Yuvraj Singh’s father Yograj Singh is known to be an extremely strict parent. But his earliest lessons in cricket came from his father, Yograj Singh, a former cricketer who remains active as a coach for young players and also works as an actor in Punjabi cinema. Recently, Yograj spoke candidly about the intense and often controversial beginnings of Yuvraj’s training, revealing how he pushed his son towards cricket despite strong opposition from within the family. Yograj recalled that Yuvraj was barely five or six years old when he made a decision to pull him away from other sports. At the time, Yuvraj was excelling in skating and tennis, collecting medals and slowly drifting away from cricket. But Yograj was clear, he wanted to raise a cricketing champion who would one day avenge his own unfulfilled dreams.
He also shared a deeply emotional memory from when Yuvraj was still an infant. Recounting a night of despair, Yograj said, “One day, I was very sad, crying a lot and I was thinking what God had done to me. At 2-3 am, I picked up Yuvi and I hugged him. I thought that if I just die like this, it will mean nothing. Even my family will say that this man did nothing. I placed Yuvi in front of Guru Granth Sahib and I said either you take me away or you give him a blessing.” He admitted that he felt incapable of living with a sense of failure, adding starkly, “I will shoot myself.”Yograj went on to describe moments that, in hindsight, felt like early signs of Yuvraj’s raw power. When Yuvraj was around a year and a half old, Yograj handed him a plastic bat. One swing was enough to shatter a windowpane. “I thought that this boy is a package. He had just started walking then,” Yograj said, stressing that he had not taught his son anything at that stage.As Yuvraj grew older, he lost interest in cricket. He was more invested in skating, even winning multiple medals at competitions. That worried Yograj, who believed his son was slipping away from what he felt was his true calling. Determined to force a course correction, Yograj admitted to taking an extreme step.Recalling a particularly painful incident, he said, “Yuvraj was skating at a competition one day and he got a lot of medals. We sat in the car and I took his medals and threw them out of the car. This was the wrong thing to do. Then I took his skates and threw them out and he started crying.” As Yuvraj broke down, Yograj shouted at him to stop, later acknowledging his own anger issues and describing his temper as “very bad.” In that tense car ride, neither Yuvraj nor his mother spoke up.The fallout at home was severe. Yograj’s mother confronted him, furious at how he was treating her grandson. According to Yograj, she told him it would be better if he left, or even died, rather than continue troubling Yuvraj. “She told me that if you are going to treat my grandson like this, you better get out of the house. She abused me a lot,” he recalled. Yograj responded with a firm ultimatum: “Either I will live in this house, or he will. I want him to play cricket, and I will not let go until he plays. You can do whatever you want to.”Yograj, who once played alongside Kapil Dev before his own career stalled, framed his actions as part of a larger battle against the system that, in his view, had wronged him. “I wanted my son to get revenge for me, from the system, the selectors, and all those who laughed at me,” he said.
About the Author
