Ace Indian tennis player Sania Mirza, who has been the shining light in the national sporting fraternity for so long revealed in a recent interview with JioCinema that she would have picked up the cricket bat instead of the tennis racquet if she were a boy.
“At that point in time, if I was a boy, I would probably be playing cricket and I know being a girl, playing cricket was so different, right? Just playing sports was different,” the 36-year-old began.
“And honestly, I think because I was a girl, they were like I don’t think cricket is for girls. That mentality was then and is still there in many households. And unfortunately, or fortunately, that’s the way things were back then, 30 years ago,” she recollected.
“I was told, why don’t you play tennis? But if I was a guy for sure, I would be playing cricket. There was no question about that because we have a lot of cricket in our family,” the tennis star opined.
She further revealed the deep connection her family has with the sport of cricket.
“My dad played cricket, my uncle played Ranji, my dad’s uncle was the captain of the Indian cricket team. So, we have a lot of cricket and now obviously our life went on and cricket kept adding to our family,”
She also shared her memories of being the first girl from her family to be involved in sports and cited the role her parents played in the formative years of her illustrious career.
“I was the first girl from our family to play sport or even pursue playing a sport. It was actually my mom who pursued it before my dad and both of them together were way ahead of their times at that point.”
“I was very fortunate to have that kind of parents who were like, it doesn’t really matter what you guys think. Our child is going to play a sport regardless of what gender she is.”
She reflected on her fledgling career back in the day and pointed out that the decision to take up tennis as a career wasn’t powered by an isolated incident, but was rather a process.
“But, there was not really any one day that we sat down and were like, okay, fine, from today you will be a professional tennis player. That never happened. It was kind of a process,” she said.
“Like, when I was eight, I went and played my first tournament, a state tournament, and we celebrated every win the same way and we were proud of it. I remember having memories of my parents keeping albums and albums of the articles that used to come,” she said with a smile on her face.
“At that time, there was the newspaper, no social media. Like normal people, we used to open the newspaper and read it. Till today we have those albums, so it was a very, very natural progression into me, becoming a professional athlete,” she added.
Mirza emphasised that she could not have imagined the amount of success she achieved in her long career and said that it was her love for the sport that took her places.
“I don’t think that we, in our wildest dreams thought that it will reach the level that it did, to be very honest, because we were just doing it for the love of the sport and because my parents wanted their child to play a sport and I loved the sport,” she concluded.
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