They say you can judge a man's legend by the quality of myths that surround him. By that measure itself Dhyan Chand was an extraordinary man. To hear tales of his craftsmanship was to wonder whether his stick was designed by Merlin himself. They broke his stick in Holland to check if there was a magnet inside; in Japan they decided it was glue; in Germany, Adolf Hitler even wanted to buy it.

It sounds all silliness and hocus-pocus and maybe it was. But, one thing strikes you -- they never said this about anyone else, did they?

Whenever a tale journeys through time, exaggeration inadvertently rides along. Yet however inventive the teller gets, there is a point, he knows, beyond which belief is suspended. A magnet in the stick? If they said this about Mohammed Shahid we would have guffawed; for Dhyan Chand it just fits.

There's another thing here. Modern players use advertising to give their deeds and personalities greater flourish; they do not allow us to forget them either, for television, the accumulated memory of our times, is their evidence. Dhyan Chand had nothing, no reams of literature to record his brilliance, no highlight film for us to gasp at. How come then this reverence has come to rest?

And so we return again to the stories, the building blocks of his legend. We are told that a statue of him exists in a Vienna sports club, whose form speaks of a certain awe: it is of a man with four arms and four sticks. We are instructed that at penalty corners he would stop the ball with his own hand, then rise and strike it with a smooth swiftness (normally it takes two men). We are informed by his son Ashok Kumar, that in his 50s he would shame Indian goalkeepers in practice by dropping the ball and then on the half volley drive into the corner of the net. Not once but 10 times out of 10. We are advised that his stickwork was studied but was so fast that even slow film offered no clues to his magic. You had to wonder, as someone wrote, did the poets come to watch him, and the playwrights, for he was drama.

And, of course, he was not just beautiful, he won. We see that not just in three Olympic golds (1928 Amsterdam, 1932 Los Angeles, 1936 Berlin) but in his goals. Two statistics stand out. In 1932, India scored 338 goals in 37 matches, 133 his contribution. In 1947 he accompanied a young team to East Africa (no Dhyan Chand, no team, said the invitation) and he, 42 and semi retired, was the second highest scorer with 61 goals in 22 games.

Still, it would seem on first impression that this was a man born with blessed hands, a flamboyant soloist (his mentor Bale Tewari would scold him for dribbling), not a honest member of the orchestra.

It is where, Keshav Dutt, Olympic gold medallist, tells us, we mistake him. "His real talent lay above his shoulders. His was easily the hockey brain of the century. He could see the field the way a chess player sees a board. He knew where his teammates were, and more importantly where his opponents were -- without looking. It was almost psychic." Remember Maradona in the 1986 World Cup final, swivelling blind to send the ball 30 yards or so for Burruchaga to score the winning goal. To not see but to know, to figure the geometry of a field with a blindfold on, here is an idea of a player's completeness.

In team games you can tell genius by the man who arranges the grand design of the play. Dutt saw this too in Dhyan Chand. "He treated everybody as pieces on a board meant for his use. He'd know from his own movement how the defence was forming, and where the gaps were. In other words, he was the only imponderable, everybody else (opposition included) fell in predictable patterns around him."

So, of course, when everyone else thought he was going to shoot, he passed. Not because he was unselfish (and he was), but to induce surprise. And when he passed to you, you did not want to miss. On that 1947 tour, he put through a wondrous ball to K.D. Singh Babu, then turned his back and walked away. When Babu later asked the reason for this odd behaviour, he was told, "If you could not get a goal from that you did not deserve to be on my team."

What these stories are telling us is this: there are good players, great ones, and then those who come closest to perfection's embrace. They are not practitioners of a sporting craft, they become its definition; they are not heroes, they are the caliper by which other men's heroism is measured. Pele, Jack Nicklaus, Muhammad Ali, Don Bradman come fastest to mind, and Dhyan Chand has a seat reserved too at this table. (Here's a sweet tale on the side. In 1935, Bradman and Dhyan Chand met in Australia, and it is a measure of this man's innocence that he writes, "The picture of that meeting I will cherish all my life." Did Bradman know who he had met?).

To say he was an icon is correct, but only a context can provide a precise measure of such status. Gurbux Singh, 1964 and 1964 Olympian, provides it when he says, "When I grew up, to achieve anything in Indian sport was to do it in hockey." As the century turned into its first quarter, it held pre-eminence, lifted by India's first Olympic gold in 1928 and kept there till the '70s by a conveyor belt, so terribly rusted now, that rolled out champions like fast food. It is said Dhyan Chand's greatness was elevated by the illustrious company he kept on the field; conversely, how fine he must have been to stand so taller than them all. There is a beauty to hear the grey-bearded Gurbux, breathless, talking about how even in 1959, way past his best, no man at the Indian camp could win the ball in a bully-off with him.

It makes it sadder still that even this man as he turned grey should tell his sons not to play hockey, for it gave him so little in return. He coached for a while, then settled in his beloved Jhansi, still the fisherman, the hunter of deer, who loved to cook -- but short of money. "Once he went to a tournament in Ahmedabad and they turned him away not knowing who he was," says Ashok. "And he never saw any comfort."

When he fell ill, liver cancer it turned out, and came to Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, they dumped him in the general ward. A journalist's article eventually got him moved to a special room, but that public memory had to be jogged tells its own story.

In Jhansi they had a funeral, not in the ghat, but on the ground he played on. Players came, but it seemed a little too late. It made it hard to forget the first few words of his autobiography Goal: "You are doubtless aware that I am a common man." He wasn't but he died like one.

Rohit Brijnath is associate editor, India Today.