Yuvraj Singh’s father, Yograj Singh He was his first coach. Yograj, who continues to coach children and also work as an actor in Punjabi films, recently spoke about the time when started training a young Yuvraj against the wishes of his family. He recalled that Yuvraj was just 5 or 6 years old when he threw his medals and skates out of the car because he wanted to groom a cricket champion who would one day take revenge on his father.
Yograj Singh said: “I will shoot myself”
In a chat shared on Saurav Yaduvanshi’s Sports Launchpad YouTube channel Yograj Singh, Yograj recalled an incident from when Yuvraj was just a few months old. “One day, I was very sad, crying a lot and thinking about what God had done to me. At 2 or 3 in the morning, I picked up Yuvi and hugged him. I thought that if I die like this, it won’t mean anything. Even my family will say that this man didn’t do anything. I placed Yuvi in front of the Guru Granth Sahib and told him, either you take me away or give him a blessing,” he said, adding that he didn’t want to live like a loser. “I’ll shoot myself,” he said.
He recalled that he gave a plastic bat to Yuvraj when he was almost one and a half years old and when he hit the ball he applied so much force that he managed to break the window glass. Yograj said he had not taught his son anything at that time. “I thought this kid was a package. At that point he had just started walking,” she said.
Yograj said that as Yuvraj started growing up, he started playing tennis and skating and started losing interest in cricket. To bring him back to cricket, Yograj did something drastic. He shared: “I wanted my son to get revenge on me, the system, the selectors and everyone who laughed at me,” he recalled. Yograj once played cricket with Kapil Dev, who eventually became one of the most popular players of his time.
Yograj threw 5-year-old Yuvraj’s medals and skates from the car
“One day, Yuvraj was skating in a competition and he got a lot of medals. We sat in the car, I took his medals and threw them out of the car. This was the wrong thing to do. Then I took his skates, threw them and he started crying,” she recalled. As young Yuvraj cried, Yograj roared, “Shut up.” As he had a “very bad temper”, Yuvraj and his mother did not talk much in the car.
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Upon returning home, Yograj’s mother told him to leave the house if he was going to bother Yuvraj like this. “She told me it’s better if you die. She told me if you’re going to treat my grandson like this, you’d better leave the house. She abused me a lot. I told them, I told them, ‘Either I’ll live in this house or he’ll live. I want him to play cricket, and I won’t let him go until he plays. You can do whatever you want,'” he said.
Yograj proudly announced that he turned Yuvraj into someone who played cricket even as he battled cancer. “This is how champions are made,” he said.