Stuck at the base: The grand slump in Indian tennis

For the fourth day, as Jaidip Mukerjea narrated, around 5,000 people flocked the club; never mind the daunting climb staring at Krishnan. It was about to get steeper, with Koch racing to a 5-2 lead in the fourth set to be a game away from putting the contest to bed. That’s when Krishnan came alive to win the fourth set 7-5, the fifth 6-2 and the match and the tie 3-2.

“You won’t believe the crowd…they just came jumping on to the court. They hugged him (Krishnan), they carried him with them,” Mukerjea, India’s second player from the tie who teamed up with Krishnan to deliver the decisive doubles victory, said. “The government declared a holiday that day.”

Back in Madras, unprecedented felicitations greeted Krishnan.

“There was no TV back then, yet I became a national hero,” Krishnan, now 84, recalled. “I went for a haircut and the barber refused to charge me!”

It’s more than sheer coincidence that both Krishnan and Mukerjea went back 55 years to pick a moment that encapsulated the tennis high in the country.

Such tales have vanished from Indian tennis.

When did you last hear of an Indian success story emerging from the sport? When did you last see an Indian magician with a racquet in hand? When did you last hear the roar of thousands of fans bouncing around the court while watching a tennis match in the country?

Indian tennis has gone from producing Grand Slam semifinalists and quarterfinalists in singles to celebrating a first-round Slam victory once in seven years. From being three-time Davis Cup finalists to being demoted to a lower group. From resembling a buzzing beehive of talent to a barren desert with straggling survivors.

“Today, and I’m sorry to say this, our tennis scene is really bad. It’s plain sad,” Mukerjea said.

Sad for a sport seeped deep in history. Much before global tennis embraced the Open Era in 1968, Indians were making a mark. Players like Sumant Misra and Dilip Bose created waves at the domestic, Asian and world stage through the 1940s and 50s, which was ridden to unforeseen heights by the talents of Krishnan, Mukerjea and Premjit Lall over the next decade and more. Krishnan, the 1954 junior Wimbledon champion, twice made the singles semi-finals at The All England Club in 1960 and 1961 and found a spot in the world’s top-10 rankings. Mukerjea was a four-time singles last-16 entrant at Wimbledon and twice at the French Open. Indeed, the 1966 Davis Cup heroics were no fluke.

“We were considered a leading and strong opponent for any nation because of our performances,” Krishnan said.

India was also considered a tennis-loving nation, and it reflected in its domestic tournaments. Let alone the cream of Indians, foreign players ranging from Roy Emerson to Ilie Nastase too wanted a slice of it.

“We had a lot of players coming from Europe to play in the winter. It strengthened our base. Plus, one of us Indians was always playing the semis or final or winning the tournament, which is why the stands were packed. Tennis became more popular in India, and the youngsters were watching,” Mukerjea said. The torch had been lit, and now it was being passed on. The Amritraj brothers, Vijay and Anand, came along in the 1970s and had the likes of Sashi Menon and Jasjit Singh for company at the top level. Vijay reached a career-high world No. 18 in 1980, making the singles quarter-finals of both Wimbledon and US Open twice. The 1974 Davis Cup final, for which India gave a walkover to South Africa protesting apartheid, is part of world tennis folklore.

Ramesh Krishnan, Ramanathan’s son, would soon follow his famed father’s footsteps. A three-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist in the 1980s, he scripted a stunning win over the then world No. 1 Mats Wilander in the Round of 64 of the 1989 Australian Open and was the chief architect of the 3-2 win against hosts Australia that took India to its third Davis Cup final in 1987. Less than a decade later, a young Leander Paes delivered one of the last glittering moments of India’s singles spectacle, an Olympic bronze in 1996 Atlanta, before Sania Mirza shone bright at the turn of the century as the trailblazing Indian woman among the elite.

Somewhere along the way, however, the torch got dropped—at least when it came to singles. The Paes-Mahesh Bhupathi combination was winning Slams in the late nineties, chest-bumping and all that, injecting oomph into the doubles game. Mirza joined in and became world No 1. Rohan Bopanna followed, becoming a a Grand Slam mixed doubles champion in the last decade.

But the doubles boom happened in lockstep with a drastic slump in singles. In the last 21 years, India has only seen Mirza in the top-50 of the singles rankings and three men sporadically enter the top-100: Somdev Devvarman, Yuki Bhambri and Prajnesh Gunneswaran. You’ll have to rewind 13 years for the last Indian to progress beyond the singles second round at Grand Slams (Mirza, 2008 Australian Open), 24 years for the last male (Paes, 1997 US Open) and six years for the last Indian singles player to defeat a higher-ranked opponent in Davis Cup.

Krishnan believes the slump in singles and the rise in doubles is connected.

“In my days, there were 300 or 400 top players travelling for tournaments. Now it is in the thousands. Our players lost confidence and started going for doubles play. It is a bad move which has seriously impacted Indian tennis,” he said.

So did the drop in volume and value of the domestic circuit. As India’s top pros shifted abroad—US and Europe, specifically—on scholarships or to seek a training base and compete in international events due to the lack of opportunities at home, national tournaments lost its local touch along with the diminishing overseas colour.

“The Indian tennis season seems to have gone haywire,” Ramesh said. “The quality of players dropped. This coincided with the increase of TV popularity in India, which meant that spectators started staying away. It was difficult to get the attention of the fan, who had too many other avenues.”

Indian tennis continues in its struggle to find enough reason, and faces, for the fan to come back. “When we were playing, youngsters like Vijay and Anand started taking over, followed by Ramesh and Leander,” Mukerjea said. “You have to have your local heroes, someone you look up to. Now, youngsters have no one. They only look up to (Roger) Federer and (Rafael) Nadal. When Sania was doing well, girls started picking up the sport. But nothing has happened since.”

And nothing may happen anytime soon.

“I cannot see in the next 10 years—I hope I am wrong—anyone coming in the top-20,” Mukerjea said. “To get to the cherry, you have to climb the mountain. We’re stuck at the base.”