Coimbatore :
Nirupama Vaidyanathan Sanjeev, one of India’s finest tennis players ever, still remembers that afternoon two decades ago in Japan when she lost a match from a winning position. She was done in by a sudden spell of cold weather. “I was totally unprepared as I was facing the extreme cold after coming from Chennai where the temperature was 42 degree. Internet was not so prevalent then for me to check the temperature level before leaving for Japan. The temperature there was sub-zero and I had just a light jacket,” said Nirupama, who was at her parents’ home in Race Course in Coimbatore on Wednesday, after releasing her memoirs, ‘The Moonballer’, in Chennai on Tuesday.
Presently settled in the US with husband and daughter, Nirupama calls Coimbatore her home, the city where her self-trained father taught her to play tennis. It was the Cosmopolitan Club at Race Course where she served and volleyed first. At Perks Matriculation School, she learned to be a winner. “The atmosphere at the school helped me a lot to hone my skills when I was a student there in the early 1990s”, she says.
Her father was her first coach. “I was from a modest background with no sponsors. It was my father’s effort that made me India’s number 1 tennis player at the age of 14 and the first Indian woman ever to win a round in a Grand Slam tournament,” she said.
Though tennis has a long history in India, women have had an insignificant presence. The Krishnans and the Amrithraj brothers at their peak figured in the top 25 ranks. The men did well in Davis Cup. So, when Nirupama started winning international matches, she was breaking new ground. “At a time when no one knew of professional Indian women tennis players, I ventured into this uncharted territory and scripted a path for youngsters to follow. I represented the country in SAF Games, Commonwealth Games, Asian Games and the Sydney Olympics apart from the Federation Cup. I have penned the book to inspire girls to take up tennis,” she said. Like Nirupama, her daughter Sahana, 7, too wants to play tennis at the international level.
The title of Nirupama’s book recalls her modest beginning. “I had beaten the best in India with the Moonball style,” she said. “I realised that I had a lot of stories to tell. The attempt is to inspire youngsters that where there is a will, there is a way,” she adds.
Cherishing her formative years as a budding tennis player in Coimbatore, Nirupama credits Perks Matriculation School for making her a winner. “The school’s impact on my sporting career is irrefutable. I joined Perks in February 1991, and in March 1991, I won the national women’s title,” she said.
“The Moonballer’, Nirupama says, is just the beginning. “My next book will be on parenting a Wimbledon champion and it will be a step-by-step guide for both the parents as well as the aspirants,” she said. Right from choosing a tennis racquet to identifying the right coach, she says the book will break down the entire process of becoming a winner into simple steps.
She should know. For the past eight years, Nirupama has been running Nirus Tennis Academy in the US with her brother, K V Ganesh. “It is a revealing experience to be a coach and many of my students are playing at university levels in the US,” she said. And, she continues to follow the scene in India. “A couple of players in India are doing ok, but the real problem is the difficulty in conceiving a team beyond them,” she says. For that, she thinks, more people needs to take up tennis or the game needs to be made more accessible to the public.
source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Coimbatore / by TNN / August 08th, 2013