Tamil Nadu subjunior champion. Three years later, he not only became the state junior champion but also made the quarters of the Nationals.

The coming years would see Chandra’s aggressive style of play and never-say-die attitude fetching him three National titles. Despite his prowess on the TT table, Chandra was always serious about his studies. “I was able to balance both TT and academics. For me, it was always a case of doing well in whatever I was taking up,” Chandra had said. He was a gold medallist in BA economics and law from Madras University. Former national champion Kamlesh Mehta, who has had many memorable battles with Chandra on the table, hailed him as a fighter to the core. “Chandra had an aura about him. Nothing would faze him and he would keep fighting right till the end. He was such a difficult opponent to play against and one could never relax for a moment,” recalls the eight-time national champion. Kamlesh had gone down to Chandra in the 1982 Nationals final. However, Kamlesh had his revenge a year later when he overpowered Chandra for his maiden national crown.

Apart from his fighting qualities on the court, another facet of Chandra that impressed Kamlesh was his constant urge to add new shots to his game. “The top-spin was a shot that Chandra employed in his game and it became quite popular in the 1980s. He had mastered the shot at Ichiro Ogimura’s academy in Japan and soon every other player began to learn the nuances of it,” says Kamlesh.

Despite being at the peak of his powers, Chandra’s playing career was cut short due to a botched-up surgery in 1984. Chandra underwent a knee operation at a leading hospital in Chennai which left him partially blind and disabled.

A setback of that magnitude would’ve left anyone demoralised — but not Chandra. He fought a protracted legal battle with the hospital and won about ₹17 lakh compensation after almost a decade. That didn’t help him revive his playing career, but Chandra didn’t lose his passion for the sport — he moved into coaching.

Chandra’s ability to spot and groom talent saw him train a number of champions in his own coaching centre. Players such as G Sathiyan, Chetan Baboor, S Raman, M S Mythili, N R Indu and Preyesh Suresh Raj are some of the prominent names who have benefitted from Chandra’s expertise.

It was on Chandra’s insistence that a young Sathiyan joined his academy at the age of five in 1998. “Chandra sir shaped my game from 1998 to 2012. My parents had gone to his academy to train my elder sisters. But he persisted that I should also join. His death is a personal loss for me and my mind is blank at this point of time,” says Sathiyan, who qualified for the Tokyo Olympics recently.

With the lockdown in Chennai in full swing, most of his students couldn’t pay their last respects to their beloved mentor. “But I know Chandra will always stay in their hearts — the honest, hard-working competitor who never took a step backward,” says Kamlesh.