Rohan Bopanna: A short walk and a long stretch to late-career glory

The last time Rohan Bopanna’s life took another of its could-only-happen-to-him turns was during the dark, restrictive days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was pretty sure his career was over.

He’d just turned 40, which is ancient in tennis, even for doubles specialists. His knees were shot; devoid of nearly all of the cartilage that provides the essential cushioning between the bones of the joints, not just for playing elite sports but for walking from the living room to the kitchen. At the time, playing on the floor with his newborn daughter without pain would have felt like a victory.

The medical interventions, including injections of platelet-rich plasma and hyaluronic acid — a gel-like substance that can bind to any remaining cartilage and create a protective barrier between the bones — had largely failed. Bopanna, one of the game’s doubles greats, was at home in India, hitting a ball against a wall to maintain some semblance of feel, just in case science created the twin miracles that would make the pandemic and the pain go away. Professional tennis was on hold indefinitely. So was the practice/compete/practice/compete routine he had followed for more than 25 years, since he began his tennis journey on his family’s coffee farm in Coorg, southern India, as a teenager.

Each day, he got a bit fatter. A bit slower. A bit more desperate. Any suggestion that, four years later at age 44, Bopanna would be trying to win the title at the All England Club, preparing for the Olympics as a first-time Grand Slam champion, and reaching the world No. 1 ranking in doubles on the way would have seemed preposterous. His partner, Matthew Ebden, rather spoiled the party by overtaking him in April, and since then the duo have fallen to No. 3 and No. 4.

But Bopanna won’t be too upset. He knows there is an awfully rosy big picture view of where he has been and where he is now. Bopanna overcame aching, aging knees to stage one of the great late-career surges in any sport. Now, partnering Sriram Balaji for India in the men’s doubles, he is among the oldest Olympians at the 2024 Paris Olympics whose sport does not allow him to compete while sitting (equestrian) or standing still (shooting, archery). They will take on home favorites Fabien Reboul and Edouard Roger-Vasselin in the first round of the Games.

Bopanna and Ebden on their way to winning this year’s Australian Open (Elsa/Getty Images)

“I have no cartilage in my knees,” Bopanna repeated several times during a recent interview, emphasizing the absurdity of what he has accomplished despite all that. He shook his head. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he recalled asking a relative, a yoga teacher, if she could help.

At the time, it was not a particularly serious question. The answer ended up changing his life.

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The journeys of tennis professionals, even (or perhaps especially) the best ones, are filled with kismet.

The sport is so rarefied — requiring so much training and access to expensive coaching and court time — that somewhere along the way, something has to fall into place. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the co-founders of Microsoft, grew up a short bike ride away from the University of Washington and its mainframe computer system, on which they honed their skills in the 1960s. So much tennis success includes similar tales.

But even by tennis standards, Bopanna’s collisions of destiny are a bit off the charts. He didn’t really believe that relative when she said, yes, yoga could help — but not just any yoga. He needed to practice Iyengar yoga: a style that focuses on alignment. It uses a variety of props, including straps, ropes, chairs, weights, and contraptions that allow yogis to hang upside down from a wall for long stretches. It is known for its rehabilitative powers.

So he typed “Iyengar” into Google, more out of boredom and desperation than actual faith that it might save him. His black beard was already half-gray, and the hair on his head was starting to get salty, too. 

Then Google told him that there was an Iyengar studio just down the road from his home in Bangalore — so close he could walk there. The Practice Room. It was the only one for miles around, and he was metres away. 

He dialled the number. A man named Mohan Polamarasetty, who runs the studio with his wife, Jaya, picked up. Bopanna introduced himself and explained that he was a professional tennis player with wrecked knees. Polamarasetty introduced himself and explained that he was a tennis buff, too poor to play the game growing up, but a huge fan.

He knew exactly who Bopanna was.

Could Iyengar possibly help, Bopanna asked?

