Opening the Sportstar Hangout session with N. Ram, who recalled visiting Robert Amritraj’s Southern Railway office as a young reporter in Madras, Vijay Amritraj traced every achievement of his career back to his parents, Maggie and Robert Amritraj. Growing up with chronic lung complications, severe asthma that worsened at hill stations like Ooty, Kodaikanal, and Bengaluru, and frequent nosebleeds, young Vijay spent prolonged stretches on an IV drip at the Perambur Railway Hospital under the care of Dr. Cherian and Dr. Govindaraj.

Because his illness kept him out of the classroom for weeks at a stretch, Maggie Amritraj sat in his classes at school, copied down every lesson by hand, and taught him beside his hospital bed. Amritraj joked to Sportstar that for 1 set of school fees, both mother and son were educated—while older brother Anand regularly topped his class and even drew with a visiting Russian chess grandmaster at age 7 or 8 before meeting his only boyhood chess conqueror in another railway officer’s son, a young Viswanathan Anand.

When doctors advised that outdoor exercise would help expand his lungs alongside drinking goat’s milk, Maggie Amritraj brought 2 goats into the family home. What began with 10-yard, 50-yard, and 100-yard sprints gradually built into 5-mile, 8-mile, and 10-mile morning road runs at 5:00 AM with a trainer driving alongside him, followed by court practice at 6:30 AM. Tennis was already a family fixture at the Madras Gymkhana Club, where the 3 brothers—Anand, Vijay, and Ashok—watched their mother command the baseline with crisp groundstrokes while their father, a former track-and-field athlete, chased down every ball across the court.

That passion for Indian tennis also got the brothers into trouble at Don Bosco School in 1962. When India hosted Mexico in the Davis Cup in Madras featuring Ramanathan Krishnan against Rafael Osuna, the school denied the boys permission to skip classes. All 3 brothers called in sick, attended the tie at the stadium, and were promptly suspended for 1 week upon returning to school the next morning.

Asked by N. Ram how he became the 1st Indian player with a world-class serve capable of going toe-to-toe with the tallest servers in the West, Amritraj credited his lifelong idol and mentor, American great Pancho Gonzales. As a 15-year-old in 1969, Amritraj had saved 50 pence from his dinner allowance the night before to stand in the Wimbledon enclosure and watch the 41-year-old Gonzales save 7 match points to defeat Charlie Pasarell 11-9 in the 5th set after 5 hours and 12 minutes. Later, Gonzales invited Amritraj to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and coached him for 3 years without charging a rupee, transforming his serve and mental approach so he could break into the top 10 of the Grand Prix standings.

That partnership produced the most unforgettable—and humbling—anecdote of the Sportstar interview. At the 1973 US Open at Forest Hills, a 19-year-old Amritraj defeated Rod Laver in 5 sets and beat Allan Stone to reach the quarterfinals against Australian veteran Ken Rosewall, a player who defeated Amritraj 6 consecutive times before Vijay eventually pleaded with Rosewall’s wife Wilma not to let him retire until he finally beat him once at Earls Court in London.

On the eve of the 1973 US Open quarterfinal, pitched in hot Madras-like conditions on Labor Day before 18,000 spectators and live CBS television cameras, Gonzales gave his 19-year-old charge 1 non-negotiable tactical instruction.

Tempted by the wide-open space, Amritraj fired a flat serve down the T onto the chalk at Rosewall’s backhand—and watched a clean winner fly past him for 0-15 without even reaching the net. Convinced it was a fluke, he walked to the ad court, where Rosewall stood near the center hash mark, leaving the wide backhand corner wide open. Amritraj went wide to the backhand again, and within seconds trailed 0-30 on the way to losing his opening service game to love.

When Amritraj walked to his chair at the 1st changeover to towel off and looked up at the players’ box, Gonzales’s seat—the exact superstitious seat he had occupied during the wins over Laver and Stone—was empty. Gonzales had walked back to the locker room, packed his bags, hailed a cab to the hotel, checked out, driven to the airport, and boarded a flight back to Las Vegas. For 3 months, Gonzales refused to answer Amritraj’s phone calls until Vijay flew to Las Vegas, walked onto his court at the pro shop, and asked why he had gone silent—prompting Gonzales to bark back with a grin that Indians did not understand a word of English.

Having attended his 56th consecutive Wimbledon this past summer, Amritraj offered Sportstar a sharp technical diagnosis of how men’s tennis has changed from the 1970s golden era of Stan Smith, Arthur Ashe, Ilie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe to the modern game. When Borg captured 5 consecutive Wimbledon titles without playing a single grass-court warm-up event between slow Paris clay and lightning-fast London lawns, the balls were 6 times lighter than today’s pressurized balls, and servers aimed for the chewed-up T-box to force awkward bounces as they charged the net.

Today, Amritraj noted, Wimbledon grass plays so much like Roland Garros clay that by the final weekend of the fortnight, the baseline is completely worn bare while the middle of Centre Court remains pristine green because baseline players approach the net only to shake hands or argue with the chair umpire. Combined with taller player frames and shoulder-high bounces that make the 1-handed backhand nearly extinct against heavy 2-handed drives, the physical demands of the tour have flipped completely.

