Come on, keep fighting!”

For a while on Show Court 3 at the Australian Open on Thursday, it seemed as if Sania Mirza was going to buckle under the pressure and surrender. After winning the first set 6-1 in her typically aggressive style, her game had faltered, and she looked pensive as she submitted 4-6 in the second. Now she was down 1-3 in the decider, and her Swiss-Hungarian opponent Timea Bacsinszky threatened to run away with the match.

The exhortation from the players’ box had come from her father, Imran Mirza, and it had sounded like part instruction, part encouragement. Like many Indian families, the Mirzas are extremely close-knit, and Imran has played a pivotal role in Sania’s emergence as a world-class tennis player. I still remember my surprise when, visiting her house in Hyderabad many years ago, I discovered that Imran and his wife Naseema were about to set off for Thiruvanthapuram in their beat-up Maruti Esteem so that Sania could participate in a tennis tournament. They couldn’t afford to fly.

Nobody had heard of Sania Mirza at that time, but Imran, an enthusiastic club cricketer and tennis player, had recognised very early, when his daughter was just six years old, that she was blessed with an amazing ball sense. The Mirzas were solidly middle-class, and owned a small printing press. They did not have the money to send their daughter abroad for training, and facilities in Hyderabad for coaching a precocious tennis genius were primitive.

... contd.