The miraculous case of Sumit Nagal

SOMEHOW, IMPROBABLY, Sumit Nagal, ranked 137th on the Association of Tennis Professionals tour, had fought Alexander Bublik, ranked 27th, to a third-set tiebreak. Two and a half gruelling hours had passed on a bright blue acrylic-layered court at the 2024 Australian Open. Nagal had three match points, and he just had to make one of them. He wore a neon orange kit and a white cap. Long white sweatbands ran up his forearms; sweat sheened his forehead and calves. On the other side of the court was Bublik, seeded 31st for the tournament, pale and lanky, taking in harsh breaths. A twisted racquet lay next to Bublik’s bench, from when he had smashed it in frustration. Late in the second set, he had been seen laughing to himself in disbelief. 

The crowd was captivated. Nagal was never supposed to get this close. 

But suddenly, Nagal began to choke. He squandered his first two match points on mistimed forehands that landed far wide. If Nagal lost the tiebreaker, it wouldn’t matter how well he’d played so far. Bublik would take the third set, and with it a second chance: to claw back the fourth set, and then the fifth, and then the match, which had been, for a brief, bright moment, all Nagal’s. 

This was the beauty and cruelty of tennis, a sport played without a clock: it was never too late to win. And it was never too late to lose. Nagal looked tired. When he lost the second match point, he paused, briefly, to drop his hands to his knees and bend low. Was he despairing? Was he trying to catch his breath?

On the third and last match point, Bublik served. Usually firing past his opponent at speeds of some 200 kilometres an hour, his serve had been glitching all match. The first was called out. Bublik served again. Out again: double fault. 

The point and match went to Nagal, who raised his arms to the sky in supplication: Oh, thank god that’s over. 

The crowd was frenzied as he shook hands with Bublik, then the umpire, then staggered to his bench. Nagal raised his fist and shook it. The motion was stilted, like that of an automaton, but the crowd roared. He did it again when he sat down, and they roared again. And then Nagal, surprisingly, roared too: belated anger and pride. Behind his bench was a clamour of fans with balls for him to sign, phones ready for selfies. One screamed and pointed: “Bro! That was all you, bro!” 

Just four months earlier, Nagal had had around INR 80,000 in the bank – something over USD 900. The yearly cost of playing tennis full-time for Nagal, with coaches, travel, stay and physical therapy, is more than 200 times that amount. Most years as a pro on the men’s tour, Nagal barely broke even after putting together money invested from his previous winnings, and modest stipends from the Indian Oil Corporation and local tennis federations in India. With his win over Bublik, he’d raked in around INR 9.5 million, or just over USD 110,000. It was the most significant win of his career – and the first by any Indian male against a seeded opponent in a Grand Slam since 1989. 

Nagal uncapped his water bottle and took a sip. The fans kept screaming, cordoned off by banners for Chubb Insurance. For all the people shouting for him, he looked remarkably alone.

TENNIS IS A TORTUROUS grind. Thousands of women and men play it professionally for eleven months of the year. The men are governed by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the women by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA); everyone is subject to the governance of the four Grand Slams – the Australian, United States and French Opens and Wimbledon – which enjoy independent rule; and then there’s the International Tennis Federation that helps regulate all of it, along with low-tier tournaments for low-rank players, like the Challenger and Futures events. Players train, play, draw crowds and are monetised for about a billion viewers around the world, but 80 percent of those ranked in the global top 1000 don’t make enough to cover their expenses. Sponsors flock to those ranked in the top 50; the others may get free sneakers or kits, but only if they are lucky or unusually charismatic. Tennis careers don’t usually last more than 15 years. Over half of the exits from the sport are attributable to injury. 

In India, where Nagal is from, and where cricket takes up so much of the oxygen, tennis is surprisingly well-entrenched. It was introduced by British civil servants in the 19th century and has enjoyed popular participation ever since. Now, India is home to roughly a tenth of the world’s 90 million tennis players, and to some of the most accomplished tennis players ever: the Amritraj brothers and Ramesh Krishnan of the 1970s; Sania Mirza, who won six doubles Grand Slams in the 2000s; and Rohan Bopanna, who became the number-one in men’s doubles in January 2024. For a time, tennis and nationalist fervour perfectly combined. In the summer of 1999, as India and Pakistan fought the Kargil War in Ladakh, Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes brought home the men’s doubles trophy from the French Open. Doubles tennis in India, with all this accumulated expertise, continues to flourish, with ten players in the top 150 as of 31 December 2024. It guarantees less risk of injury, a longer career, and so more money, which is why players like Yuki Bhambri, who once attained a singles ranking as high as 83, have transitioned to it. For a long time, India has seemingly had no real singles prospects. The question is: why?

IN A 2015 INTERVIEW, shortly after his son became the Wimbledon boys’ doubles champion, Suresh Nagal, a municipal school teacher, recalled the exact distance from their house to Sumit’s childhood coaching centre. “Sumit practiced at the Siri Fort Sports Complex,” he said, which is about 27 kilometres away from Nangloi” – a neighbourhood in western Delhi. “So the travelling took its toll. We used to travel in packed buses.” 

