Pro Kabaddi 2019: After breakthrough 2018-19 season, Pawan Kumar Sehrawat aspires for spot in Indian team

Pawan Kumar Sehrawat walks along the hotel lobby at a luxury hotel in rain-soaked Mumbai, wearing shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt that shows off the biceps. The swagger is all too familiar. Leading raider of the Bengaluru Bulls and the Most Valuable Player of season 6 in Pro Kabaddi, he’s a man at the top of his game and knows it well. But despite the hype, he makes time for honesty.

“I am lazy, have always been,” the 22-year-old says with a smile. “Since you guys came to interview today, I got an excuse to skip gym.”

His coach, Randhir Singh, who discovered Sehrawat, is fortunately nowhere within earshot.

“Coach saab also knows how lazy I am,” he explains over a cup of frothy coffee but steadfastly keeps away from plate of cookies. “But he knows, I may not train for a long time but if I have committed an hour I give my hundred percent in that.” For the team, it’s an off day amidst a tiring, three-month long season of kabaddi, which includes travelling up and down and across the country.

Sehrawat, meanwhile, is still riding from a wave of attention from last season. Not many saw the barrel-chested raider coming. Playing in his fourth season in Pro Kabaddi in 2018-19, Sehrawat bulldozed through defences, surprising them with his strength and speed. He led Bengaluru Bulls to the final, and there, scored a record high of 22 points as Bulls got the better of his former team Gujarat Fortunegiants.

“I wanted to do my best for the team,” he says. “But I never thought I’d do it so well, lead my team to the title or finish as the Most Valuable Player.” To say the least, the numbers he notched up were quite impressive. He scored the most number of points (282), most number of raid points (271), most successful raids (209) and most super raids (12). And it came on the back of his least encouraging outing in the League.

“The season before that was quite bad,” he says of his stint at the Gujarat Fortunegiants in 2017. “It was a combination of me not getting enough chances and not performing well whenever I did.” In season 5, Sehrawat played only nine matches and earned 10 raid points.

“They had bought me for some 14 lakh (Rs 13.8 lakh to be precise). I thought they have spent so much and I couldn’t do anything. Maybe, next year no one will even give Rs 8 lakh for me. There were so many experienced players who had gone unsold. I was thinking maybe I should quit the League; leave before they throw me out. I work as a TT at New Delhi station, which is quite close to my house, so I was thinking I will just concentrate on my job.”

But Randhir Singh believed in him, and gave him another chance.

“He (Randhir) called me up after season 5 and told me not to be disheartened,” Sehrawat recalls. “He said he will bring me back to Bengaluru Bulls. He helped me regain my confidence. Bengaluru bought me for Rs 52.8 lakhs; the price didn’t matter I was just looking for a chance to do well.”

He justified his coach and captain Rohit Kumar’s faith in him by leading them to their first Pro Kabaddi title.

“Rohit is a very good captain, he never let me feel the pressure. He would always tell me you go in bindaas (carefree), if you get caught I’m there,” he says. “The coach? Well, he hasn’t said till now that I did very well. He always tells me, ‘it’s alright, you played well for one season. Usme kya hai?’ He says that more to challenge me, so I keep my feet on the ground and strive do even better.”

The Bengaluru Bulls coach has been quite the guiding force in Sehrawat’s career. He was the one who discovered the raider during a Northern Railways trial and offered him a Railways job in 2015 and signed him for the Bengaluru franchise for the third season of Pro Kabaddi in 2016.

That job was essential for Sehrawat, 18 then, to help his family’s financial woes. His father’s plastic recycling factory had shut down and the family lived off a small grocery shop. Sehrawat wasn’t quite the academic that his mother wanted him to be, but his play was good enough for a neat salary.

“Wo kehte hai na, ‘Padhoge likhoge to banoge nawab’. My mother used to take that very seriously,” he says. “She wanted me to study well. But I didn’t enjoy it as much. Also, I don’t like working too hard. In school I used to play kabaddi. I was quite healthy as a kid, and it was quite natural that I used to do well against the thinner kids on the kabaddi mat. But it wasn’t till I was in the ninth standard that I thought of playing it seriously. No one in my family has played sport so we didn’t really think of it as a career.”

But Pro Kabaddi has given him, and his peers, an unprecedented opportunity to fame and fortune. Sehrawat says though his family doesn’t involve too much in his career they feel proud when people talk about him and his success. He has bought land and built a house for himself, a car and a bike from money earned from the League.

“It has been life-changing,” says Sehrawat. “The one thing I aspire for now is breaking into the Indian team.” And he’s ready to work hard—or at least smart—for it.