Mumbai: Having just signed for Greek basketball club Esperides Kallitheas, Harsimran ‘Honey’ Kaur Dhami is set to become the first Indian female to play professional basketball in Europe. In a sport where statistics make for hot discussion, she must like the sound of that stat.“I mean, who wouldn’t?” she replies with a chuckle in a telephonic chat with TOI. “Like, it’s definitely great to hear. I always wanted to do that. But at the same time, it’s a lot of pressure to kind of carry because you’re really just representing your whole country. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have that pressure but me, I think that’s definitely just all the work that I put in. Definitely paying off slowly. I’m really excited, though.”Pressure, however, is something the 22-year-old Honey has learnt to accept over the years. It’s something she was trained, and trained hard to endure by a father, who, in her own words, didn’t treat her “like a daughter”, right from her introduction to basketball as a seven-year-old.“Growing up in the small town Kapurthala in Punjab, there was not really a women’s team anywhere. There was no woman basketball player that I saw in my town, or even in Punjab that was, you know, good. So it’s just watching my dad every day, because he used to play basketball. So he would go to practice every day and I would just go with him, stand by the pool and just watch him play.”Considering it to be a “weird game” at first, curiosity got the better of the innocent seven-year-old girl and she soon prodded her father, and asked if she could join him and his group. It was not exactly an ideal beginning. “I’m playing with these 40-year-old, 35-year-old dudes and they’re like beating me up and I’m thinking, ‘this is not for me, what is this? what am I doing’? And my dad would go, ‘just put the ball in the hoop’.It was simply the first of many sporting lessons Sukhdev Singh Dhami would go on to teach his daughter, more often than not, in a manner which produced many flashpoints between the two. “You know how, especially when your dad is coaching you, it’s hard. You probably heard stories about how when the dad is the one that is coaching you, he wants you to be so perfect that everything would be detailed and so strict.
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“I’m not going to lie. There were times that I would get mad at my dad and I would just leave the gym and I would be like, ‘you know what, I don’t want to do this anymore’. Back and forth, she says, it would go. “An example, he would wake me up at 4 in the morning knowing that I have school at 7. And I’m not gonna lie, I’m sleeping in the first three periods of the school.”At the time, it was hard for a young girl to cope with her father’s tall demands. But as Honey looks back on a journey that has seen her play for India, and seen her go from being named MVP at the NBA Academy Women’s Program India Camp in Mumbai in 2019 to a training stint at the NBA Global Academy in Australia, and then to the United States to play college basketball, she gets it now.For someone who had to put up with the usual social stereotypes and inevitable taunts from boys during her early training days, the 6’4” power forward admits she would have struggled to get this far had her father not been as hard as he was. “Guys would come and make jokes like, ‘yo, I don’t even think you’re a girl. I think you’re a guy’. Even though I would try and be strong in front of them, I would come home and cry and be like, ‘mom, am I okay’?“They would mock me like crazy. And I think that’s when I realized that my dad wasn’t really making me ready for the on-the-court stuff. He was getting me ready for the adversity that I was about to see off the court,” Honey, who graduated from the NCAA Division 1 program at the University of Rhode Island, says.Her overseas experiences brought their own share of challenges. As a teenager in Australia, still learning to speak English, she often felt “the odd one out”. At first, she struggled with being the “Indian girl” trying to fit in. “That was the biggest challenge for me – learning to be comfortable in my own skin because I always was the one trying to follow people. Later, I learnt that unapologetically, you just gotta be you. And if it is the “Indian woman” you’re going to hear all the time, then be that Indian woman and be the great example of that Indian woman.”Excited as she is about starting a new chapter of this inspiring story in Greece, Honey remains in pursuit of a bigger goal. “The job is not done yet. Like, I haven’t touched the WNBA yet. I know it’s a big deal to be Europe’s first Indian female player, but I think it would be an even, even, even, even bigger deal if I became the first Indian to ever play WNBA.”The ripple effect of her rise on the international stage has been felt back home where, she says, there’s a big picture of her put up in Ludhiana. Not surprisingly perhaps, she has a message for the same boys who once taunted her but now try reaching out to her on her social media accounts.“You all can watch that (picture) every day and remember the jokes you all made about me.”