Nagal was seven years old when he first started playing tennis in earnest. The year would have been around 2004. The Delhi Transport Corporation, so ordered by the Supreme Court of India, would have been converting its bus fleet to run on compressed natural gas. City buses back then had a classic yellow-green exterior with white stripes running down their length, the DTC logo of two interconnected arrows hand-painted on the sides. Old and rickety, they had no air conditioning and no passenger-side doors. 

It would have been in just such a bus that Nagal went to school and then practice every day. And it would have been just such a bus that carried him and his mother, Krishna, to a “nationwide talent hunt” for the next tennis great. 

It was 2007. Apollo Tyres, an Indian company, was sponsoring the search. The following year, it would officially launch Apollo 2018, a mission to create India’s first Grand Slam singles champion within ten years. 

Presiding over the trials were several international coaches and Mahesh Bhupathi, tall, dark and possessed of a genial handsomeness, who had won all four mixed-doubles Grand Slams. 

Ten-year-old Nagal was jittery. His father had promised to drive him to the trials, and then had fallen sick. So Nagap took the bus with his mother, who, though she had kept her son fed and healthy all these years so he could play, cutting back on her own meals when she had to, did not know who Bhupathi was. 

The trials progressed, and Nagal seemed unable to distinguish himself from worse peers. His impatience grew. He went up to Bhupathi.

The champion was surveying the trials: all the small, skinny boys hitting groundstrokes, some five thousand of them. In an account to the sports journalist Giri Nathan, Nagal later said, “I went and I took Heshi’s hand, and I said, ‘Can you please watch me play? The guy you [advanced], I beat him every time.’” Nagal’s confidence caught Bhupathi’s attention – perhaps he glimpsed the simple, straightforward self-belief one needs to be a true competitor. It was the hand-hold that changed everything.

The anecdote is lovely, but in many ways it vexes as much as it entertains. The best players are scouted at age six or seven to begin preparing for the intense biomechanical demands of tennis. Not at age ten, like Nagal. Getting scouted early is just one step among many that usually makes the difference between a player who exits tennis young and one who continues playing it professionally, with the differentiating factor being consistency. Players are trying to maximise consistency over time, monitoring when and how they eat, practice and play tournaments. They are paying attention to pubertal changes and form, protecting the body from injuries, which lead to missed days and inconsistency.

I spoke to my friend Eashan Ghosh, who taught me how to watch tennis. Ghosh is an intellectual-property rights lawyer. He played tennis seriously until middle school, in the same city as Nagal, before realising he wasn’t going to cut it. In other countries, he said, “programmes are well-funded, and your education is taken care of. So we never had that. We never had that luxury, right? Every hour that you’re playing tennis on a hard summer’s day is an hour that you will have to recover from later in the day, and then do your homework, and then attend class, and all of that is non-negotiable.” 

I thought of Nagal returning from school in the afternoon under a scorching Delhi sun, and then heading out again for four hours of practice, under that same sun. 

In 2010, Apollo Tyres pulled its funding for Apollo 2018 just two years into its commitment. The company had given out 36 scholarships to young boys and girls around India, including Nagal, all of whom were suddenly cut off. It cited the global recession. In conversation with me, Nathan ventured that this episode was representative of the Indian context: “You have a lot of grand proclamations, and you have these brief moments of interest. But getting that sustained commitment? The funding of tennis is very extensive, and it’s very unglamorous, because you need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get around the world and receive training, even if your results aren’t good.”

Nagal was 12 years old, training at Bhupathi’s academy in Bengaluru. “I went back to Delhi in Jan,” he said during a press conference in Melbourne on 16 January. “Feb to April I quit. I said it’s impossible. I cannot afford. My dad is a teacher, so I said it’s impossible to afford this. End of March and April I get a call from Mahesh saying, Listen, I’ll take care of you. Do you still want to play tennis?”

Perhaps the greatest enemy of consistency is a lack of resources. It is impossible to carry on a routine without knowing when you can next pay your coach or physical therapist. You begin betting against yourself: how deep will you go in the tournament, when should you book a return flight? Every match could be your last if you don’t accrue enough points to qualify for the next tournament and earn the next paycheck, or if your sponsor drops you dead, or if your coach says they have to pay rent too and begins prioritising other players. 

But, like some kind of deus ex machina, Mahesh Bhupathi swept in. He supported Nagal and helped him move to Toronto, in Canada, where Nagal would train until 2014 before shifting to Offenbach in Germany. Nagal would continue winning Under-12 and Under-14 tournaments. At 17, he would qualify for the Wimbledon Juniors and take the doubles title with Nam Haong Ly of Vietnam. Then would begin the long, hard years of grinding on the Challenger circuit, hoping for a breakthrough to the main tour. 

Nathan observed: “I think if you play out Sumit’s life 10,000 times, in only maybe five of those times is he in the position he is now.”

