Vijay Amritraj, naam toh suna hi hogaIJ The dialogue delivered by Shah Rukh Khan in one of his blockbuster hits is apt to introduce Amritraj, who in fact needs no introduction. For years, he was the country's brand ambassador on the world's tennis courts, the only Indian in a sport that was dominated by Americans, Europeans and Australians, the only reason the Indian flag was unfurled, the reason the national anthem was played. He was in the capital recently to promote his brainchild Champions Tennis league. Amit Chaudhary and Tanuj lakhina caught up with him. Excerpts
Why did you feel the need of the Champions Tennis league (CTl)IJ
Unlike other sports, ours is not a seasonal sport; from January to November, it's pretty much full year. So, that being the case you can't get a tournament. You can apply but you won't get it till somebody pulls out or somebody goes bankrupt or you buy a tournament from someone and things like that. So, we haven't been able to have a tournament in any other part of the country. There is a large fan base in India. So, how are we going to have a family see events live. Today of course TV is big and people can watch everything on television. But if the person is playing in london or Singapore, how does it affect him. He is not there.
So that being the case, this league format gives six cities a chance to watch world class players, that's number one. Number two, it's both men and women. Number three, it has Indian participation in every team. And number four, most importantly, it has two juniors — one boy and one girl — on the team. Though the juniors are not competing, they will be there to gain experience, to practice with these guys and to travel with these guys. They will never have that opportunity. And it should inspire them. That's the goal.
So it ticks all the boxes for me. Eventually I would like to have eight teams, may be in the third year we might be able to get two more teams on board — one in the north and one in the south. But we have to walk before we can run. So, let's try to accomplish this in proper manner.
So, your basic aim is to give India a tournament where people can watch big players play liveIJ
The ATP or WTA tournaments are hard to get. We don't know when it will happen. More important thing is to make sure that we are be able to see these players live here. However we do it. If we can have them play here in a competitive format like the league, both men and women, then it gives our boys and girls a chance to see them live. So a family can go to see it. The children can be inspired by watching players like Venus Williams and David Ferrer.
You think your reputation as a former player, administrator, commentator and TV host played a role in getting together this tournament and convincing such big players to come to IndiaIJ
I hope so. People know that I’ve been in this for more than 40 years; first as a player, then as a former player, administrator and as a commentator now. I’ve covered all the Grand Slams, people have seen me everywhere. So, there’s a degree of credibility as well that helps in attracting players to come. All of those things are very positive. Still, at the end of the day, they must want to come, the economics has to be right, it must fit into their calendar and all those things. I’ve also asked them to come with their spouses or a friend or anyone they want.
How would it help Indian tennisIJ
The first thing is that there has to be some Indian interest in the team and in CTl that comes in the form of a Davis Cup player. Each team has an Indian Davis Cup player on it. I am looking forward to the men's doubles because one Indian is going to play with one international, which has never happened before. Another important thing is that each team has two juniors in it. So, one boy and one girl — the AITA is giving us the names — get to travel with the players. It gives them a chance to know how do they train, what their thought process is like and they will be listening to them. I know it helped me when I was a junior. So this is a huge bonus for them to be able to do that. It should inspire them. If it doesn't inspire them, they shouldn't be in tennis.
Despite your tremendous success as a player and tennis being such a rewarding sport, it couldn’t flourish in India as much as it should have. What was the reasonIJ
When I used to play, the commitment to the sport was overwhelming. I started because of the health problems (breathing problem) but thereafter I got to be the number one in India, number one in Asia and then I wanted to explore the international arena to do the best I could do. Eventually I made the world's top-10 and so on. It started to generate some level of interest among Indians who constantly used to ask me 'yes, you play tennis but what do you do for a livingIJ' Tennis or any other sport was never a profession. I was the first ever professional athlete in this country in any sport, including cricket. My cricketer friends like Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Gundappa Viswanath, they all had jobs with banks and government departments but I didn't. My career was my sport. It has taken 35 years to get to this point where today families think that ‘may be the child has this dream, we can fuel the dream and may be, we’ve another (Sachin) Tendulkar, (Abhinav) Bindra or Saina Nehwal.’ But it never happened during my time.
You mean to say Indians look for security before everything else and that has hampered their success at the ultra-competitive international arenaIJ
Absolutely. It's a normal thought process in India. You have to go to school, you have to go to college, you have to get a job, you have to get married, you have to have children and so on so forth. That's the cycle. But today there is a huge change.
