SM tipster Vipur Andleigh (by the way, a great stand-up comedian) turns us on to a report in the San Jose Mercury News about the arrest of kabaddi pro — yes, you read that right, kabaddi pro — Kuljeet Singh:

Coming home after a grueling winter season of Kabaddi matches in East India, Kuljeet Singh arrived at San Francisco International Airport two weeks ago with a suitcase full of trophies, neatly folded designer jeans and a stash of syringes and steroids in his shoes.

He got as far as customs.

Singh obviously isn’t the sharpest raider on the kabaddi circle. Everybody knows that the best way to smuggle illegal drugs into the country is by stuffing them up your ass, or ingesting a sealed bag of them. Hiding them in your shoes is so 1998.

Out on bail and sitting in his parents’ home in Petaluma, Singh, 23, told the Mercury News he used steroids regularly during trips to India. He does not see the harm in the drugs he brought home, nor did he know they were illegal. Most of the players he saw in India used steroids, he said.

“If I knew, I would not have brought them here, never,” he said, referring a reporter to a document he said was an Indian doctor’s prescription for the anabolic steroids. “I didn’t know. I thought they were good.”

Yet he told customs officials that the syringes, liquid-filled bottles and tablets were vitamins and pain-killers, according to court documents. He later refused to speak to arresting officers, who Googled the names of the drugs to find that many of them were potent illegal steroids.

I loved playing the game as a child. It offered me a rare chance to bring that overaciever “Venkat” down to earth with a few blind-side cheap shots. But I always assumed that kabaddi was made up by generations of parents to keep hyperactive kids busy at Indian functions. Instead, it’s steeped in rich cultural tradition:

Traditionally, (Kabaddi organizer Jeff) Sohal said, Kabaddi was a way for Indian farmers to gather after their harvest to show who was the fittest -- and therefore who worked the hardest.

“If you’re doing it through steroids and drugs,” he said, “you’re not catching the spirit of it.”

Kabaddi is also a way of cultivating the culture throughout the world.

“From Hong Kong to the Punjab to London and Yuba City, Kabaddi is being played,” said Gurinder Singh Mann, a professor of Sikh and Punjab studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “This is a way they have found to connect to each other. It’s an indication of the globalization of the Sikh community.”

Anybody know if there are kabaddi leagues down here in Los Angeles, and how I can get a hold of “Venkat”?

San Jose Mercury News: What is kabaddi? (PDF), Steroids collide with traditional Punjabi sport (Free registration required)