AN IMPORTANT ACTOR lurks behind Nagal’s story: the Indian national sporting system. This system is a hound whose nose follows national prestige. India has only ever won one medal in tennis at the Olympics, a Bronze, and it is that sort of international achievement that matters most to the All India Tennis Association (AITA). The AITA’s revenues in 2022 were over INR 100 million. Around INR 16.9 million was spent on player development and grant disbursals; a smaller portion was spent on administrative expenses; and the rest, nearly INR 74 million, was declared surplus and returned to the 2023 general fund. In 2023, a similar amount was once again declared a surplus. It was only in 2024, an Olympic year, that the AITA spent nearly all its income. 

This is puzzling. There is no shortage of players who could have used these surpluses to compete at more tournaments on the ATP or WTA tours. But, plainly, it matters what the money is used for. Association documents lay out “key milestones” for the 2024 and 2028 Olympic Games (five medals), and the 2022 Asian Games (nine medals). When providing young talent with funding, the AITA prioritises “events where there are realistic medal chances.” In effect, a small fund is spread across many players, and its use is restricted to representing India at a few specific, internationally significant events. 

This approach fundamentally misunderstands how good players are made. Seeking out tough competition, events in which players are likely to lose and not win a medal, is an important part of the programme. To not understand this affects how achievements are valued. Nagal’s first-round win at the 2024 Australian Open was not a championship win, nor was it easily come by. Thousands toil year-round hoping for an outcome like Nagal’s. Consistent subsidies allow players to participate more fully in the tennis calendar, and give them a better chance at moving up in the rankings and earning a steady living. The Royal Spanish Tennis Federation, for instance, funds not only participation in international tennis team events like the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup, but also professional tour expenses. But to understand all this would be to accept, as Nathan put it, an unglamorous proposition. 

One issue seems to be that there is no centralised system of tennis development in India. Plans for a Centre of Excellence, an elite academy that would bring together the most talented Indian players under one roof, fell through when the AITA withdrew half the funding. 

Somdev Devvarman, the highest ranked Indian male singles player in the 21st century (whose rank of 62 back in 2014 Nagal is still chasing), had been attached to lead the centre after his retirement. He advocated for a system like that run by the United States Tennis Association, where coaches are provided gratis for players at every level and work with all nationally ranked players – both the ones that have reached success and the ones still developing. Devvarman expressed cheerful frustration in a 2019 interview: “Maybe the [AITA] thinks it is very simple. I think it’s not. If you think it is simple, why have you not done it for 30 years?” 

Throughout my research, the AITA kept coming up as a dysfunctional body, one mired in conflict and unpleasant to work with. Even in his patriotic history of Indian tennis, the writer Anindya Dutta had to admit, “I did not meet many players across generations who had a positive word to say about [Indian tennis administrators].” Representatives of the AITA did not respond to my questions about its mission and fund disbursements, and about these allegations. 

Back in 2008, the AITA took issue with Apollo Tyres’ splashy Mission 2018. More recently, Karti Chidambaram, the vice president of the Tamil Nadu Tennis Association, spoke about the AITA’s lack of interest in a crowdfunded player development fund, indicating perhaps a preference for controlling how tennis is funded. Chidambaram – the son of the former Indian home minister P Chidambaram – was sacked from the AITA in 2014 through the kind of lawyering usually reserved for courtroom dramas.

Bhupathi and Bopanna were once banned from representing India at any international event for two years for refusing to pair up with other players. The captains for India’s Davis Cup team are frequently cut and reshuffled without notice. In September 2024, Devvarman and Purav Raja, also a doubles player, filed a petition with the Delhi High Court alleging that the AITA had violated several provisions of the National Sports Code. These violations purportedly include the wilful exclusion of athletes from electoral processes and decision-making within the organisation. Devvarman characterised the administrators as “corrupt, insensitive, and incompetent” shortly after news of his petition broke, and said that “the system should enable dreams, not crush them.”

Nagal has also tussled with the AITA. He opted out of the Davis Cup tie against Pakistan earlier in 2024 because it would be played on grass, a surface that favours aggressive play and serve-and-volleying, none of which are his strengths. In retaliation, the AITA refused to nominate him for a 2024 Australian Open wildcard. Instead of vaulting into that first round match against Bublik, Nagal laboured through three qualifying rounds. He said getting the call from the AITA secretary general Anil Dhupar was “a bummer”. 

The bad blood has some history. Nagal faced disciplinary action for draining the mini-bar at a hotel room and bringing his girlfriend to a Davis Cup match against Korea in July 2016, when he was 18 years old. Six months later, he was dropped from the Indian team for a tie match against New Zealand. The AITA appeared to have withheld punishment for those six months, in part because it still needed Nagal to play against Spain later in 2016. But it didn’t come away happy with his performance against Spain, either. One AITA official complained that in the concluding singles matches, Nagal “did not want to finish the match. He kept on saying he wants to retire, since he was having a breathing problem. He is a young player. If he is not able to play, what is his place in the team?” Another added: “He has been set aside temporarily and definitely has not lost his place permanently, because he is a very good player and has a good future.” 