Evaluating the Big 3—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic (SRB, 12)—who combined for an extraordinary 66 Grand Slam singles titles during his decades in the broadcast booth, Amritraj compared Federer’s noiseless court movement to sitting at the starting line of the 1988 Seoul Olympics men’s 100-meter final and watching Carl Lewis and 7 fellow sprinters float down the track without a audible footstep. He ranked Ilie Nastase and John McEnroe as the 2 purest natural geniuses he ever faced—players who possessed unforeseen tactical options 4, 5, and 6 when pushed into a tight corner, whereas many heavily regimented players today have only Plan A, and return to Plan A even when it is failing.

On the current men’s summit featuring Jannik Sinner (ITA, 1), Alexander Zverev (GER, 2), Carlos Alcaraz (ESP, 3), and Andrey Rublev (RUS, 22), alongside women’s stars such as Aryna Sabalenka (BLR, 2), Amritraj strongly endorsed equal prize money across all combined WTA and ATP 1000 events by 2027. Because men and women both contest best-of-3 sets across every tour event outside the 4 majors, he told Sportstar that tour-level prize parity is long overdue, noting that a 3-set thriller featuring Aryna Sabalenka (BLR, 2) often delivers higher end-to-end drama than a 5-set men’s match that only catches fire in sets 4 and 5. He also shared that by 2028, bonus pool payouts for players finishing inside the world’s top 50 are slated to rise by another 35% to 40%.

Addressing frequent complaints from elite stars about an overcrowded tennis calendar, the former ATP Player Council President (who served from June 1989 through the end of 1992) drew a sharp distinction between the top 10 and the rest of the professional ecosystem. Top-10 stars, Amritraj observed, already have the freedom to play just 12 to 15 singles weeks a year, whereas players ranked 50 to 250 depend on a healthy year-round calendar of 250 and 500 tournaments to earn a living and climb the rankings.

During his presidency in 1989–1992, almost every capital city across Asia hosted an ATP tournament. Today, tour-level stops have concentrated heavily in Europe and North America, shrinking in South America and disappearing across much of Africa and Asia. Responding to Sportstar’s data showing that in 2025 India hosted 10 men’s and 10 women’s ITF tournaments compared to China’s 29 men’s and 29 women’s events, Japan’s 14 men’s and 17 women’s events, and Thailand’s 11 men’s and 13 women’s events, Amritraj emphasized that while southern states like Tamil Nadu organize a steady stream of ITF Futures, Challengers, and junior events under Tamil Nadu Tennis Association (TNTA) CEO Nitin Kannamwar, India urgently needs 1 or 2 flagship ATP and WTA “crown jewel” events alongside his multi-city WTA 125 roadmap to inspire home fans in person.

When N. Ram raised the central question on every Indian tennis follower’s mind—why India has produced Grand Slam doubles champions like Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi, and Sania Mirza, yet has struggled to produce singles contenders in the mold of Ramanathan Krishnan, Vijay Amritraj, and Ramesh Krishnan—Amritraj refused to hide behind excuses. With capital expenditure from both central and state governments and modern domestic facilities far ahead of what existed 30 or 50 years ago, he stated candidly that India has no excuse for not having singles players inside the world’s top 100 today.

At the same time, he explained the brutal economics and emotional toll on Indian families: unlike team sports or corporate careers, a family can pour 5 prime years of life and savings into a child’s tennis journey with zero guarantee of a return, making individual sport “the world’s worst startup business to invest in.” Overcoming that barrier requires an obsession where a player digs deeper when everything hurts, fingers are bleeding, and the tank is at zero.

To illustrate what that threshold looks like in real life, Amritraj shared the story of India’s 1987 Davis Cup tie against Argentina in blistering New Delhi summer heat—a year in which all 4 members of India’s Davis Cup squad (Vijay Amritraj, Ramesh Krishnan, Anand Amritraj, and Vasudevan Srinivasan) hailed from Madras. After Ramesh Krishnan lost a 5-set opener to 21-year-old world No. 7 Martin Jaite, playing captain Vijay Amritraj stepped off the captain’s chair in his mid-30s to defeat 23-year-old world No. 16 Horacio de la Pena in 4 tight sets, before he and Anand lost an 8-6 5th-set marathon lasting 5 hours and 15 minutes in Saturday’s doubles.

During the audience Q&A with The Hindu Editor Suresh Nambath and CEO L.V. Navaneeth, Amritraj also weighed his 2 most famous Wimbledon quarterfinal heartbreaks—1973 against eventual champion Jan Kodes and 1981 against Jimmy Connors (where Vijay led 2 sets to 0)—and shared why great players like close friends Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors do not automatically make patient coaches or administrators without learning the art of communication. Looking back 53 years later, he named the 1973 quarterfinal against Kodes as his single greatest chance to win Wimbledon: leading 5-4, 30-0 in the 5th set on the old Court 1 with Roger Taylor and Alex Metreveli awaiting in the semifinal and final, he missed an overhead smash to reach match point—a shot a Union Cabinet Minister still reminded him of while sitting inside Wimbledon’s rebuilt No. 1 Court decades later.