Interview with French Open winner Rohan Bopanna: "A country like India can produce champions for sure"
Back where I come from, a small-ish neighbourhood called Cox Town in Bangalore, there is a facility with a couple of tennis courts open to the public; all you have to do is pay INR 300, and the court is yours for an hour. But while it is supposed to be a hardcourt, the years of wear and tear have reduced it to a weird surface that is probably quicker than grass; with little to no grip, the ball skids alarmingly on practically every shot.
The manager of the facility often likes to speak of the time when Rohan Bopanna used to practise on that court. He also likes to joke that Bopanna, who once lived in Bangalore but now travels all over the world, would have found even Wimbledon's first-week courts easier to handle than the courts from his childhood locality.
I imagine the Bopanna legend at Cox Town will grow even bigger now. When you can say that a Grand Slam champion once played on a court, you don't need any other selling point.
To say that Rohan has come a long way from there would be the understatement of the year. For him, however, the term ‘Grand Slam champion’ still feels like an alien concept.
“It's still sinking in,” he says to me just minutes after winning the 2017 French Open mixed doubles title with Canada's Gabriela Dabrowski. “You come right after the match, you're constantly on the move – right after the prize distribution, then with the press, and I'm sitting here now. (I haven't had the time to) just sit down myself and take it all in; it'll probably take me a few hours.”
He has more than a few hours to do that, of course; he has his whole life. That's especially true because he's spent his whole life trying to get here. This – winning a Grand Slam – is the ultimate goal for any player, and to achieve it at the age of 37 has got to make it even more special.
“Truly special,” Rohan says. “As an athlete, when you start playing tennis, you want to win a Grand Slam. It's my first final in the mixed...we kept pushing, kept working hard together, and we finally got through.
“It's really really special, especially for a country like India. Mixed doubles was the first Slam that an Indian won, 20 years ago – when Mahesh won (the 1997 French Open with Rika Hiraki) – so I'm really happy to be part of those athletes who have won Slams after that. For me it was always a personal goal to win a Slam.”
Rohan has had a really good 2017, winning the title in Monte Carlo and reaching the Dubai final with Pablo Cuevas. I ask him if he thinks he's playing the best tennis of his career, and he doesn't disagree – although to him, it's not just about this year.
"I have been playing (my best tennis) for the past few years. I've been enjoying the claycourts so much better. I have to say the last 2-3 years I've been adapting my game. Sometimes I'm not serving-and-volleying on the clay, and I'm using my forehand as a weapon, which is an evolution in my game. And that's something which is a great feeling for me – to adapt even at this point in my career, to make changes in my game, and make it better.”
He talks about ‘adapting’ to the clay; does that mean it is the surface most alien to his game, or his ‘worst’ surface? He quickly shoots down that idea.
“Not at all. I will never say clay is my worst surface because we play tons and tons of weeks on it. Getting used to the surface takes longer because we don't have claycourts like these in India. So it's only a matter of getting used to it, to move better on the clay – which takes about 10 days.
“If you look at it, it's one of my strong surfaces the past two years. I've won two Masters titles here, I've reached a couple of Masters finals, and now I've won my Grand Slam here on the clay. So if anything, I would probably say it's my strongest surface.”
He laughed as he finished that last sentence, and it's hard to argue his point. While it still takes him some time to adapt to clay every year, there's no denying he's enjoyed the best results on the slow surface. I think back to anomalies like Li Na winning her first Slam on clay, or Maria Sharapova going from ‘cow on ice’ to ‘queen of clay’, and Rohan finding success on dirt doesn't seem so paradoxical anymore.
‘Adapting’ seems to be the buzzword for Rohan today. He brings it up again when I ask him whether he had learned anything specific about the games of Robert Farah and Anna-Lena Groenefeld from their US Open battle last year.
“Even though we do come up with a set plan, when you're a set and a break down you have to adapt and make a lot of things different. I think we stuck to pretty much the same strategy; it's just that we got more relaxed as the match progressed. The first set went so quickly that we could keep ourselves calm, and that helped us,” he says.
It wasn't always easy to remain calm though, especially during the delay with Rohan and Gabriela leading 6-5 in the match tiebreaker. Farah had some kind of problem with his eyesight, and play had to be stopped for a few minutes as he asked for eyedrops to fix it. The Indo-Canadian pair then lost the subsequent point and went on to trail 7-9, two match points down.
Gamesmanship, or something else? Rohan is willing to give his opponent the benefit of the doubt.
