By Admin 
On that warm summer morning in the northern Kerala town of Kannur, there was one thing the tall 66-year-old man said during a long conversation that struck you especially. “I don’t come here often; it is very expensive to travel, you know,” he said about the visit to his hometown.
A bus ticket from Bengaluru cost about ₹400 those days. At that time, some 12 years ago, Manuel Frederick was the only Olympic medallist from Kerala. He kept goal when India won the hockey bronze at the Munich Olympics of 1972.
Frederick died at a private hospital in Bengaluru on Friday, aged 78. Life hadn’t been easy for him, but that day at the St. Michael’s Anglo Indian School ground, where he had been giving training to local players, he was reluctant to speak about his troubles. He had sounded disappointed that he could not get the Dhyan Chand Award despite applying for it seven times; he said he could have done with the ₹5 lakh that came with it (he would get it in 2019, as he was ninth-time lucky).
During that interview, Frederick, who was the Indian goalkeeper for about a decade, was glad to talk of the greatest moment of his life. “Though we could only win the bronze, we were good enough for the gold,” he had said. “That team had players like Ashok Kumar, Ajit Pal Singh, Harcharan Singh, M.P. Ganesh and Kulwant Singh; we had crushed Great Britain 5-0 and Australia 3-1.”
He remembered the Munich massacre too. “The incident took place just 60 yards away from where we were staying,” he said. “We were preparing for our semifinal with Pakistan, which was then postponed by a day. I still could recollect that loud noise of gunfire.”
Frederick had earned high praise from the then Pakistan President Zia-ul-Haq after a stellar show in a Test against the arch-rival.