PKL 2024: Jang Kun-Lee and the toll of being kabaddi’s evangelist in South Korea

The romanticism associated with sport often glosses over just how heartbreaking and hopeless it can sometimes be.

Korean kabaddi is a case in point.

For the systems and public of South Korea, kabaddi was among the least known team sports, something to follow at the quadrennial Asian Games and erratic World Cups and then quickly cast out of memory.

Over the last two Olympic cycles, powerhouses India and Iran have made leaps in their development of the sport. Meanwhile, there’s barely been a skeletal system to hold up kabaddi in this part of the world. The services of Indian coaches from the Sports Authority of India were enlisted to work on skill and technique over the past decade.

Classes, which initially began in car garages, slowly moved to the judo hall of Busan University. The nation had around 100-odd registered players pursuing the sport at a given time. In the 2010s, that group of players saw the emergence of a young raider – Lee Jang-Kun.

Strong and agile, Lee made heads turn in the international events leading up to the 2014 Incheon Asian Games.

“I played without knowing anything in the 2013 Asian Indoor Games. I just played with confidence and things worked out. This was the first time we won a medal (bronze) in Korean kabaddi history,” Lee told a Korean news channel a few years ago.

“Besides the Indian players, I think I was the best player then. When the game was done, the Indian players came to enquire who I was and get to know me,” he added.

This eventually culminated in a Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) contract, starting what would be a memorable journey with one of India’s oldest sports. He represented Bengal Warriors in the initial seasons of the PKL.

Lee was a vital part of the Korean national side too, even going on to lead the team. The unit picked up a bronze in the 2014 Asiad. 

The winds began to change from 2016. At the Kabaddi World Cup in Ahmedabad, South Korea stunned India with a 34-32 win in the tournament opener. Lee produced a terrific performance in the last two minutes to turn the game in his team’s favour. 

Korea also handed India its first-ever loss at the Asian Games, beating the sport’s Goliath 24-23 in Jakarta in 2018. Korea would go on to win silver in the Indonesian capital. Iran took gold, while India had to settle with a place on the lowest step on the podium. 

Lee has seen India’s kabaddi assembly line churn out generation after generation of talent. His burst in international kabaddi coincided with the tail end of the reign of legends like Anup Kumar and Rakesh Kumar. Lee was a Korea regular before Rahul Chaudhari and Pardeep Narwal became Team India staples and he is now witness to a new era of all-rounders like Pawan Sehrawat and Aslam Inamdar ruling the roost.

Long before Korean pop influences like BTS took India by storm, it was the ‘Korean King’, as Lee came to be called by his fans, who had the nation wrapped around his finger.

The Iranians, the only foil to India’s dominance in the sport, were admired and feared even, but this son of Korean soil excelling in an indigenous sport of a country far from his own endeared him to the audiences.

That frenzy grew when he moved to Patna Pirates in 2019 to turn out alongside homegrown superstar Narwal. However, Lee has been missing in action in PKL since.

Despite being picked by the Pirates in the 2021 edition, he never made it to India.

Hurdles aplenty

“2019, 2020 – COVID became a big issue here in Korea and I got a bit scared to travel halfway across the world. So, I decided not to go to India,” Lee told  Sportstar in a video conversation.

COVID-19 tightened the noose around an already struggling sport and the irregularities in international competitions outside the Asian Games pushed it further down the priority list for the powers that be.

Players had to make a living picking up odd jobs on the side. The inability to travel to India meant Lee also gave up on a pay cheque worth millions and sought other ways to support himself and his family. 

He dabbled in a bunch of side jobs, including running deliveries, working as a bodyguard and a gym trainer. He also featured in a few TV shows in Korea including Physical 100 on Netflix and The Gentlemen’s League (also called Let’s Play Soccer).

Wherever he went, Lee was an object of interest. His sport was still alien to most participants and judges he met on shows but he used his platform to make a case for the game.

“People here got to know about me and kabaddi at the same time. I want to be a pioneer for the game in Korea,” he said on  The Gentlemen’s League, a show where two former professional footballers, Ahn Jung-Hwan and Lee Dong Guk, recruit star athletes from other sports to form a football team. 

Deja vu

Football and Lee go a long way. As a child, his early ambitions were to make a name for himself in this sport. Kabaddi was yet to find him then. However, financial struggles nipped those dreams in the bud. 

