Excerpts from the interview of Vijay Amritraj by Tennis Channel host and son Prakash Amritraj

As I look at this home and everything you’ve built, do you walk outside when you have your coffee in the morning and think about where it all started?

Oh, probably every day. Coming out of Chennai, what used to be Madras when I grew up there, it’s hard to imagine that this could be it. This could be your life’s journey. It’s more than living a dream, because it’s hard to dream and imagine things. You haven’t seen or you don’t know about. That’s the way I grew up. Wimbledon was as far away as it could possibly be. Apparently in a town called London.

I had you, and I saw the life you had. Since you couldn’t see anything in front of you, what guided you?

For me, at the time growing up, was health, to be able to play and to be able to hang out with my friends from school. And then when I actually ended up going to London, at 15 years of age, and walking through those gates the first day, and watch the late great Pancho Gonzalez, my idol play in front of me, in a packed full house with people standing on feet. Then you start to think, you start to imagine, I want to play here at some point. I want to be good enough to play this tournament.

A lot of your big milestones were come from behind victories.

Yes, and I think a lot had to do with a belief. Winning the national championships at 18 years of age. You know, for an 18-year-old, that’s a lot. Six to eight weeks before the event, I’d slit my right forefinger, opening a vitamin bottle. One week before the tournament, with big, big bandages on my finger, I would try to tap against the wall at home and see if my finger would hold up. You put yourself into a situation where when you haven’t practiced hardly anything at all over the last eight weeks, and you’re coming in one match at a time to be able to see if you can get through to the second round or the third round. And the next thing I knew, I played the great Ramanathan Krishnan in the final of the national championships.

Wimbledon semi-finalist!.

Semis at the Queens as well. Oh, by a long shot, the greatest player we’ve had prior to the open era. He won the first set, and then I won in four sets. Came back an hour later, and we played the number one team in Indian doubles, Anand and I, and won 7-5 in the fifth. And you wonder why those things happen. It started to make me believe even more that, yes, it has to do with work and discipline and support and all of that, but at the end of the day, there’s something much, much higher than that that wants you to do something in this space.

You take that confidence, you become India’s best, you go play internationally, but it didn’t go great when you went to the U.S. 

We were invited because we were number one and two in India. Not because we were good enough internationally, but because we were number one and two in India. This was well before the ATP rankings as we know it today. And I played something like 13 or 14 tournaments in North America and lost first round every week. But we had the best time. We had the best time here with zero money in our pocket.

When we came to America and we saw the standard of tennis here, which was so high, we knew we had to get better. And strangely, you know, the great Pancho Gonzalez, my idol, wanted to coach me and bring me to Vegas. 

How on earth did you process that? Your hero, your idol? 

Obviously, I won the lottery at this point. I think that stint alone there took me to a different level. And the following 12 months were arguably the best 12 months I ever had.

I won a great tournament in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Open, beating four members of the Australian Davis Cup team, one behind the other. That was the first year I made the quarters at Wimbledon and then came to America and then had a tremendous run and winning tournaments and being live on television network in the U.S., which had never happened to an Indian before.

So as this happens, you’re bringing acclaim to India, to Asia. It’s not just the level to which you’re reaching, but quite frankly, it’s a completely white sport. Did you feel that weight and responsibility on you?

Very quickly. I realized that people coming and watching you play, the first look was, oh, well, he’s Indian. Let’s go see this Indian play. But then as they got to know you, then they perhaps got to know who I was. But first look, you’re always going to be an Indian.

So for me, that started to matter more than anything else, that it was important for just not for me, but for every Indian who came to America to make a better life. That was the front page.

Wimbledon and Davis Cup were the two most important things for you. And Davis Cup played a significant role in your life.

So to me, in 1974, as a 20-year-old, to reach the final of a Davis Cup was monumental.

It was under very different circumstances. You made a joyous run to the final back in 87. Could I call you a full-time tennis player at that time? You were just as much an actor as you were a tennis player at that time.

The way I looked at it was, I’d done a Bond movie, I’d done a Star Trek movie, I’d had a series of my own on American television. The first of its kind. First of its kind, first for an Indian. And, okay, I’m playing tennis as well, and you end up getting to the final when we had one guy ranked in the top 50. I don’t know. The honest answer is, I think that’s when a good team comes together.

On the James Bond movie

So you grow up with these things, right? When in 1962, when Dr. No hit the screens and Goldfinger ended up being the first major movie that I went to a theater to see. And the next thing you know, you get called up in 82 to do a screen test for a Bond picture after the producers had watched me play Connors at Wimbledon in 81. Now, at this point, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, talk about Goldfinger in my first picture.

What am I supposed to say? It was exactly what I imagined it to be with Roger Moore looking better than James Bond in actual life. He was so relaxed and he was so excited that I was in the film with him because he followed my tennis career and he was kind of close to it. He loved tennis.

So he made it easy for me, you know, which made a huge difference because pretty much most of my scenes were with him.

What does it mean to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame?

It’s unimaginable because you grew up, one, not knowing about it, two, eventually learning about it, three, wondering how far it was. And so you look at this and think, can I ever even dream of getting there?

And then for it to come around is something not just beyond belief, but a gratefulness that I can’t even imagine. Most important of all, it is a win for India. And that, to me, is really what makes me elated.