Village tales

Leander Paes,Tennis
I remember that time when (Mahesh) Bhupathi and I were at Athens in 2004. I owe that semi-final appearance to Jaideep Mukerjea. On the day of our first match,our shuttle bus was set to leave to the stadium but Mahesh and I were fast sleep. Thankfully,Jaideep uncle peeped into our room to check on us and when he realised we were fast asleep,he went down and kept the bus waiting. We jumped out of our beds,ran down to gulp some coffee so we would wake up and ran to the bus. Had we missed that match we would have been out of the

tournament.

Talking about another time,at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 I met Mohammad Ali,and interacted with Agassi. That was special too.As told to Smriti Sinha