Coco and Jade

Tennis is a microcosm of Life - Times in Antibes (SoF)

This tennis life is not all about winning trophies, rather it’s about the people you meet and the connections you make along the way. Covid - 19 taught me this in so many ways and I will forever be grateful for one of the greatest lessons I learnt from it. Happiness and Sadness are both sides of the same coin, you live through each of them pretty much the same way (as you become more emotionally mature). No two people have spoken this in life and in poetry like Arthur Ashe - speaking about his illness that led to his eventual death - and here I paraphrase his meaning in my own words, and from what I learnt from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “should I thank God for only the good and then question Him when the bad comes”. I believe Arthur was able to say this because apart from his deep spirituality (because the Him he referred to was God), he had also played in Wimbledon several times and would have had to pass the inscription as most players have who played on center court there reads: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same;”

And the second person is my dad, in 2012 he had to leave the company that he had started with his brother (for personal reasons) and start off again. Not only did he do this, but he also went into something totally different - farming - which gave him the outlet to live out his dreams to his heart content, personalising another aspect of the Rudyard Kipling poem that I like “If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss;”

Madison Keys’ at the just concluded Australian Open, has made me really strongly believe what I wrote in my book Seasons of Antibes, that tennis is a microcosm of life. Meaning if you wait long enough and go through all the seasons that life brings your way, while taking the pause to learn from each happiness (when you win a tennis match or tournament) and/or sadness (when you lose one you feel you should have won). Tennis has made me a strong person and the journey as a tennis parent trying to help my kids find their way through navigating the tough terrain has brought me some really painful and joyful moments. In the midst of tough personal trials I have learnt deeply from my tennis life and the connections I have made in the SoF in this beautiful city of Antibes and how this has helped me. The photo above was taken just after we had come out of the first lockdown of Covid-19, totally new experience for all of us but as you can see from the closeness of those two in that picture (we all had missed close human contact); the power of friendship and hugs can never be overestimated. Some months later I asked her to advice him and I smiled when she said “Listen to your mother” with the same genuine smile and sincerity that we have come to know from the player Coco. For me the journey of my tennis mom life is one that has really added as much as it has taken from me. And like Arthur and my dad, I choose to keep moving on with virtue and not losing the authentic me, because at the end of the day that is all I ever want!