DUBAI // “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”
If Dr Harvir Nehwal was like Stan Wawrinka, he may have got these words from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet tattooed on his arms. But he is an agricultural scientist and a fan of a tennis player from a different generation, Steffi Graf.
Nehwal and his wife Usharani were so fond of the German that they would affectionately call their daughter “Steffi”. But, growing up inside the campus of the agricultural university where her father worked in the north Indian city of Hisar, the young girl showed little interest in tennis or any other racquet sport.
Saina, instead, loved swimming and playing cricket with the boys. In her own words, she would barely spend time at home and was outside the whole day, at school studying or playing sports.
Those happy days, however, came to an end in 1998 when Dr Nehwal received a promotion and had to leave Hisar. He had the option of five cities, but, with destiny perhaps nudging him, picked Hyderabad.
For the eight-year-old Saina, those were lonely days. She missed her friends from Hisar and felt miserable sitting at home all day. Her parents decided to enrol her at the judo-karate school next door, and the little girl was a brown belt in a short time.
“I got a brown belt and was on the verge of getting a black belt, but it was too tough for an eight year old to continue,” said Nehwal, who was in Dubai yesterday to help promote badminton through the Shuttle Time Dubai initiative.
“I used to feel a lot of pain in the body and I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore’. That’s when one of my father’s friends told him, ‘why don’t you just send Saina to play badminton’.
“That’s how I started playing badminton in May, 1999. Then I started participating in small tournaments – school tournaments, district tournaments, state tournaments.
“Gradually I started winning, and I really enjoyed those moments when I was standing on a podium with a medal around my neck or a trophy in hand or winning some small prize money. So it was just destiny. It’s not like I wanted to be a badminton player.”
Today, she is the top-ranked player in the world, the first Indian woman to reach that position. She is the first non-Chinese to reach the top of the rankings since September 2009.
Since the new Badminton World Federation ranking system was introduced in 2009, only two women from outside mainland China have reached the top – Hong Kong’s Zhou Mi and Tine Baun of Denmark. Between them, they managed to spend 49 weeks at No 1; for the other 288 weeks, it was the Chinese.
So Nehwal’s rise to the top is a big achievement, but it would not have been possible without a little nudge from destiny and a fresh start in a new city.
After a disappointing 2013, when she did not reach a single final and fell from No 3 to No 8 in the rankings, a disenchanted Nehwal was on the verge of quitting. But then she spoke to former national champion and national team coach Vimal Kumar and he convinced her to persevere.
“It was such a difficult year for me,” Nehwal said of that year. “I was not able to beat any top players; I was losing to almost all the players. In 2014, when the World Championships came, it was the same result with Li Xuerui,” the 2012 Olympic champion.
“So I thought if I play in the next tournament, I have to be in my best form or it is better to just stop playing. I spoke to Vimal sir about my decision, but he was like, ‘Saina, don’t do that. You are doing really well, don’t worry about your performance. What you need is a change’.”
Change meant packing her bags and leaving Hyderabad for Bangalore to train at the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy, where Vimal is a director. It meant parting with long-time mentor Pullela Gopichand, Nehwal did in September.
“There was a lot of criticism of my decision – ‘Saina is doing the wrong thing’, ‘She is changing her coach’ and ‘we don’t think she will be able to win again’,” Nehwal said. “I heard a lot of these things, but I just kept myself cool and Vimal sir just made me believe everyday that, ‘You are a champion, that you can do it’.
“Actually, my belief had really gone down and he made me get it back. Then, of course, he was like, ‘If you get your confidence back, the training, I will take care of it. Don’t worry about it’.
“So the one-on-one training we are doing is really helping me a lot. In Hyderabad, I was training with 20 people. I am world No 2 and I cannot do the same things as the others are doing. I could not just sit there and think, ‘when will my chance come?’.
“I had to do something, and with the 2016 Olympics approaching, I had to make a decision and I am happy with the one I made. I think it was God’s decision again that I went to Bengaluru.”
The divine plan, again. Destiny has perhaps laid out the dots for them, and the Nehwals have done a good job of connecting them.
arizvi@thenational.ae
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