Bopanna during an Iyengar session (The Practice Room)

In a decade of running their studio, Mohan and Jaya have learnt not to make any promises. Success ultimately rests with their students. They have to be open. They have to be diligent. They have to be patient and understand that change is not automatic. They have to accept that if there is pain in their knee, the problem and the solution may lie with the hip, the spine, maybe even the shoulders.

Because of the pandemic, Mohan and Jaya could not hold classes, but they could work with Bopanna privately.

Come in and we’ll have a look, Mohan told him. 

Now, it almost sounds like the start of a stand-up comic’s routine. 

So this middle-aged professional tennis player with a gray beard hobbles into a yoga studio, and asks if they can save his career.

Mohan and Jaya knew this wasn’t a joke at all — Jaya doesn’t have much cartilage in one of her knees either. The Iyengar had fixed her. 

“We were pretty confident,” she said.

Bopanna’s career was upside down — being upside down saved it (The Practice Room)

As for Bopanna? He knew it was ridiculous that he would ever become a professional tennis player to begin with; and that he was playing so long past the usual sell-by date for touring pros.

His tennis journey had thrived on a weird combination of luck, whimsy, determination and hard work. So maybe, just maybe, the alignment of the stars that had produced this godforsaken virus, immobilizing his sport, giving him time to focus on healing and putting him within walking distance of having the chance to play it again, would prove to be the greatest break of his tennis life. 

After all he had been through to get to this spot and with nowhere to go, what did he have to lose?

Maybe the kismet had come for him once more.

Bopanna’s tennis kismet began before he was even born, before his parents were even married.

His grandfather owned a 50-acre coffee plantation in the hilly rural region of southern India 150 miles from Bangalore that makes up Coorg. He didn’t like seeing his son, MG, and his friends wandering around the countryside with little to do. So he gave him a small piece of land on the plantation and told him to build a tennis court.

The family knew next to nothing about tennis at the time.

Bopanna’s father-to-be had to get a book to learn the dimensions of the court and how to play the sport, including the most basic information, like how to hold a racket. But learn they did, so by the time Bopanna was growing up in the 1980s, his parents and their friends knew a little about the game. Still, Bopanna didn’t start playing until he was 10, and even then his dad was the closest thing he had to a coach. There were no tournaments, no teaching pros, no other kids to measure himself against. His strength training involved hammering a log every day, and climbing a rope his father rigged around two poles, because the book he had read said rope climbing could help with tennis.

Every morning he ran on the roads to build endurance. “I think that’s why I have no cartilage,” he said during an interview earlier this year.

Bopanna stretches for a volley at last year’s Tour Finals (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

By 14, he had reached a certain level of proficiency, but he was going to need some luck and some help to make the next level. He tried out for spots at the few tennis academies that existed in India. All rejected him. Every director said he wasn’t good enough. Except for one, in Pune, 600 miles north, which said he could come if he paid his own way. 

His father borrowed money, rented him a room in a hostel four miles from the academy and bought him a bicycle for transportation. Training started at 5:30 each morning. He did not complain. 

“It was freedom,” he said. “Coming to a new city, a big city, with so many players now suddenly playing tennis. And there’s a structure, small, but whatever the structure may have been, it was better than Coorg, because I had nobody there.”

He stayed four years, and got pretty good, but not nearly good enough to make it as a professional, so he moved to Bangalore, which was closer to home. There, he came to know the father of Mahesh Bhupathi, one of India’s most successful players and a Grand Slam doubles champion. 

The elder Bhupathi told him he had some promise, but somehow Bopanna had never learned how to hit a kick serve that would rise up and out of the court after it bounced. He showed him how, and told him to hit 200 serves a day and to use it religiously in tournaments. 

At first, Boppanna was framing balls and knocking them onto neighboring courts, double-faulting four times a game. After a while though, it clicked, and at 21, he won a national tournament in Chennai, and was on his way. Sort of. 

