A day in the life of a Tennis Player: Part 2

05:45 AM.

Father’s sense of time at this ungodly hour remains keenly sophisticated. I don’t want to test his patience this early in the day. Generally, my meek attempt at a daily rebellion comes half-way through the day, where I tell my brain that the amount of punishment I receive as exercise is karma for the sins I’ve committed three lifetimes back. Now however, a sense of discipline can be sniffed around me from miles away.

Father carefully checks my attire and attitude out, head to toe. I’m dressed every inch like an athlete. My hair is long, which is perfect cover in the sun. It has been tied back into a tight ball behind. I wear a matching pair of dry-fit shorts and a tee. Dry-fit clothes don’t absorb sweat, unlike cotton, which hugs you like a paranoid girlfriend. I’m forbidden boxers while playing for obvious reasons. My father’s casual explanation, “If your b*lls are lose, you jerk off serves all over the court”

I round up with a layer of track-pants and a sweatshirt. Mornings are cold. I’ll warm up like this, a miniature eskimo till my body becomes loose and warm enough to start hitting. A tennis professional’s career ends when he’s around 30 to 35. You have freak cases like Connors reaching Grand Slam semi-finals at 42, but those are extremely rare. I have to do everything I can to make sure my physique lasts as long as possible. I wear tennis shoes down. Tennis shoes are more or less the same for both clay and hard courts. They’re specialised for grass. Standard court shoes have no raised grip, unlike running shoes-which are meant for jogging or sprinting in one direction. Tennis shoes have a wave like marking, ideal for quickly changing direction.

Lastly, comes my kit. Carrying the kit out is the final stage before I embark on my mammoth atrocity of a day. If you’ve seen most players on TV, they carry their kit-bags on their own. A player’s life sits inside. He has everything he needs to survive the rigorous routines before, during and after a match. If I zip open my kit, you’ll find 2 racquets, gutted and ready to play with. One spare frame: bare – in case of an emergency. An entire reel of gut to be used at my discretion. Tennis racquets were strung at one point with gut made from animal intestine. This is where gut gets its name. I top this with the court necessities: a towel, a skipping rope for a quick warm up, a small medical kit, my Ipod- to help relieve tension before matches – and glucose bars. Bananas are the best to have while playing, but glucose works too. Lastly, I add a spare can of balls and a vibration dampner for my racquet.

In case you were wondering how much I have to shell out for all this, I have to admit that tennis is probably one of the most expensive sports to play, second only to golf. A professional racquet costs Rs. 10,000. Players generally carry three frames. A reel of gut would cost almost Rs. 4000. My clothes, branded and dry fit, sum upto another Rs. 5000. My shoes set me back Rs. 7000. A kit bag for another Rs. 3000 and coaching at Rs. 20, 000 a month ensures my life outside tennis is a comfortable zero. I spend close to Rs. 3 lakhs a year just for training. My father has to work late nights to even scrape together enough to ensure I have a diet suiting my training. It sometimes bothers me to think why I go through this self-inflicted torture for a dream which materialises for only one among ten players. You need to crack the top 150 if you want to have a life which is remotely decent.

Father starts his moped and consecutively, his stopwatch. I slow jog till the tennis courts, which are a good mile and a half away. As I pass familiar obstacles down the path I’ve crossed a thousand times since my childhood, I increase my pace, encouraging blood to pump my muscles. When I was really small, father would send our dog running behind me in the last 200 odd metres. You had no option but to sprint for your life. As soon as I would hear the canine panting, I would bolt. I can do a 100 metres in almost 12 seconds. That’s not fantastic for a sprinter, but for tennis players we aim at agility, more than speed. Animals like Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic were sprinting like there’s no tomorrow in the fifth set on a court where the temperature was almost 40 degrees C. It’s almost inhuman.

I reach the court in just under eight minutes. My father checks to see if I’ve made it within the limit, or else I’d have to turn back and sprint again. I start stretching. Aerobic stretching before tennis, simple stretching after. After ensuring that each and every movable muscle is warmed up, I’m good to go. Most people wouldn’t be able to bear the warm up knock we do before our match.

I drink a sip of water, before grabbing my racquet and running to the service line. My father stands there, like a miniature rhinoceros – immovable. We start with a little game called ‘b*tts up’. It’s basically like playing points from the service line. For 15 minutes we slice, dice and move each other as much as we can. But we have only the service boxes to play in. The prize this game has to offer is that whoever loses had to bend over and allow the winner to slam three serves directly at him. Since my righteous father won’t think of demeaning himself by breaking the game whenever he goes down match point, it’s only me who’s under pressure. Luckily, I come close to winning today.

It’s seven-thirty, and I’m good to go. May I stay alive at the end of the day…

To be continued…

Part 1 can be found here.