Growing up with the game: Of tennis and realisations

Realisation is a funny thing. It strikes at you when you least expect it, leaving you to wonder and gape about the way certain things pan out in your life. Watching the 2013 Australian Open Finals between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic and simultaneously arguing with my dad – I do that a lot – about why Murray should lose the match, I got struck with a weirdly dawning sense of realisation.

It was one of those things; the kind that makes your mouth go slack and your eyes roll. Reiterating back to my earlier point, the whole epiphany was weird not because it was disjointed to the subject aired on the television but because of the way it seized my mind up. I mean, here I am, discussing the demerits of a Brit winning relative to a Serb and there my thoughts drag me to a French Open final between a certain hallowed Swiss and a certain gritty Spaniard.

At this juncture, I should elaborate that it was that final that got me hooked on to the sport. As the daughter of a man who used to watch tennis religiously, I grew up hating the sport. To be honest, at first glance, there seemed to be nothing special about it. Two girls or two guys on opposite ends of a net, whacking a ball against a bat – call it a racquet – also having a net and trying to best each other, what was so unique about that? By comparison, there was cricket; a sport which not only had a multitude of players playing alongside each other but also included the proverbial ‘bat and ball.’

Thus, the first few years of my life were spent hating tennis, while the next eight involved my indifference to its existence. The turnabout came during a certain match between the Swiss, and a Russian – Youzhny – in the year 2007. I liked the Russian, but somehow I ended up liking the Swiss more. There again, have to add – I had the advantage of knowing about the Swiss because the news channels were agog about him that year. And though I didn’t know who Federer was by face, I felt he had to have something unique about his game that made him the most coveted tennis player all over. As was common in those times – Roger was at his peak then – the Swiss won and just like that, I was hooked. Which is why going into the aforementioned French Open final as a novice fan, I was rooting for Federer over Nadal.

And when Federer lost that final, only to go on and establish his supremacy at Wimbledon a month later, that got me hooked even more. Only by then, I not only wanted to get to understand and learn more about Federer’s game but about the larger dynamics of tennis too. It took me six more years – back to the present – and now I can say that I really know something about the different styles of play, about legends and GOATs. I proudly call myself a ‘true-blue’ tennis fan these days and even have a tattoo to evince it.

So, what was the epiphany all about? It was about completion of a transition; a transition from yelling and cursing at the tennis players to stop their running about and at the cable guys to stop streaming the matches to the point where I was actually ranting at the players for committing double faults and unforced errors. It was a change that made me rave out at my father to stop supporting Murray because of bias, instead of the rants years ago to stop watching the game altogether for something that seemed to be more productive.

It is an oft quoted proverb that life takes a course completely unlike the ones planned by individuals. While in my case, it pertained to an incongruous element like sports, for others, such unexpected and unpredicted wanderings could very well be life-altering.