Bopanna would spend much of the next decade bouncing around the tennis minor leagues in singles and trying to find the right partner in doubles. That happened in 2010, when he began a consistent partnership with Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan, a controversial move for both considering the two countries’ history of antipathy. 

Bopanna and Qureshi in 2010 (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

The duo, one Hindu, the other Muslim, became known as the “Indo-Pak Express”. They warmed up in shirts that declared, “Stop War, Start Tennis.” After they made the finals of the U.S. Open, they received a series of awards for furthering peace in South Asia, including the Peace and Sport Image Award from Prince Albert in Monaco. Bopanna gave up on his singles career and he and Qureshi remained together through 2014. 

After that, he spent years following the usual routine of trying to find partners he could click with and whose ranking was high enough to get him into tournaments. All the while, the cartilage in his knees was wearing away, his bones grinding together.

His pain was worsening.

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Mohan Polamarasetty said Bopanna was almost entirely focused on his knees when he came to The Practice Room. Polamarasetty told Bopanna that his knee wasn’t his problem.

“All I said was, ‘Look, your thigh seems weak, so let’s strengthen your thigh’,” he said. “’Let’s strengthen your buttocks, let’s strengthen your abs, let’s ignore the knees completely’. We look at everything else but that problem area. We started strengthening his thighs, we started connecting his thigh muscles to his buttock muscles. Then we started connecting his buttock muscles to his back muscles. Then we slowly started reconstructing.”

This all happened through a series of movements and positions that require leaps of faith. There was a lot of hanging upside down, a lot of supporting weights with straps, a lot of manoeuvring the body into strange positions involving chairs, blocks and towels.

Bopanna at the studio that saved his career (The Practice Room)

As the weeks and sessions wore on, the pain began to dissipate. Bopanna had been getting injections in his knees for several years, but soon stopped. He assumed his cartilage was growing back. His doctor told him cartilage does not grow back on its own. 

Bopanna underwent a scan anyway, because he figured he had to be the first human to regenerate cartilage.

He is not.

“It’s not a miracle,” Polmarasetty said. “It’s hard work.”

That work never ends. Bopanna travels with straps and other equipment, and each time he walks into a hotel room he looks to see how he can use the furniture as part of his morning routine. At this year’s Miami Open, during a quick break before he played a championship-deciding tiebreak, he did a yoga headstand in the locker room, calming his nerves and his breath with a rush of blood to his head.

The kismet of Iyengar might have saved his knees, but none of the rest — the first Grand Slam title, the being doubles world No. 1 — would have happened without one other stroke of good fortune.

At the end of 2022, he and Matthew Ebden of Australia got dumped by their doubles partners. Ebden’s partner, Max Purcell, another Aussie, wanted to focus on singles. Bopanna’s partner, Matwe Middelkoop, wanted to play with another Dutchman to better prepare for the Olympics and Davis Cup. 

Ebden was 35. Bopanna was 42. No one else was knocking down their doors.

They figured, why not give it a whirl? It worked out. Scott Davidoff, Bopanna’s coach for the past decade, said that the key to both players’ success has been their attention to their fitness and their happiness. When there are some long, lonely weeks on the road, both try to have their young families along with them. After winning the Australian Open, the culmination of everything that Bopanna had done since the dark days with the ball and the wall and the fear that he could never play with his daughter how he wanted to, let alone play tennis how he wanted to, he celebrated.

He celebrated with Ebden; with the Aussie’s family; with his wife, Supriya Annaiah — a psychologist who never said he was nuts for trying all of this on a short walk and a long stretch and a Google search. And he celebrated with his daughter, Tridha, who is four and who stayed up until 4am, saying she wanted to sleep with the trophy. 

“You want to make sure they are enjoying the moments,” Davidoff said.

Enjoying them they are. Kismet.

Enjoying the moments after the Australian Open triumph (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic / Shi Tang / Daniel Pockett Getty Images)