“Soccer costs a lot for camp, off-season training and dormitory fees, but my early circumstances were quite difficult. My father’s kidneys were bad and he underwent dialysis. So, our money was entirely focused on the hospital bills and there wasn’t much left for anything else,” he added.

Lee eventually became quite proficient in rowing, judo and martial arts. When he was preparing for a physical entrance exam, he discovered kabaddi. Initially, like most of his compatriots, the ‘silliness’ of a sport played in a far-away country on mud didn’t attract him, but a coach who saw him train asked him to give kabaddi another look.

Lee slowly emerged as the brightest in the bunch of prospective candidates to represent a national kabaddi team. Indian coaches like Ashan Kumar Sangwan, Jaivir Sharma and current technical director of PKL, E. Prasad Rao, worked extensively with the nation in the lead-up to the Incheon and Jakarta campaigns.

Rao, who played a pivotal role in setting up the Korean Kabaddi Association, bemoans just how much the seasons have changed for the sport in that part of the world.

“The former chief of the Korean Kabaddi Federation, Yoon Yeong Hak, was a very passionate man. He helped us with our efforts in training a generation of players,” Rao recalled. 

Funding, however, was still far from where it needed to be.

“Kabaddi here is an unpopular event among unpopular events. When the team participated in the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, we didn’t receive any support. We didn’t even have competition jerseys or award kits,” Lee narrated in his first appearance on  The Gentlemen’s League.

One of the other participants, taken aback, pointed out that medals would not be handed out to nations unless the teams came in their official kit, a fact Lee corroborated.

“We couldn’t attend the ceremonies at the Games because of this. But the players were confident of winning a medal at the edition and so we all pooled in money to be able to procure those team kits. The clothes we wore when we won those medals were bought with our money,” he remembered as he wiped tears away.

“When we beat India, we had so many reporters come to us and cover our stories. But, on the day of our final, these reporters came to us and said, ‘Sorry we can’t attend this, the soccer final is on the same day as the kabaddi final.’ We had no one covering us when we played Iran.”

Those meteoric campaigns would have changed things, one would think. Sadly, no.

The COVID-19 pandemic made the situation worse. Slowly, the Korean presence in the sport’s only steady competitive entity- the PKL – also waned.

A change in administration saw the game and some of its older players lose favour. Lee was missing from the Korean sides that participated in the Asian Kabaddi Championships in Busan, his hometown, and the Asian Games in Hangzhou last year. In Busan, he met the Indian team and his former coach, Ashan Kumar, as a spectator. The question persisted – “Why aren’t you playing, brother?”

Lee’s return to the PKL after four years, picked by his old team Pirates for Rs. 17.50 lakh (approximately 27.7 million South Korean won), champions of the sport hope, will give the sport a new lease of life in the nation. Hopefully, the ‘one step forward, three steps back’ cycle ends here. 

Pioneer first, player second

Being the face of something has its pros and cons. While you become synonymous with the entity, it also takes away some of the simplest parts of the experience. Long before Lee became the ‘Korean King’, he was just a player who longed to keep upping the level of his game. 

“When I first came to India, more than my career or any big picture stuff, I just wanted to play against competent players and learn from them. The league’s best players were in the Indian team so it was a chance to analyse their game and figure out how to beat them,” Lee once told a local broadcaster. 

“In Korea, there are no spectators. So, it feels like we’re playing by ourselves. In India, there are a lot of spectators who record the game and send it to me on Instagram. Or give me good fan art. They genuinely cared for me and I’ll always remember that. I am someone who does better when I have people cheering me on so I’ve always been able to do better there.”

Weeks away from returning to kabaddi’s motherland, in a video conversation with  Sportstar while running errands, Lee hopes his fans will give him another chance to win them over. 

“In 2019, I was young. Now I am a bit older. But, I still have the same speed and skill. No problem there. I have been watching the seasons of PKL. In the 10th season, I saw that most raiders are really fast but not strong. Only Maninder (Singh) and Sachin (Tanwar) showed some brute strength. In season XI, I hope I can fill that gap. I have speed and strength both,” he said, days after the auction. 

“Long time no see, India. I am very fit. Trust me to put on a good show for you.”