But today we’ve all the facilities and, as you said, people have started considering sport as a profession. So, why we aren’t breaking into top-100 or 50IJ
I don't know about the girls who all are playing. I follow boys a little bit more because of Davis Cup and so on. Boys are in fact working hard and they are improving but not at the rate of the westerners. At the end of the day, it comes down to commitment and hard work. There is no getting away from it. People don't realize what kind of commitment this is. It is of immeasurable proportions. This is not the kind of work where you go to office at 9'o clock and come back at 5'o clock in the evening. Granted that's a tough day at work. Whatever the person is doing, it's a tough job and people are working hard to make a living. But, at least when you do that you get your wage. Here you may work hard for eight hours and still lose the match. You don't get anything for losing it. So the problem with our sport is that there are no contracts. It's only winning and losing. If you lose, you don't get any money. Only if you win, you make money. That's your profession. So how do you take that riskIJ How can Indian parents let their child take that riskIJ It's difficult.
Who among the current lot has it in him to make it bigIJ
I think Yuki should be doing a lot more than what he is doing. He is a good player; junior world number one. What happened after thatIJ The other point is that we’ve to realise that Indians mature physically later and mentally sooner than the westerners. The westerners mature physically early and mentally late. That's my thinking.
We have to allow these kinds of little nuances of cultural differences, heritage, DNA and so on. So, what the westerner does at 18, we should be doing that at 25. Don't say to the child that ‘oh, he is 18 or 19 and he is done.’ I don't think we should put that kind of pressure on them. Our careers are little bit later — from 25 to 33. I’m talking about only singles. Whereas they, the Beckers and all of them, are 17 and 18 years old and they are outstanding. We have to address it because it can't be a coincidence all the time. In tennis, I have noticed it for the last 30 years. We should play to that.
Many of the juniors tend to go for the doubles more.
Doubles is a safety net to be able to make a living. People don't go out and play tennis as a youngster to play good doubles. When you start playing tennis, you want to be tennis player. You are not going there to become a good doubles player. What happens is that at an early stage, you feel that you are not going to do well enough in singles and it's better to play at that safety net. Top guys are not going to play doubles, so I have more chance of winning in doubles and make a living out of it. And you can prolong your career as well. So you start playing more doubles and steadily climb the ranking ladder but keep losing on the single rankings and after sometime you don't even qualify for the big tournaments. It's quite a common scenario around the world.
Recently there was a controversy after some of the players pulled out of the Asian Games squad to be able to play in the professional tournaments. Your view on the ‘country vs professional career’ debateIJ
Here is the challenge with individual sport. In individual sports, every individual is his own boss. Unlike other sports, nobody controls him or her. In other sports, there is a selection committee. Here it's based on merit. There is a ranking system that comes out every Monday and that's the yardstick. Whether it is Davis Cup, Fed Cup, Asian Games, Olympics or any other, you get picked on the basis of your ranking. It is the ‘be all and end all’ of our sport. However you look at it.
I don't think any of the girls or boys who missed the Asian Games had any lack of commitment towards India. I think all of them have proved beyond any doubt that they are committed to their country. But there is always going to come that choice when you are in between. If you are in the top-10, it doesn't matter if you skip a tournament. If your 700, then also it doesn't matter. In between, when you are trying to bridge that little gap to make it to a tournament, that's when it matters.
You think the criticism was unjustifiedIJ
Absolutely. For me, the players are the be all and end all of the sport in our country. Everyone else is immaterial.
You have beaten so many great players, including Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Do you ever think about those daysIJ And how do you feelIJ
Oh, just wonderful. People also ask me, ‘hey, you are not playing these daysIJ There is so much money in the game.’ And I always feel that I played at the right time. The 70s and 80s were the golden time in tennis and I am blessed to have played during that time. I was very fortunate that I played Davis Cup for 20 years for India which is a very special privilege. Wherever I played in the world, the anthem was played and the flag was unfurled. Those are all blessings and dreams that a very few people have been accorded. For me, I feel very privileged to have that.
