‘He realised we were scared since he spoke so little, so he started talking more’

There was something far more crucial than the coaching basic of ‘two lateral steps front, two strides back’ that P Gopichand had to get accustomed to when he floated his academy for budding shuttlers in Hyderabad. In fact, he had to unlearn certain things he had picked up as a player, to accommodate the questions springing in the excited minds of his trainees. “He even played the way girls do — more drops and tosses — from across the net in practice, just so I could understand,” laughs Saina Nehwal, the world number six player and Gopi’s most famous student.

Since he spoke so little initially, when his first batch of trainees — P Kashyap and Guru Sai Dutt besides Nehwal — lined up at the Lal Bahadur Shastri stadium, they would try drawing him into telling them anecdotes from his overseas exploits. It was after much persuasion that the former All-England champ spoke of his Birmingham triumph.

Gopi maintains that the 2001 win defined his career for life — irrespective of what would happen after it. But it didn’t stop him from returning to the daily grind once his knee looked to have given away, and to go back to endless practice sessions. “He can get down to our level and explain things to us,” says Kashyap, ranked 31 in the world and India’s bright hope for the coming years, who has trained under Gopichand since 2005.

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