The name might be tad of a tongue twister this side of the country but tell a sports enthusiast that K Arumugam was here and chances are he’s already sprinting for an autograph book. Having authored more than ten books on hockey, the 51-year-old hockey journalist does have a final word on the game. This Monday morning saw the prolific writer launch the seventh edition of the Hockey Yearbook.

“Chandigarh is very lucky for me. I remember coming to the city for the Four Nation Pan American tournament in the ‘90s and I am lucky that I got a chance to unveil the seventh edition of the Hockey Yearbook here today,” spoke a visibly pleased Arumugam who has also authored a book on former Indian hockey captain Dilip Tirkey titled ‘Olympic Captain Dilip Tirkey’ as well well as one on Dhanraj Pillay. In a sport like hockey where accessing statistics is a tough job given the lack of a specific database, Arumugam has been doing commendable work. Apart from authoring books he’s happily stepped into the shoes of a statistician since the early nineties with his first Yearbook coming out in 1995. “It is a very difficult in hockey to prepare a database. It has taken me years to compile all the data and most of the times I travel on my own with the team. For the first two editions of the Yearbook, I did not get even a single sponsor. It was only later that I managed to get some sponsors in the form of Castrol and Hero Honda,” adds Arumugam who is also the co-author of ‘Great Indian Olympians’ and ‘Golden Boot’.