A sneak peek into the Bengaluru house of Mahesh Bhupathi!
Even before, Mahesh Bhupathi was born, his father C. G Krishna Bhupathi – a professional tennis player, had decided that his son would become a tennis player.
Tennis ran in the blood when it came to Mahesh’s father side of the family, as his grand dad was the first one to have the passion to play, and so he got all his kids to play. Mahesh’s father was the best of the lot. He made it as high as number 6 in India nationally and played at a time when there was Krishnan and Jelly Mukherjee and towards the later part of his career with Vijay Amritraj.
Unfortunately, Krishna Bhupathi met with a car accident and he broke his hand and that was his end of Tennis dreams. At that point, he decided in his mind that his first born was going to pursue Tennis in some form or the other and then Mahesh’s Tennis journey became his destiny.
Mahesh was 3 when his father started training him in Tennis and at the age of 11, he watched his first Wimbledon.
Mahesh informs, “My dad had got transferred to the Middle East when I was 7. We were in the UAE for five years. Then he got another job in Oman. So we went to Muscat after five years. I was literally the only tennis player who was aspiring to turn professional while they had the facilities like tennis courts and gyms but there was no kid my age anywhere close to the level that I wanted as sparring partners. I think my dad had to make an extra effort to play with me twice a day so that I get that practice.”.
“I had been on the court with him 6.30 to 7.30 in the morning. He would rush back, have a shower and make sure he was at work by 8. After a long day at the office, he would again come back and make another hour available to play tennis with me. There was no margin for error, there was no ten seconds to take breath. He had 50 minutes before he had to get to work and those 50 minutes had to be as productive as two hours in his mind,” Mahesh adds.
In 1997, Mahesh became the first Indian to win Grand Slam when he took the French Open Crown in Mixed Doubles. In 1999, he won three doubles titles with his tennis partner Leander Paes including the French Open and the Wimbledon. On 26 April 1999, they became the No.1 ranked doubles team in the world. In his more than two-decade long career, he won 12 Grand Slams (4 in Doubles and 8 in Mixed Doubles).
ZEE5, Nitesh Tiwari and Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari are all set to bring you a gripping story that drove one of the most famous partnerships in sports from India with the series, ‘BREAK POINT’. The untold ‘Bromance to Breakup’ story based on the iconic on-court partnership and off-court lives of living legends, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi will soon unravel on ZEE5, India’s largest home-grown video streaming platform.
Co-directed and produced by Ashwiny and Nitesh, ‘BREAK POINT’ is a 7-part series which will not only construct the epic tennis matches featuring the legendary tennis players – Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi but also deconstruct their relationship, both on and off the court. Apart from their accomplishments on the tennis court, the charismatic duo is known for their off-court lives and the public split which broke the heart of the nation.
The seven-episode series will be exclusively available on ZEE5 on October 1st, 2021.