“I think he (Farah) had no control over it. The ball hit his eye and it was watering, so he had to get it fixed. I don't think at that point of time he wanted to break the momentum either; it would have been the same for both the teams I think. He genuinely had a problem; when you're a tennis player, vision is everything. He needed to get some eyedrops to get his vision back; that's very much part of the game.”
Rohan and Gabriela had enough composure to shrug off the incident and win anyway. And their strong play from the back of the court contributed greatly to the final result. Rohan in particular blasted quite a few baseline missiles to keep Farah and Groenefeld away from the net. Does the Indian enjoy hitting groundstrokes more than volleying?
“It depends completely on the surface and the situation, and also your opponents. What has really helped me with my groundstrokes the past few weeks has been practising with Pablo Cuevas. He hits a heavy ball off the ground, and trying to keep up with him has given me a lot more consistency on my strokes, which has helped especially on the clay.
“I'm not going to serve and stay back on grass; if the surface is faster I will serve and volley, if it is slower I will hit from the baseline.”
There was one shot that Rohan hit today that was neither from the baseline nor from the net. It came at the start of the super tiebreaker; the Indo-Canadian pair scurried all over the court to put one more ball back in play, before Rohan finally ended the point with a majestic backhand drive volley winner from the middle of the court.
It was a shot that would have made Roger Federer proud. Does Rohan practice shots like those, or do they come instinctively?
“I was moving towards the net when the ball came at me, and I just went for it. You do practise such shots, because there could always be situations like this that come up. But yeah, to get a lot of power while hitting from no-man's land, yeah, it's probably one of the tougher shots. Like I said, I had forward momentum with me and I just went with that shot, and it worked out perfectly.”
That may not the most tell-tale explanation, but it's hard to explain genius. And Rohan has frequently come up with genius shots during his career.
Another thing that Rohan has had a lot of during his career is Davis Cup. India's next tie is against Canada, and Gabriela is from Canada too. Have the two talked about that matchup?
“Yeah I did speak to Gabriela about it, she knows India plays against Canada,” Rohan said. “I told her that hopefully she can convince a few Canadians to come and support India (laughs). If I'm selected in the team, I'll definitely be there for India, helping them to win.”
There is, of course, no shortage of people if Rohan is looking for support. India, with its impossibly huge population, always has scores of fans cheering for the country's athletes, and at times even berating them. Does that put more pressure on Indian players to perform on the biggest of stages?
Rohan doesn't think so. “I think it's a great feeling that we have great support. Unfortunately, we have only a handful of players playing these big events. But we have tremendous support. It makes us better players, makes us to want to compete at the big stage and keep going and pushing. Not only for your family and friends, but for the whole country. At the end of the day you are playing tennis to represent your country; it's the biggest feeling to take India around the globe.
“I don't see it at all as any added pressure; I take the positives from it. Even if some people are negative towards me, I take it as a positive. It doesn't really matter; it's up to the people to say whatever they want. For me, the fact that they are thinking about me – whether it's good or bad – is enough.
“As long as we can inspire some youngsters – that's the reason I opened my tennis academy in Bangalore, so that I could inspire a few young kids to come up and play. Hopefully we get a lot of support – from the federation to the corporates to everyone – to really build Indian tennis up. And a country like India can produce champions for sure.”
Rohan's message is loud and clear: if he (and Paes and Mirza and Bhupathi) can, surely many others from a country of a billion can too. And there's no doubt that moments like the one we saw today – with an Indian proudly lifting one of the most prestigious trophies in tennis – will go a long way towards turning more prodigies into champions.
While 2017 has been brilliant for Rohan, 2016 had its share of painful moments – particularly the loss in the bronze medal playoff at the Rio Olympics. Does this win in Paris make up for that heartbreak in some way?
For Rohan, there's no making up to be done at all. “What's in the past is in the past,” he says. “We've gotta just look at the present; as an athlete, that's how you grow. You don't look at the past at all.”
It's hard not to look at the future though. While Rohan is 37, he is, by his own admission, playing the best tennis of his career. Will he take a leaf out of Paes’ book and play well into his 40s?
“I don't think I'm looking at any particular age. As long as I'm feeling fit and I'm enjoying the game, enjoying the travel, I'm happy to keep playing. But there's no number which I've fixed, till when I'll play.”
As Rohan gets up to leave, I can't resist asking him about the Cox Town court. Does he remember his time playing there, and does he ever visit it now?
Rohan grins as he recollects the long-forgotten times. “Yeah I did play there, but I have my academy to play in now, so I don't anymore.”
Of course. Why would anyone play on a court whose surface is completely different from anything else in the world? But at least the manager can now proudly say that his facility produced a Grand Slam champion. What's a few chinks in a court compared to that?