Vijay Amritraj: The tennis champion who carried India’s identity to the world

That week, Vijay beats two greats, Rod Laver and Jimmy Connors, and wins the title and the hearts of the club regulars. He remembers those tough days fondly. “Be it wearing a tennis shirt on court or going out in chappals, I was comfortable in both,” he says. “For the final against Connors, everyone in the audience of 10,000 was White. Eventually, only two people were cheering for Connors. And when I came for dinner in the evening, several people in the room were wearing chappals.”

This wasn’t what it appeared to be — a breakout moment for young Vijay. It marked something bigger. Barely on New Delhi’s radar, here was a teenaged tennis player, supremely confident about his slick serve-and-volley game and the colour of his skin, beginning to shift the perception of India and Indians in the Western world. Vijay’s push for the country he was born in has not stopped. It has been mostly subtle or absolutely anonymous.

A young Vijay Amritraj

From refusing to surrender his Indian passport despite living in the United States for over 50 years, to wearing a Nehru jacket with a bold Tricolour strip for his Tennis Hall of Fame induction at Newport, Rhode Island, Vijay has always worn his Indianness on his sleeve. He introduced India to the world beyond the handful of nations that played cricket. He has been an honorary ambassador, without office or privileges, a walking billboard of everything that is nice about India.

He has not been a token Indian, a tick of the box or symbol of inclusivity. He was a big-draw player, Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) president, and was picked by the late UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as a Messenger of Peace alongside Muhammad Ali, Luciano Pavarotti and George Clooney, among others. In his travels, Vijay has seen the change that he had contributed to.

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On Monday, Vijay, 72, stood at Rashtrapati Bhavan and received the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, from President Droupadi Murmu. This was to acknowledge Vijay’s many inspiring acts. In Delhi, many years after the Florida triumph, he recalled those ‘champion in chappals’ times.

Vijay says the screaming and yelling of his fellow countrymen abroad are etched in his mind forever. He often meets those who were at matches they could not afford. “In the early ’70s, they didn’t know where India was geographically. Did they have many Indian friends? And here was an Indian guy doing these unreal things against a champion like Rod Laver. So after watching the Indian, they try to look up: who is this guy, where is India, what do they do? It is a process that has taken India to be where we are today in the world.”

Vijay Amritraj with Sunil Gavaskar (Express archive photo by Mohan Bane)

Those times were recalled two years back on the Newport grass courts, where tennis’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony is taking place. Vijay is not far from the other Indian inductee, his long-time friend Leander Paes. Martina Navratilova, Andre Agassi and Kim Clijsters sit alongside him. It is an elite gathering at a posh club and this time Vijay’s dress is unmistakably Indian. Nehru jacket, Tricolour strip.

Vijay’s son Prakash gets the microphone. A top Indian pro in his playing days, he, like his father, is an eloquent tennis pundit with a radio voice and TV presence. He has been tasked to talk about his father.

As Prakash spoke, Vijay bit his lip, trying not to well up. In the front row, his wife Shyamala recorded the event on her phone. It was getting tough for her. She was wiping tear drops from the side of her eyes while trying to keep the camera steady.

The Vijay story, as his son Prakash would narrate, is also about the “importance of having a hero to look up to”.

His son recalls the many conversations he has had with early Indian immigrants. He says they were from the time when “we people of colour felt we didn’t belong, we weren’t good enough, we were told we couldn’t”. For them, he says, Vijay “was a beacon of hope”.

A young doctor in early 1970s Massachusetts, in the middle of his residency, was struggling to bond with his White senior who would unfailingly ignore him. One day that changed. It was after he had watched Vijay beat Laver on national television. “The very next day, he started talking to the young aspirational kid and asking questions: ‘Where are you from? Are you from India?’ They started building a bond, built a friendship,” says Prakash. The kid went on to be among America’s most successful surgeons.

He also spoke about an aspiring actor with Indian roots, who had grown up facing taunts and racial slurs at school. The boy with stars in his eyes got to see Vijay play a handsome, debonair Indian secret agent (in the 1983 film Octopussy) who helped James Bond save the day. Another life changed. From that day, he did not believe those who told him the best he could do was be Appu in The Simpsons.

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Vijay Amritraj receiving the Padma Bhushan from President Droupadi Murmu (Photo Credits: Express Photos)

In his early years of globe-trotting, people would ask about India’s place on the map and talk only about elephants and snake charmers. Vijay has watched that image die slowly. “Now the tagline for India is always the brilliance of the mind. There is this common adage among youngsters today: ‘My phone is not working, go around the corner and talk to the Indian guy, he will fix it’. Where did that come from? The brilliance of the mind. All the chips that are in there, the future of AI, all of it has India.”

He says Indians are not just cracking the toughest academic tests or winning Spelling Bee contests but are now earning Michelin stars. “If you look at top-notch Indian restaurants in the UK or New York, you’re talking about them as Indian brands. They’re not your hole-in-the-wall restaurants. These are the very fancy ones. High-end people, movie stars and musicians go there.”

Finding Indian food in his early days in the United States was another matter. “It used to be so difficult in smaller towns,” he says, with a what-do-I-tell-you chuckle. “So every time I saw an Indian kid somewhere on the road, I would go to him and say, ‘I’m coming to your house tonight’. And not once did anyone say no.”

Vijay paints an endearing frame of those evenings. They were strangers but their struggles were common, everyone trying to build their own American dream. The guests, like the hosts, would sit on the floor in furniture-less homes. “We would just have dal-roti and the next day they would buy expensive tickets to come and cheer for me.”

