Rant 100: Why I love tennis - the story behind the picture

I’ve often thought about doing a full blog post about the pictures that I click and share on my photography page (click here if you want to have a scroll). For one reason or another I’ve never been able to. But this being my 100th Rant, I thought I’d take the plunge.

So, to set the scene - I’d finished work at 7pm, and was torn between going to the gym or playing tennis with a friend. As it turned out my friend was not available to play. And so I ended up on my own at the tennis court.

And suddenly, I was a five-year-old again!

Tennis in the Twilight (location: Goole Tennis Centre)

Flashback to the early 90s in Jamshedpur. My father decided to enrol a four-and-a-half-year-old me in tennis lessons. Now, growing up in India, with cricket as the unofficial national sport, I was a bit bemused. In fact, I even resisted. Why would I want to play something like tennis, when I could instead be out playing cricket with my neighbourhood friends? Everybody played cricket, literally everybody. Whether it was at school, or at the local park. Still, my father persisted, and took me on his little green-yellow lambretta scooter to a local recreation centre called “United Club”. Among things like showing movies, food, swimming pool, they had two clay tennis courts.
I can remember it very clearly now, the first time I stepped on to a tennis court. My father was introducing me to the coach, but I was lost in a different world. Somehow, by some stroke of luck, I was transfixed by the court. Red clay, with pristine white lines, and with a net across the middle. It was mesmerising, it really was. And that’s part of the reason why I remember those first few steps so vividly. From then on, I was hooked on tennis.

Tennis is an individual sport, and in many ways it suited me perfectly. I’ve always had my own rebellious streak so perhaps a team sport like cricket or football was not best suited. In tennis, I work for my own win, mistakes are mine to bear, and my creativity is mine alone. I can be as crazy, or as subtle as I want. At the moment of hitting a ball, nobody can tell you how to play the stroke - you play it, and be it on your head. I loved it.

But tennis is also different. And this goes back to the fact that not a lot of people played it - at the time - in Jamshedpur. I was taught the basic strokes, but I would regularly struggle to actually play much. My coach and his colleagues Tillak Sir, Ganesh Bhaiya and others, to their immense credit, seemed to love that I loved the sport so much, and would therefore basket-feed me about 200 balls every day. But that was about it. At the start I was not good enough or old enough to play a proper match against them, though it never stopped me trying, and none of my age-group peers played tennis. I was on my own. And still I played and loved.

In fact it came to a point when even ball-feeding from the coaches stopped, given I used to be the only kid who would rock up every afternoon - couldn’t blame the coaches. But still I came, and grew to love the game even more.

One reason - because even when the coaching stopped, even when the coaches did not emerge from the clubhouse in the 40-degree heat, I continued to play. I would be dropped off by my father at around 3pm - on his way to work - I would be given a tennis ball by the coach, and I would stand at the court baseline and hit against the perimeter wall. I was playing against myself. I would play games of my own. How many shots could I do in one “rally”? How many volleys could I do standing closer to the wall? How many tap-ups could I do in a minute? The stats, as it were, eventually became irrelevant. What mattered was that I was gaining valuable experience of my own limits; I was learning a lot about the proper grip on a racket - the coach would sometimes observe and give a few pointers - I improved my agility and balance, and my movement around the court area. I am still a predominantly baseline player and rely on a strong top-spin game. Basically, those years spent banging against wall, I could do whatever the heck I wanted in that time without being troubled by parents or siblings or friends, and without being judged for it as well.

It helped me find myself at a very young age.

And so I found myself again… 24 years later, on a brisk but sunny evening in Goole, East Yorkshire, nearly 6,000 miles away from those sun-baked courts in Jamshedpur. I stretched, jogged, then started hitting the ball on my own, swung some forehands, some backhands, smashed some serves.

I learned.