Since your times, tennis has changed a lot. How do you see itIJ
It (tennis) has gotten away from us. We didn't mean it to go that way. We didn't see the racquets getting ahead of us. That's what happened first. The heads got bigger, got more aerodynamic, they started putting different materials in the racquets which we never did before, fiber glass, metal etc. And before you knew it, it had gotten away from us. At the same, the average height of the players started increasing dramatically. When I was playing, the average height was 5'8". Today, the average height is 6'4". So you take a guy as tall as Ivo Karlovic (6'8") and put this aerodynamic weapon in his hand… it's like a rocket launcher. All of a sudden, the skill ends up going out of the game and all these guys who just happened to be tall with aerodynamic racquets started hitting ace after ace. Then people got smart and slowed down the courts and made the balls heavier (now it's approximately six times heavier than the time when Amritraj played the game). All these various elements were made to compensate for the racquets and the height of the players. The grass at Wimbledon isn’t even close to what it was when I used to play. So everybody is playing from the back of the court now. It's not much different from the French Open.
You have also done a couple of chat shows, how did they come aboutIJ
First was the international one and then a domestic one. I recently finished shooting the domestic one which features 10 Indians with two actors, two bankers, two athletes; different people in different walks of life. Naserrudin Shah, Amitabh Bachchan, AR Rahman, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Deepak Parekh, KV Kamath, Prakash Padukone, Jeev Milkha Singh are all on it.
How do you manage so many thingsIJ
I always feel that greatest education that I ever received in my life was being on the tennis tour. It taught me to truly ask more of myself than just one thing. For me everything is a learning experience and I always challenge myself to learn more of everything. So I've been blessed with such options. When TV was offered to me, I had no experience of it and now I've been on it for 23 years.
Which side is difficult — hosting or intervieweeIJ
Hosting is much more difficult! There needs to be a train of thought, there needs to be research done on the back of your head so you're not constantly looking at a piece of paper. What you really want to do is listen to the guests and your thoughts should formulate based on what the other person is saying. The viewer should think it is a real conversation rather than asking multiple questions. To me, that's very important and I listen very carefully to what the question has to say.
Do you think that your upbringing and a tough period that you went through as a child made you mentally strongerIJ
I think considering what everyone said to my mom that ‘this guy is a zero’ and ‘he won't be able to do anything’, she took it upon herself and then my coach (Mr Ramarao) who had diabetes said he was going to make me national champion and everybody laughed at them because I was constantly sick. And I ended up winning the national championships and three months later he died. For me, watching my mom and where I came from, there was no question of 'impossible'. When you play a match and you're in incredible amount of pressure, and you have 20,000 people watching and more on TV, we always felt that pressure was a privilege — not many get to experience it. At that point in time, can you reach within yourself for greatness and for me it always meant going back to when I was growing up. If you can overcome those kind of issues, it's great. Even now my mother and I talk about it and laugh that 'you couldn't pass an exam but you're speaking at Wharton and Columbia!' That's the funniest part.
Had IPTl not been happening at around the same time, could you have brought in other playersIJ
Our immediate mandate was to leave out the too four guys — Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray were out for me anyway. And amongst the women, Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, li Na and Ana Ivanovic were out. We were going to choose from the rest — who was available and who was in the top 25. IPTl is using the biggest names that they could find. I don't know the full details but there is no way that the economics can work, the numbers are just astronomical! Plus, the same team doesn't play everywhere. The Delhi team isn’t the same team that plays in Singapore. How do you decide who’s on which team. In CTl, we’ve four people who’re playing all the matches.
The grand slams are so popular, do you think leagues can make an impactIJ
No. The only way a league can work is by helping the local players and local tennis. It needs to have a local impact otherwise people will just watch on TV, what's the big deal. You've got to leave the four grand slams aside. My point is how do you go over and above that and encourage the local country's development. Either you have tremendous academies and bring in international coaches on a regular basis but at the same time if you can bring in great quality players to inspire the youngsters then that's terrific. It's not meant for them to learn but to be inspired.
Recently some big guns brought on legendary players as coaches. Does it helpIJ
The great thing about using players of that calibre is that they're not exactly coaches. Whether it is Goran Ivanesevic, Stefan Edberg or Michael Chang — they're not there to change your style or work on your backhand or forehand. There are two things that they are most capable of doing. For example, let's say you're having a tough time where you reach the semis but can't go beyond. The first thing that this guy does is inspire you to win a tournament. It's more like speech therapy. He makes you think more of yourself. The second thing is technically playing a big point based on the players' strengths. On how to prepare for big points because at the top, it is not easy matches, they're all very tight. Those are the two major issues in a champion coach. They're not a 'coach' but more of a guide. That's where the difference is.