Vijay would repay the favour with something priceless. He would give them their identity in an alien land.

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Seen universally as an elderly statesman, Vijay has a word of advice for those Indians travelling abroad to work, study and settle. “Don’t try to be something you’re not. You have to believe in yourself, which is why you’re going where you’re going, to something a bit better. You’re going to improve your own style of what you want to do. The design needs to be completely different with an Indian touch to it,” he says.

From his own experience, Vijay says it all starts from home and parents. “There are certain instincts and certain things that stay with you forever that are learned and embedded in you from a very young age. If you don’t know where you came from, you will never know where you’re going. And I think that is a very important factor for me that puts me in good stead around the world, especially in representation of my country and Indians,” he says.

Vijay Amritraj illustration (Credit – Suvajit Dey)

What about the Indian diaspora now and the newer challenges they face, the visa complications, the uncertainty about long-term stay in the United States for work? “When someone is doing exceptionally well, the need for more of them becomes vital. So in a few years, the importance of having them in great numbers starts to say, ‘oh my goodness, we’ve exceeded all limits more than any other country’. But everything needs to be based on merit.
For example, do we say: in the top 100 in tennis, there are more Spaniards, we should have some Indians in it too? I think you can’t argue with merit,” he says.

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Born with cystic fibrosis, a potentially fatal lung ailment, Vijay’s mother Maggie ensured that he would turn out to be a spectacular sporting over-achiever. During Vijay’s long and frequent hospitalisations as a child, she would attend school for him, take notes, and read them to him from his bedside. Once discharged, doctors told him to pursue an outdoor sport. Tennis it was. To build her son’s lung capacity, Maggie would be by Vijay’s side as he took baby steps, one metre at a time. She would sit in her car as Vijay jogged to the courts to the point he lost his breath. There came a time when the vehicle was no longer needed. Vijay was now covering the five miles that separated his home and the tennis courts on a canter. Maggie’s tenacity is part of Indian tennis folklore. When she was in her thirties, she had a near-fatal accident. Her sari caught fire from the flames of a kerosene stove in the kitchen. She was burnt from the neck down and needed to be in hospital for close to nine months. Even when she was in terrible pain, she would keep asking if Vijay’s tennis coach was paid. Years later, at the fag end of his career, playing a crucial Davis Cup match, Vijay would be reminded of his mother’s obsession about his tennis classes when he was seven.

He has not forgotten it. He never will.

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It is March 1987 and Delhi is getting baked by an unforgiving sun. It is the final day of the Davis Cup tie against Argentina. India’s chances of reaching the final seem all but lost. Vijay is on the training table in the locker room, surrounded by a worried circle of teammates, trainers, coaches, a manager and a doctor. India’s ageing star, at the fag end of his career, has been out on the draining grass courts for three days.

Day one: he beat their top seed (Horacio de la Peña) in singles. Day two: he lost a five-hour doubles match. Day three: after trailing 0-2, he has levelled it at 2-2, beating Martín Jaite.

In a ten-minute break, an exhausted Vijay is not ready to listen. The doctor gives him a warning. “You are taking the risk of permanent damage to your body.” Champions are differently made, their limits are stretchable. Vijay gets up, picks his racket, and has a short exchange with the manager on the way to the court. “Keep an oxygen cylinder ready and park an ambulance by the courtside.”

Neither is needed. Vijay wins. His teammates hoist him onto their shoulders. It is the mother of all comebacks, inspired by
a mom.

Not a visit to Delhi goes by without Vijay remembering that day. “It’s like it happened yesterday. That match was basically my life. Like the adage in the movie Rocky, where the guy stated that this whole life was a million to one shot for me. I think when I look at that, it’s what my mother said when she was in hospital, coming out of a coma and making sure that the coach was paid and my tennis would not be hampered,” he says.

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This was Vijay’s second Davis Cup final. The first was in 1974 but India had to boycott it as they were to play South Africa, a nation at that point in history pursuing racially discriminatory policies. India and its players took a tough stand and did not travel for the final. Nelson Mandela, from behind bars at Robben Island, took note.

“I was 20. As an athlete, it was a disappointment. But at the end of the day, you’re looking at the people who are living under the most ludicrous of policies and circumstances. We can add one little bit to putting pressure on them to be able to change their way of life. It was an athletic disappointment, but a human triumph,” he says.

Many years later, after the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, Vijay met Mandela. The tennis star was now a UN representative. The inmate was now president of South Africa. “We had the opportunity to shake his hand and have a few words with him. He said, ‘Thank you for what you did’,” recalls Vijay.

Vijay also heard something during those days that he has never forgotten. Those wise words were from Muhammad Ali. “He always said that he was not a boxer. Boxing was just a journey for him to be able to accomplish what he was put on this earth to do. Once when he had Parkinson’s, he told me: ‘Keep in mind, the service you do for others on earth is the rent you pay for a room in heaven’.” Vijay has tried to pass this message to the next generation.

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Back to Prakash and his speech. Among the many anecdotes there was one about an afternoon from decades back, when his mother Shyamala took his younger brother Vikram to McDonald’s after school. The mother parked the car as the son walked in to pick up chicken nuggets. On the way out, Vikram held the door for an older lady. Back in the car, Shyamala said, “Son, that was so sweet. Why did you do that?” Vikram replied, “I see dad do it all the time.”

Vijay didn’t just open the door for older ladies at McDonald’s. He opened it for a generation of Indians abroad.