Given that one of my posts made mention of a number of tennis tournaments as well as player names, some of my friends considered it as some sort of a sports commentary, whereas it wasn’t. So I thought of editing it to include an intro! The “names” at the most were “salad dressing” and nothing more. The excerpt from the ghost written biography was a confession and at the same time an admission of insecurity from the “woman in red”. It took several years for Dr Han Suyin (19…52) to realize that ‘love is a many splendored thing’. How many life times is it going to take for Sharapova?
End of a Sporting Love Story
He recently told me—we were talking on the phone after he’d reached the semi-finals of the Australian Open—that one of the worst things in life is when you have the right thing at the wrong time.
It made me think of an evening we spent before the 2015 Wimbledon tournament. He had reached the semi-finals the previous year by beating Andy Murray; he lost to Novak Djokovic in four sets in that round. He pulled out a book that Wimbledon puts together of previous championships.
He quietly flipped through the pages of the book until he found a picture of me, in his box, watching his match. He looked at me, sad—I thought I saw tears in his eyes—“Did you see this? This means everything to me. Seeing you in my box next to my mother.” It was then, at that moment, that the emotional pull I had been fighting came to an end. I knew, and so did he, that I couldn’t be that person at this time of my life. I was supposed to be focused, getting prepared for my own matches, my own triumphs and defeats, on the largest stage of my career.
I had been watching his match that day only because I’d lost early at those championships. So his good memory was my bad memory. What meant everything to him happened only because I had lost. Like he said, you can have the right thing, but it might come at the wrong time.’
– Unstoppable: my life so far
najeebsa 