Nagal declined to comment at the time. I found myself far less troubled by a teen drinking than an organisation careening wildly between carrot and stick, alienating its best players. 

When I asked Nathan about all this, he pointed to Kwon Soon-woo. In 2021, Kwon became the first player from South Korea to win a tour-level title since 2003. The only way in South Korea to gain exemption from mandatory military service during one’s mid-twenties, the prime of one’s career, is to win “a very narrowly circumscribed set of medals” that the government believes bring national glory. In an Asian Games match in 2023, Kwon suffered a shock loss to Thailand’s Samrej Kasidit, who was ranked outside the top 600. “After the match, he just immediately smashed all his rackets, something I’ve never seen him do before. But he knew, because of the way his country was viewing his tennis accomplishments in this very warped way, he was going to have to take this extremely disruptive break from his career.” Nathan added, “I think that’s an extreme case. But I think some version of that probably applies broadly, where we assume these players are useful insofar as they can help propagate these kinds of nationalist stories. And they’re not necessarily useful as individuals, striving and trying to achieve things on their own terms.”

WHEN TENNIS DOES flourish in India, it’s often not due to state efforts but a patchwork of passionate coaches, former players, philanthropists and local businesses. The key here is jugaad, or frugal innovation. Deepak Nahak, a coach and the tournament director of the Gadre Gaspar Dias Open in the state of Goa, started out playing tennis in a fairly jugaadi way. When they were young, he and a friend used to line up a row of chairs in lieu of a net and hit plastic balls over it with their pencil boxes. There were no tennis courts in HL City, in the state of Haryana, but soon they discovered they could extend the lines on concrete badminton courts and play there. 

Nahak laughed over our Zoom call as he reminisced. It was late in the night in India, and he had, with enormous generosity, made time for me after sitting all day with a recently hospitalised uncle. We both had bad internet, so it was video-off: we had only our voices to gauge each other. Nahak was unhurried, warm, and spoke with a sincerity devoid of self-deprecation. After bowing out from district-level tournaments due to injuries, Nahak worked briefly in the corporate world as a management consultant. Then, in 2016, he returned to tennis full-time in his current role.

We transitioned into a discussion about the Indian tennis ecosystem. Nahak told me that scouting is difficult within a privatised system of academies and clubs. Tennis takes cricket’s leftovers: people often “fail into” tennis from cricket, which is more easily played on the street than tennis, and therefore more observable by scouts looking for young talent. Scouting also takes place primarily in cities that already have tennis academies or Challenger events; it’s rare to spot players from rural areas or the country’s Northeast. 

I put to Nahak some critiques I had heard of Indian coaching. Nagal famously did not know of footwork as a technical concept until he was 13 or 14 years old and being trained in Canada; my friend Ghosh was often coached into fearing his backhand, and trained to run around it as much as he could. What did Nahak make of all this? He answered after a moment, gently, in a way that made me feel embarrassed: “Well, I would not like to downplay our Indian coaching formula. We have our own restrictions.” 

Climate is a big one: indoor facilities are few, and the weather in most cities is too harsh to be played in outdoors for four to six hours a day. When it rains, tennis comes to a halt. Not many coaches train players one-on-one: players tend to share courts and instructors. “The number of balls that a kid gets to hit is reduced, and the focus is more on footwork, running around, fitness, all these things. Which is not always the best thing,” Nahak mused. “Someone who would’ve taken three months to pick up a skill now takes, say, double or triple the time, depending on how many people she is sharing resources with.” 

Tournaments are important in providing competition and income. Spain is a useful point of comparison: there is a rich, dense network of domestic tournaments, including 17 Challenger and 82 Futures events, where the prize money for singles winners ranges from USD 1000 to USD 15,000. It is possible for a Spanish tennis player to play on the domestic circuit year-round without ever boarding a plane. In India, the network is thinner and spread over a much larger area. Tournaments take place in Delhi one week and Hyderabad, more than 1600 kilemetres away, the next. There are fewer tournaments at which to make serious cash. India hosted just five Challenger and 20 Futures events in 2024; at AITA-sponsored events, the prize money for singles winners ranged from INR 12,500, or around USD 150, to INR 62,500, around USD 750. 

Nahak and his coaching community developed the Gadre Gaspar Dias Open pretty much all on their own, scrounging around for local sponsors for every little component, from the grips that go around racquet handles to specially formulated socks meant to stop your feet sliding about inside your shoe. He was optimistic about his grassroots efforts – in 2024, the tournament had all 16 players for the quarter-final draw come from Goa, instead of having to invite people from out of state – but there was only so much a small community could do on its own. The absence of higher levels of intervention and investment was keenly felt. 

It was difficult for me to get Nahak to talk directly about the AITA, ATP or WTA. I soon realised this was because Nahak was more interested in a “bottom-to-top” approach. 

