Sania Mirza ended her glorious journey in Grand Slam tennis with a runner-up finish at the Australian Open on Friday. It caps a highly successful career for one of India's few sporting heroes who have made it big in elite sport.
When she burst onto the Indian tennis scene as a precocious player in her early teens, winning titles at the nationals, Sania was marked out for greater things. That she went on to become a multiple Grand Slam winner and rose as high as World No. 27 in women's singles rankings and played her last match at a major tournament in a final at the age of 36 is something nobody could have foreseen. To play her final Grand Slam tournament with her four-year-old son watching from the stands was a special moment, which highlights the longevity of her career at the top level.
But to reach this moment, Sania had to endure a lot of odds both on and off the field. A fearless, outspoken woman who would not be dictated to by anybody, she charted her own path to become the trailblazer she is today. As a teenager, she defied fatwas by Muslim clerics who pronounced her anti-religious for wearing skirts on the court. In a post 9-11 Islamophobic world, she was often questioned about her religion and not her performance on the court. Then, her choice of a life partner, when she married Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik in 2010, was also questioned. The strong personality that she is, Sania took on these unwarranted outside pressures head-on and shone through her performances on the tennis court.
Her numbers make her the greatest Indian female tennis player. Besides the milestone of the No. 27 ranking achieved in 2007, she has six Grand Slam titles - three each in women's doubles and mixed doubles, and the doubles No. 1 ranking for a total of 91 weeks. In her debut at the 2005 Australian Open, Sania became the first Indian woman to reach the third round of a major in singles, losing 6-4, 6-1 to Serena Williams (at the time six-time singles Grand Slam winner and world No.7), and reached the fourth round at the US Open later that year. Her silky forehand was her biggest weapon which troubled the great Williams then but a string of injuries put paid to her ambition of becoming a singles Grand Slam champion. She then channelled her energies into becoming a doubles specialist, forming successful partnerships with Indian doubles great Mahesh Bhupathi and Swiss legend Martina Hingis.
Sania bows out of the tennis arena as not just India's but the subcontinent's greatest female tennis player with a legacy that will take some doing to match by her compatriots - men or women. The Hyderabadi ace is leaving the big stage but worryingly for India there is no one in sight to fill her big shoes in tennis. Since Sania’s impressive run in the singles, other countries not known for their tennis (like China) have produced major singles champions but India still remains a sleeping giant. Despite a rich legacy of men’s tennis players like Ramanathan Krishnan, Ramesh Krishnan, Vijay Amritraj, Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes, the country has missed the bus in singles tennis, both men's and women's; while no Indian woman is ranked in the top 200 in singles this week. The No. 27 that Sania reached still remains a peak for Indian tennis, a summit that won't be scaled anytime soon.
