What explains among the longest careers in global, professional tennis that you can think of?
Leander Paes in a still from web series Break Point that premieres on Zee5 on October 1
I guess when you have a good thing going—lot of people wish to jump on to your boat. They could, in the process, rock it as well.” This is how I roughly remember Leander Paes cryptically responding to an off-record question, on why had split with his tennis partner, Mahesh Bhupathi. This is in the early noughties, when Paes had come for an informal, post-dinner discussion to my college in Delhi.
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Being hormonal collegians with a simple/single track mind, we automatically assumed he was referring to a girl, who must’ve come between him and Bhupathi! Maybe the gorgeous model Anupama Verma, dating Bhupathi at the time? Was she? Why care for facts getting in the way of good gossip? We’d got it right.
It’s only a couple of decades later that I realise that maybe Paes was talking about tennis coach, Enrico Piperno, who remained attached to Bhupathi in the later years of the Lee-Hesh partnership. You sense this from Ashwiny Iyer and Nitesh Tiwary’s documentary series, Break Point, that premieres on Zee5 on October 1. Of which I’ve seen three out of seven episodes (about two hours) so far.
I actually remember Piperno as a gregarious guy on tour with the Indian team, during the India-US Davis Cup tie in the early ’90s, starring Jim Courier, Todd Martin, and others. My cousin and I, barely in middle school, would hang at the DLTA stadium stands—cheeks coloured with Leander’s name, or the tricolour (can’t remember). We stalked the Indian team later at the hotel lobby, hoping to land an interview with Paes!
This is Indian tennis from before Bhupathi, and after Ramesh Krishnan, famous for his cute/clerical ‘touch tennis’! The squad comprised Gaurav Natekar, Zeeshan Ali, etc.
Piperno helped me meet Paes, who spoke at length about why, for instance, he picked tennis over soccer—the sport he was actually better at: “I make fantastic effort for myself. I cannot control the effort of 10 other players.”
Professional tennis is, admittedly, one of the toughest sports still. With tours all through the year—athletes constantly moving from airport to airport, and instantly between success and failure. It’s a mental game as well, with skills involving you to be a “weightlifter in a ballerina outfit,” as Paes puts it.
That’s also a reason you find writer Malcolm Gladwell feature tennis prominently, while examining the difference between sportspeople ‘choking’ and ‘panicking’ on the competitive field.
Choking implies a sportsperson second-guessing their natural game, and regressing towards playing it too safe, to eventually screw up the match after all. Panicking equals throwing away a game, by getting desperate and rash instead.
Both being subconscious moves, when the going isn’t good. It’s not like the player can consult anyone during a tennis match. Two of the greatest stars among men and women, Björn Borg and Steffi Graf, left the sport, at the top, when they were all of 26 and 30 respectively!
Sounding quite Gladwell-esque in fact, Paes, 48, says, “I started around age three/four/five, to achieve 10,000 hours (of practice), 10 years (of training), 3 million repetitions, before leaving home to pursue competitive tennis at 12.”
What kept him going, despite enough Grand Slams and an Olympic medal, is learning new things about the sport still: “[Adopting] new training systems, fresh rehab [processes], learning new tricks to expand the tennis repertoire—volleys, foot work… “Reinventing is important,” Paes tells me.
We spoke last week since I first interviewed him. He’s the same—Lee, the sorted life coach, for an inspiring conversationalist. In the interim, I’ve graduated from middle to high school, finished college, and been in a profession long enough to be dumped among the “senior” category! Paes, already a pro/veteran of sorts in the early ’90s, has been playing professional tennis all through, still.
Quite early on, he also turned an individual sport into a team sport—concentrating on men’s and mixed doubles; besides playing for the country with the Davis Cup team, and a non-playing captain for pep-talk/meetings between points. Could that have something to do with the staggering length of his sporting career?
Besides Gram Slam wins with both Martina Hingis and Navratilova, even for men’s doubles, Paes tells me he’s had 164 partners over 31 years: “Squeezed every last drop of my passion!” Of course we remember him the most with Bhupathi. They became the first Indian duo to win a seniors Grand Slam (French Open, 1999).
But Bhupathi, quite unexpectedly, became the first Indian to win a senior Slam ever—in mixed-doubles, with the Japanese Rika Hiraki (also Japan’s first; at the French Open, 1997). Did that cause the first line of friction in the latent battle of off-court egos, with Paes—the more accomplished/experienced member, who actually put together the proverbial Indian Express?
You know what? Relationships inevitably defined by how people make you feel in their company, and otherwise, regardless. That would’ve been the case between the absolutely inseparable Lee-Hesh.
I, for one, can’t forget how the graceful Paes treated me as a professional equal, when I was a frickin’ wannabe/amateur journo, from Class 5/6, while he was on tour! Will go with whatever Paes’s perspective on the split is. Okay lemme go back to Break Point anyway!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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