“When I used to work with Nestlé, we used to go to big organisations to submit our tenders, so that we could be their suppliers. You know who helped the most? That babu [clerk] who sits at the bottom. That is the guy who helps you the most. So my approach has been to lure that babu. Not in terms of money or anything. Just make good relations with him, so that he can tell us, ‘You should come in half an hour early and spend time with this guy.’ All these small things. This is how your file is pushed forward.” 

Nahak said he has been thinking of providing a platform for people who want to show their love for the game. However, he had been finding it hard to source forward-thinking sponsors. But the right request at the right time – a player on a hot streak, and a very specific set of funding requirements – could help sponsors make the leap. 

I told Nahak that what he described wasn’t dissimilar to Carlos Alcaraz’s lucky break. The boy-wonder and current world number 3 in men’s singles was first sponsored at age ten by Postres Reina, a local Spanish dessert and candy business. Postres Reina’s CEO, Alfonso López Rueda, happened to be a tennis fan who saw little Carlito play at a club in El Palmar. His funding allowed Alcaraz to go sailing about Europe, terrorising boys far older than him. “That’s a very nice story,” said Nahak, with a laugh. “Sponsors play a big role. And you never know, this could help small-time sponsors in a big way.”

There’s a lot that appeals about the idea of community-led tennis development. But community has its drawbacks. It can be familiar and comforting; it can also reinforce existing power relations. In 2023, in Patan district in the state of Gujarat, an oppressed-caste boy tried to retrieve a tennis ball that had gone near some dominant-caste men playing cricket. When an argument broke out and the boy’s father intervened, the men cut the father’s thumb off. Historically, those belonging to oppressed castes have marked and maintained tennis courts, but rarely played on them. A 2022 paper on sports participation in India notes that “it is seen at the field level that most of the players want to get training from the coach of their own caste”, but the precise extent of caste discrimination in Indian tennis remains understudied. There is a case to be made for a stronger link between grassroots efforts and national governance, not just in terms of funding but also in terms of oversight and making tennis more inclusive. I didn’t know how willing Nahak might be to talk about caste. Perhaps I did him a disservice, but I didn’t ask. 

We ended the call talking about Nahak’s could-have-beens: in particular, a young woman, a late bloomer, who blew through two rounds at her first tournament and overnight gained a ranking of 300 in Indian women’s singles. He could tell she was hooked on the game; but her family was poor, and she was studying law. She dropped out from tennis to finish her exams. Even the optimistic stories – a strapping, six-foot-five-inch young man whose parents agreed to home-schooling, who Nahak happily forecasted would “get thrashed” once he entered the tournament circuits of Hyderabad, Kolhapur and Bengaluru – were optimistic only because they ended with players getting to leave India, usually for collegiate tennis in the United States. 

As we said goodbye to each other, Nahak was interrupted by a flurry of texts. The Bandodkar Panjim Gymkhana Open was on its third day, and, though it was late, matches were still going on. His team was sending him score updates. “A lot of good kids,” he said. “And a lot of my players are doing good.” I congratulated him. 

“It feels good. I feel so grateful for this game, you know?” 

IN JANUARY 2023, my family and I got up at 5 am and drove four hours from Mumbai to Pune, to the Shree Shiv Chhatrapati Sports Complex. We’d decided that we wanted to watch some tennis live. (Or rather: I’d decided, and they’d decided to keep me company.) 

A year and a half earlier, my mother had been shelling peas while half-watching the men’s singles finals at the French Open on television. I’d never been a sports person, though I’d always admired sports from afar, as you do if you grow up bookish and uncoordinated. I was immediately arrested by what I saw: Novak Djokovic bullying the young Stefanos Tsitsipas on his way to victory from a two-set deficit. I planted myself beside my mother and, endeared by his sulky good looks, began rooting for Tsitsipas. I remembered Djokovic removing his white cap to reveal a compact, helmet-like head of shiny black hair (“I call it a pelt,” a friend later texted); I remembered fine red clay sticking to Tsitsipas’s shirt from when he fell, scrambling to return a drop shot. It was dance; it was battle. It was some guys hitting balls. I was enthralled. 

Over that year, my family watched with some bemusement as I became obsessed with professional tennis. I liked Daniil Medvedev: tall, gangly, with a monk’s high forehead. I liked how he returned from miles behind the baseline, unseen outside the camera frame, making it seem the ball was being propelled telekinetically; how in the first hour of a match he stayed expressionless after winning a point, denying himself small pleasures to focus on bigger ones; how he ran for every ball like it was someone’s baby falling; how in the final set he’d jump into his backhand to give the ball extra pace, though it must have depleted him awfully to do so. I liked the cocksure Danielle Collins, who released sharply angled cross-court backhands like bullets, and once, after winning a point against Simona Halep, actually blew on her racquet like it was the barrel of a gun; I liked how Iga Świątek loosed her forehands at speeds greater than many of the men could manage, how she lunged to get low balls; I liked that Coco Gauff, then aged 18, could wheel all over the court to defend if she had to, like a manic pull-string toy, then give pressers with the stoicism of a village elder. 

