“I’ve been asked about who is next a lot, a lot,” Mirza said. “And I’ve always come up empty with that answer unfortunately.”
She agrees that it comes down to structures and said that all the Indian players, men or women, who have risen high in the game agree that they have done it “despite the system, not because of it.”
For Mirza, “we are a cricketing nation, but we are not really a sporting nation.” But she intends to keep contributing to the tennis effort: through her eponymous academies in Dubai and Hyderabad.
But she is not quite done playing yet, even if her Grand Slam days are done, and on Friday, as she took to the microphone after her last final in Melbourne, she choked up but pushed on, flashing back to facing Williams.
“That was scary enough 18 years ago,” she said. “And I’ve had the privilege to come back here again and again.”
She did not quite go out a champion, but she has been one, on her own terms.
“I think if I had to pick one attribute of Sania, it’s that she was fearless,” Hegde said. “She was just born that way. At every stage there have been obstacles: from the clothes she wore, to the way she played, to the way she looked, to what she said. There was always this tendency to try to make her like everybody else, like other women.
“It was not the India of today. She came well before her time, and she came at a time when it was not OK to be you. You had to conform. But she told everybody it was OK: to sit how you want, wear what you want, do your thing, do anything.”
