In a tiny tailoring shop somewhere in Chennai, Suresh Babu sits bent over a sewing machine well past midnight. Hundreds of kilometres away, his son is preparing for a career defining moment inside the boxing ring. The father won’t sleep tonight; he never does on the nights before a big bout.
It is not a new arrangement. It has been the rhythm of their lives for over a decade. The father sewing clothes by day and dreaming of a gold medal by night; the son – Vishvanath Suresh – throwing punches at dawn and carrying a weight far heavier than his 52 kg frame suggests.
Vishvanath, 22, is now based at the Army Sports Institute in Pune. Earlier this month, he was crowned the Asian Boxing champion.
“He (Suresh) wouldn’t sleep thinking about my training all night,” says Vishvanath in an exclusive conversation with Read.
The tailor father himself is also a former state-level boxer, who had offers from the Southern Railway and Indian Army during his heydays, but had to turn them down because his family needed him more than he needed boxing.
“There were three sisters and a brother at home. He had to take care of them,” Vishvanath explained. “So he dropped boxing. Picked up tailoring. And he hasn’t stopped since.”
Suresh now vicariously lives his dreams through his son. Yet, he isn’t willing to quit the shop.
“This work fed you. It gave you everything. I can’t abandon it,” Vishvanath quoted his father.
The World no one
At the Asian Boxing Championship in Mongolia earlier this year, Vishvanath walked into his first major elite international tournament as an athlete with no world ranking and no international pedigree to speak of.
The draw handed him, in just his second bout, the World No 1. Most would have considered it a misfortune but Vishvanath considered it an opportunity. An opportunity he grabbed with both hands.
“If I beat him, my name will be twice as big as his,” said Vishvanath.
He beat him. One-sided, his coaches said.
The bout went the way they had mapped in preparations. The one fighter in the bracket everyone assumed would take gold was dismantled with relative ease.
“God was with me. Something happened that day, the body just moved,” said Vishvanath, with the humility of someone who has also done the work to earn that grace.
It was his first elite tournament. His first major international. He came home champion.
A Record that belongs to Tamil Nadu
Vishvanath first broke through nearly four years back, winning the World Youth Championships in 2022. By his own reckoning, he is the first from Tamil Nadu to be crowned the world champion in boxing.
That 2022 World Championship gold came in circumstances that make the achievement almost impossible to fully comprehend.
Six weeks before the tournament, his grandfather died. Vishvanath was in camp. He did not go home.
“I just wish he had stayed one more month,” Vishvanath rued.
Six words. The most he will say about it. But in those six words sits everything – the grief held back so the work could continue, the regret of a grandson who chose the ring over the funeral, and the quiet belief that maybe, somehow, his grandfather’s presence was in the gold medal that followed.
The rush of winning
Viswanath did not always want to box. He will tell you that himself.
His father pushed him toward it, and for a while, it was just something he was doing because his father had done it and because his father’s blood, as he puts it, runs in him too.
Then something shifted.
“The taste of winning, the rush of winning, it got into my body. And then I started loving it,” he said.
Now, he says, the thought of giving it up the way older boxers sometimes do when the body starts to argue genuinely confuses him.
“I wonder how they live like that,” he quipped. “I can’t imagine it.”
The focus he describes is total.
“Once we lock in on something, we don’t step back.”
It reads like a man who has inherited not just his father’s sport, but his father’s stubbornness.
The dream
Suresh always wanted to see him fight at the same lightweight division he competed in before life intervened.
“He (Suresh) says seventy percent of his dream is done,” Vishvanath revealed. “The last thirty percent is the Olympics. Olympic gold.”
Not a medal, but gold! The distinction matters to him. When asked about his ultimate goal, he is impatient with the standard answer.
“Everyone says win an Olympic medal. But I want to say a medal means nothing. Only gold counts.”
The teachers at his school once told him to stop chasing sports and focus on studies. The class toppers, he notes with a dry satisfaction, are harder to find now. He is not.
Somewhere in Chennai, a tailor is still at his machine. His son is training for the Olympics. The thirty percent remains.
But if the last decade is any measure, neither of them is the kind to leave something unfinished.
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