The Shree Shiv Chhatrapati Sports Complex was built in the 1990s and renovated in 2007 to host the Commonwealth Youth Games. It was out of the way, beautiful yet worn. Manicured hedges and tall sugar date palm trees lined the roads, whose sidewalks were shedding old paint. Usually the preserve of Olympic athletes, the complex was now hosting the Tata Open, an ATP men’s tournament worth 250 ranking points. The total prize money on offer was over USD 630,000, enough to draw some of the world’s best talent – except the organisers had chosen not to pay appearance fees to the big names and make space instead for Indian players. 

By the time we arrived, however, there were no Indians left. They’d all been felled in the early rounds. Nagal had lost in three sets to ​​Filip Krajinović two days ago. 

We followed the winding path to reach the Balewadi Stadium, which was strung up with banners, and found our seats. We could have sat anywhere. There weren’t more than a hundred people watching altogether, and we’d all paid roughly ten dollars for a privilege priced much higher elsewhere in the world. 

The energy was not high, but the crowd was curious and engaged, and a lively tiebreaker between Tim van Rijthoven and Aslan Karatsev got everyone going. Neither player was well known. That didn’t really matter to those watching. Tennis, and particularly live tennis, is a display of kinetic beauty; even watching players practice basic groundstrokes can be thrilling. (To borrow the American novelist David Foster Wallace’s words, “The suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear.”) Watch the court-level view of Rutuja Bhosale, ranked 364 in women’s singles, playing Hao-Ching Chan of Taiwan at the Billie Jean King Cup. See how motion and sound unite. You can match Bhosale’s forehand to the ball snapping off the taut racquet strings; match her effortful side-lunge to the soft grunt that follows.

Anyway: Karatsev won. Later in the day, as I was stretching my legs outside the stadium, I found myself standing right next to him. He was eating a vada pav from a food stall, as serene as a grazing cow. “How on earth do you pull off a career-best season at the age of twenty-eight?”, “What did it feel like to go five hours at the Australian Open last year in round three and lose?” and “Why are your calves so unnervingly large?” were some of the many things I managed not to say to him. 

Big and dominant personalities can explode open a sport. Certainly the Big Three of men’s tennis – Federer, Djokovic and Nadal – and the women stars Venus Wiliams, Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, have got more people watching tennis. But I also think it becomes a trap, where one has to search for the right pre-existing framework to stuff new players into. Coco Gauff is the “new Serena Williams”; Carlos Alcaraz is the “new Rafael Nadal”. It becomes impossible to take players on their own terms, which means it becomes impossible to take tennis on its own terms: something that can be enjoyed independent of its conduit. 

When Nagal first played Roger Federer, Nathan reported, “the laziest punchline of the night was that number-three-ranked Federer might be intimidated by his number-190 opponent, who happened to have a surname just one letter off from archrival Rafael Nadal.” Indeed, in February 2024, when Nagal played Lorenzo Sonego at the Dubai Tennis Championships, spectators called out, “Come on Nadal,” and “Vamos Rafa!” (“One more reason the tournament industry sort of hates upsets,” David Foster Wallace observed, “is that the ATP press liaisons have to go around teaching journalists how to spell and pronounce new names.”)

But there is plenty interesting about Nagal in his own right. Namely, he isn’t like anyone else. Ghosh put it this way: “There’s some people who are very good athletes, who learn how to play tennis. And then there are good tennis players who try and figure out what athletically it takes to succeed at the top level. I think Sumit’s one of the very rare people who’s part of that second category.”

Most great Indian players in the 1980s and 1990s were moulded in opposition to those like Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander, defensive “pushers” (derogatory or complimentary, depending on context),\ who returned every ball and bored the opponent into making a mistake. Nagal, meanwhile, is the pusher. According to Ghosh, “He’s superb at boxing people into their backhand corner ... and he’s got a low-ish center of gravity, so it’s no hardship for him to chase a low ball, and then sort of force it over the net. Which again, is something that a lot of people are not very good at growing up in [the Indian] system. Because growing up in this system, the way you deal with low balls is you dig them out and put them in a place where the opponent can’t get to. You try to find gaps. But these days, you kind of have to assume that there are no gaps.” I have to agree. Nagal’s insistence on grinding it out is what makes him so interesting to watch. 

I returned home after the Tata Open full of spectator’s adrenaline and a sense that maybe tennis in India could actually catch on. I found out a few days later that my family and I had, without knowing it, attended the tournament’s last iteration. The Tata Open’s five-year contract with the ATP had expired, with no signs of renewal. The Hindu reported, “A significantly bigger financial outlay as a pre-condition for renewal proved the undoing.”

WHEN INDIA GOT serious about hockey in 2019, it invested in bringing home experienced talent from abroad, as well as coaches like Graham Reid, Craig Fulton and Janneke Schopman. The NBA opened up an elite basketball academy in Delhi in 2017, and it has begun sending Indian boys and girls to US collegiate programmes.

