Under the dilapidated ceiling of the Taji Khan Hazara Sports Complex—its white paint now grey and peeling—72-year-old Habibullah Jaferi practised punches with a young student. A spot of sunlight lit the cold, concrete ground. The two danced around it. As his narrowed eyes followed her movements from behind a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, she positioned her gloves close to her face, swung a left, then a hurried right. He parried the blows, before shifting his focus to the next student.
For six days a week, Habibullah holds free coaching classes at this club on Quetta’s Alamdar Road—one of four boxing clubs in the neighbourhood. A washed-out poster of the “father of boxing,” as he is known here, standing next to his star student, Syed Asif Shah Hazara, was plastered on the wall. Through the windows, the towering, barren mountains that surround the city were visible. Habibullah would practise along the foothills as a teenager in the 1960s. He would run in the open field, throwing his bare fists against the wind. “Has Habibullah lost his mind?” alarmed bystanders would ask his younger brother, Hasratullah Changezi.
“Boxing was an unknown sport in Balochistan,” Hasratullah said. But whenever the state-run channel PTV would telecast the fights of Muhammad Ali, the boys of Alamdar Road would huddle around black-and-white televisions to watch. Then, in the 1980s, they began renting video cassettes of the matches of boxing legends. “We never missed a fight,” Habibullah remembered. “We would hire a TV and VCR from the shop and all would gather to watch the fight. The children would get very excited. They would imitate the moves of Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson.”
Even now, decades later, Ali remains the reason many children here are drawn to boxing—although YouTube has replaced state television and VCRs as the medium for watching the sport—Fatima, a 15-year-old who already holds a black belt in karate and took up boxing when the club introduced an afternoon slot for girls last year, told me. Her friends made fun of her for taking up such a “masculine sport,” but her family has largely been supportive. “It’s more difficult than karate. There are more injuries,” she said, holding out her hardened knuckles.
Alamdar Road’s identity was once linked to the imambargahs—Shia congregation halls—scattered along its length. Now, its name brings back dreadful memories of 10 January 2013, when two explosions ripped through a snooker hall and killed over a hundred people. Incessant attacks against the Hazara community, including bomb blasts and targeted killings, have led the Hazara-dominated neighbourhoods of Quetta to become heavily fortified ghettos. Haji Abdul Wahid, who owns the Azaad Boxing Club in the neighbourhood, said that earlier, “there used to be an equal number of Baloch and Hazara students training, but barely anyone from outside comes anymore. We can’t go outside to practise either. We’ve become isolated. It’s like we’re in camouflage here.”
Despite the turmoil they live in, the Hazaras continue to take immense pride in their success at competitive sports. Last year, 19-year-old Nargis Hameedullah returned home to cheering crowds after winning a bronze medal in karate at the Jakarta–Palembang Asian Games. However, apart from the occasional accolade won by Asif, the state of boxing remains a far cry from its glory days in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, the Hazara boxers of Quetta—led by the formidable trio of Abrar Hussain, Haider Ali and Asghar Ali Changezi—would regularly bring home medals from international events. All three honed their craft at Alamdar Road, under Habibullah’s watchful eye.
Habibullah took up coaching after touring the country as an amateur boxer for several years. He represented Balochistan for the first time in an inter-provincial competition at Karachi in 1971. There, he met the legendary sports official Anwar Chowdhry, then the secretary of the Pakistan Boxing Federation, who would go on to serve as the president of the International Boxing Association for two decades.
On a trip to Quetta, Chowdhry was taken aback by the popularity of the sport among the locals, after attending a boxing meet on the grounds of a government school. “It was a football field,” Habibullah recalled. “We had a boxing ring we could dismantle and get reassembled there.” When Chowdhry saw the crowd of people clamouring to buy tickets, he told Habibullah to let them in for free.
Chowdhry sent Abdullah Baloch from Lyari—the conflict-ridden town in Karachi that is the other powerhouse of Pakistani boxing, and was the hometown of Hussain Shah, who would go on to win Pakistan’s only Olympic medal in the sport, at Seoul in 1988—to coach the local prospects, including Habibullah. Then, during a tournament in 1980–81, he told Habibullah to start coaching. “He told me, ‘Make these boys into something. Otherwise, all this talent will go to waste.’”
In 1997, after spending over a decade touring the world as a light-heavyweight and heavyweight boxer, Asghar Ali Changezi fought his final bout, in Quetta. He had won his first gold medal at the 1984 South Asian Games, at the age of 17. Then, in 1992, he won the gold at the Asian Championship in Bangkok, and qualified for the Barcelona Olympics. “At the time, the Koreans dominated boxing in Asia, but I was able to defeat North Korea in the semifinals,” he said.
Asghar’s interest in boxing was spurred by watching his “senior” Abrar Hussain train as a child. A few years older than him, Hussain, a light-middleweight boxer, would go on to thrice represent Pakistan at the Olympics and become the chairman of Balochistan’s sports board after his retirement. In 2011, Hussain was killed by unknown assailants as he stepped out of his office. In response, Haider Ali, the third giant of Quetta boxing, who won the featherweight gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, fled the country—“to save his life,” Asghar told me—and settled in the United Kingdom.
Asghar decided to stay on. After retiring, he joined the Quetta police. He confessed that he no longer follows the boxing scene closely. “What I notice now is that whenever our boxing teams play internationally, they return home empty-handed,” he mused. “This wasn’t the case in our time.” He added that since the presidency of Pervez Musharraf, more money has been pumped into sports boards, and winners are now awarded large sums. “Now, there are more resources,” he said, “but perhaps there is less passion.”
Habibullah disagreed. “A boxer—or anyone, really—has to live,” he said. “Boxing is not going to put bread on the table. Only if you become a great player does this profession pay off. All these children who train here are from poor families. They cannot afford to pay. Look at the state of our club. Has anyone from the sports board ever donated a pair of gloves? No.”
More than the lack of money, Habibullah added, it is the climate of fear among the Hazara that is hurting boxing in Quetta, particularly after Hussain’s assassination. He rued that the crowds at boxing matches had fallen drastically. “You need to have peace of mind to be a good boxer,” he said. “Where is the peace?”