Swarali Patil, a lecturer and researcher in sports policy, recounted to me with some scorn how, when Sania Mirza, having risen from Hyderabad, became the world number one in 2015, Sanjay Manjrekar, a former cricket player, quote-tweeted the news: “You mean in doubles, right?”

Patil said, “We didn’t respect it, and we didn’t give it enough attention, because we thought, ‘Oh, but it’s doubles’. And here again the AITA failed, because they should have been running a full PR campaign.” After Bopanna became number-one in doubles in 2024, “what did they do? It was like, ‘Great!’ And then a whimper.” The Zoom call went silent: we looked at each other, stumped. It was a dilemma with no satisfying answer.

The reason players opt into doubles is often said to be the reason people often don’t like to watch doubles. The format’s shorter points translate into less interesting play; its decreased hostility to the human body means there’s less suffering on show. But short points can also provide a great spectacle: a successful serve-and-volley is three strokes, all told. I thought Patil was onto something. India’s devaluation of doubles had created an environment where tennis more broadly was not taken seriously. 

IN 2019, NAGAL stole a set off of Roger Federer at the US Open. The next year, he would become the first Indian since Devvarman to win a singles match in the main draw of a Grand Slam, again in the US Open. The years following were supposed to be his prime. 

But then Covid-19 hit, arresting his momentum and plunging thousands of players into uncertainty. Then, an injury to his right hip, during the US Open qualifiers in 2021.

“I had a long, long two years,” Nagal told the Times of India. In November 2021, amid the pandemic, he tweeted a post-operation photo of himself from a hospital bed in Germany. The caption thanked the doctor Michael Dienst and the hospital staff for taking care of him, and his fans for their good wishes. (From a quick glance at Dienst’s profile, it seems that Nagal underwent either open hip or arthroscopic hip surgery.) In the photo, Nagal held both his hands out with thumbs ups. His expression was sleepy; he was smiling. A white face mask rested on his stomach. His uncovered face was, apparently, a small concession to the internet, an effort at personability in a moment of exhaustion. 

The recovery that followed was trying. “It was much more complicated than just staying positive,” said Cynthia Hucks-Smith, Nagal’s sports psychologist at the time. “There was no income as he recovered, he had to learn to walk again,” and to manage “the uncertainty associated with trusting his body.” (If the kinetic beauty of tennis has to do, as Wallace said, with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” what does it mean to be estranged from one’s body?) Nagal’s ranking went into free-fall, and, just like in 2010, he once more began casting around for something to break the fall. He reached out to the AITA, to sponsors, and was met with silence. His team eventually negotiated health insurance from the ATP, though it was unclear how much it would cover. “No one wanted to help me, no one really believed that I could be back,” he remembered.

Tennis players have haunted the medical literature on injuries, chronic pain and pain management. One 2020 paper carries the forbidding title, “Repetitive Traumatic Discopathy in the Modern-Era Tennis Player”. The authors catalogue the back, trunk and hips of a tennis player like cuts of beef. For every forehand loaded and loosed, an enormous amount of twisting force, termed “torque”, is applied to the pelvis. The hips can be imagined in a state of constant strain, sent into fine trembles by every start-stop, change in direction, or ball-strike at a dead sprint, all of which are routine in tennis. 

Another paper evaluates the serve – “The follow-through phase is the most violent ... requiring deceleration eccentric loads in both the upper and lower body” – interspersing photos of famous tennis players mid-serve, their faces blurred, as you would expect with victims in a news report. As the serve finishes, “the landing foot lunges forward, requiring horizontal braking forces, while the trailing foot kicks backward, and the centre of mass is pushed towards the front of the body.” When a professional tennis player’s feet land after a serve, close to 300 Newton-metres of torque will have been shared between her arms and trunk. (The average car engine generates about 200 Newton-metres of torque to turn its wheels.)

Nagal has played more than 500 competitive matches in his professional career, and far more practise matches. In every one, he probably serves between 60 and 80 times. His serve relies on repeated motions. So do all the best pieces of his game: the whipping forehand, the fluttering footwork. And so too does his survival: submitting applications for grants and insurance, requesting support and sponsorship. “He needs more sponsors to come on board,” said Nagal’s father in an interview, sounding indignant, tired. “The situation he faced last year shouldn’t [happen] again. He can’t be making appeals again and again.”

AN ARCHIVED Tennis Warehouse forum thread from 2017 contained the following exchange between users J011yroger and Surion on the topic of healthcare insurance: 

J011yroger: Are players on their own and paying out of pocket?

Surion: Of course players are on their own. Weak trolling attempt, 02/10.

J011yroger: I didn’t know. I mean they have a players union. Obviously Novak doesn’t need it but maybe there is a plan top 500 guys can buy into. You can get health insurance through fleabay if you sell enough stuff, ffs.

J011yroger: If you are a journeyman pro too old to be covered by your parents it’s got to be a substantial expense when you are fighting to get by. And I assume a professional tennis player needs more health insurance than the average 26 year old who goes home and plays Xbox after work.

Surion: Have you never heard that most players just can’t make a living out of tennis, because the system is so ****ed up?

J011yroger: Well, I think tennis players blame the system when in reality the fault is with the general population who doesn’t give a **** about tennis. Why should you get paid to play a Future if nobody is paying to watch you?

Should tennis players be considered employees or contractors? Should they unionise, or work with the ATP and WTA, which also represent the tournaments and advertisers? What are players owed, exactly? J011yroger, while sympathising with the “journeyman pro”, would argue that his matches, most of which take place at the Challenger level, are not what brings in revenues. The journeyman pro might retort that in many other global sports, a top-300 player would be a well entrenched, and well compensated, professional athlete. And even if no one watched their tournaments, they still serve as a crucial part of the development pipeline. Carlos Alcaraz spent years slogging on those tournament circuits and going up against veteran players before breaking into the top. 

If the Indian tennis system has followed prestige, the international tennis system follows money. Though tennis players work most of the year, they are treated as independent contractors. They face a kind of economic precarity under which it is hard to imagine good tennis flourishing. Dustin Brown, a German-Jamaican player who famously beat Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2015, continued living out of his car long afterwards, stringing other players’ racquets for money at “five euros a pop”. Other professional sports, like baseball, basketball and football, have in place base salaries or structures that guarantee athletes a minimum pay-out not tied to performance. In those, the median share for players is 50 percent of total revenues; in tennis, it is closer to 18 percent. 

The sport’s solitary nature may be hindering collective action. In golf, another individual sport, players also have little economic security and don’t see much of the revenue. In wrestling, too, players are categorised as independent contractors, despite having exclusive contracts with and being almost entirely under the thumb of their governing bodies.

Tennis might be slowly becoming more responsive to these concerns. Vasek Pospisil, one of the players spearheading a unionisation effort called the Professional Tennis Players Association, feels that a recent increase in prize money is due to the resulting pressure. Tournament calendars are being restructured so that players who exit from Grand Slams in the early rounds can enter Challenger tournaments the following week and earn money there. A minimum salary was piloted in 2024 for the top 250, which would cover 10 percent of professional players.

But tennis appears ultimately swayed by short-term market propositions. Smaller tournaments (ATP 250s, 500s) that support the “middle class” of tennis players are likely to be scrapped in favour of pouring more money into Grand Slams and Masters 1000 events (tournaments that give winners 1000 ranking points), a move that might adversely affect player development and enrich players who were already rich. Tennis remains blind to market prospects in India, but increasingly hosts tournaments in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) recently announced a USD 2-billion takeover bid that would merge the men’s and women’s tours, which has thrown a disjointed global tennis governing system into further disarray. If Saudi Arabia’s shiny new LIV Golf tour, with its focus on superstars like Phil Mickelson and Bubba Watson and outdoor parties, is any indication, then PIF money in tennis would likely just replicate status-quo inequalities. 

The physical realities of tennis, and how young players’ development begins, may make it true that international bodies can only really intervene for players once they have “made it”. It may be true that national tennis associations have more influence and responsibility over players like Nagal. But international bodies bear a responsibility too, not just to a “product” or to consumers” but also to the living, breathing men and women without whose flesh the sport does not exist. 

Hucks-Smith said of Nagal’s recovery back in 2021, in what felt simple and axiomatic: “All of us need unconditional support to move past what life throws at us in dark times.” I thought of low-rank players sharing Airbnb apartments at tournaments, sometimes two to a room. I thought of Dustin Brown sleeping in his car. 

IN EARLY MARCH 2024, Nagal joined an elite list of just 120 athletes, including sailors, archers and equestrians, to be covered under the Mission Olympic Cell of India’s Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. The ministry, bypassing the AITA, agreed to cover all of Nagal’s tournament, equipment and coaching expenses. It even threw in a monthly stipend of INR 50,000. Bopanna and Ramkumar Ramanathan were the only other tennis players on that list. 

At some point in our call, Patil clapped and said: “You know what we’re going to need in India? We’re going to need a miracle. Somebody who miraculously makes it to the quarter-finals or semi-finals of a Slam, and it’s like, ‘Oh, my god! What’s going on? How has this happened?’” Nahak, meanwhile, thought we needed more grassroots development. 

For my part, I was uncertain. I wasn’t sure if an Olympic medal, a miracle run, or a bottom-up, organic mushrooming of interest alone could force the powers that be to invest, to listen, to pay attention. 

I messaged Nagal for an interview on WhatsApp in late March, as he was preparing for the 2024 clay season. I was left on read, predictably, but I didn’t mind. Clay is Nagal’s favourite surface, the surface he grew up on. On 8 April, Nagal defeated Matteo Arnaldi, the world number 35, in Monte Carlo. He became the first man from India to win a main-draw match at that tournament. Clay magnified Nagal’s strengths – his fleet footwork, his lethal forehands. I watched that match, watched as he scrambled around the court kicking up small red clouds of dust. He did not play like someone in need of a miracle. He played like someone with the private suspicion that he might be one himself.