Following up on Anna’s post, Shikha Uberoi lost her second-round U.S. Open match to Venus Williams yesterday, 7-5, 6-1, after sprinting to a 4-1 lead in the first set. The match was hard-fought:

Shikha Uberoi of Boca Raton won a lot of new fans with her super-aggressive play against Venus Williams in the second round.. Her coach, Rick Macci, tutored the Williams sisters for four years…

As fellow Palm Beach County players, Uberoi and Williams are acquaintances. On 9/11, their local airport was in lockdown, so Williams gave Uberoi and her sister Neha a limo ride home. A grateful Uberoi invited Williams in for some home-cooked bhindi:

Shikha invited her to dine with the family. ‘‘And guess what: she agreed. She loved Indian food, bhindi masala particularly, so we called Mom and asked her to make that.’’

Despite having shared bhindi, a near-sacred bond in Punjabi culture equalled only by sharing makhi di roti and sarson da saag, Williams had to take down her young rival at tournament time. All’s fair in love and tennis.

Uberoi is a cousin of Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi.

thought i should bring this to your attention, since we are brown, and it IS tennis; Shikha Uberoi, an indian american, has upset saori obata of japan in a “spectacular” first round match in the US Open. for her second match, shikha will play a tennis-“david” to Venus William’s “goliath”.

india’s Mahesh Bhupathi digs miss uberoi:

…Indian tennis ace Mahesh Bhupathi complimented Uberoi on her victory, saying she would inspire players like Sania Mirza back home.

“Shikha’s excellent performance at the US Open is a very positive sign for women’s tennis in India. With (players like) Sania Mirza, the future of women’s tennis in India seems extremely bright; brighter than it has ever seemed before,” Bhupathi, who narrowly missed out winning a medal in partnership with Leander Paes at the just concluded Athens Olympics, contended.

Indian born Uberoi, 21, lives in Boca Raton, Florida.

A right-hander with a two-handed backhand, she is ranked 380 and has had a pretty good run this year.

now the dozen SM readers who love tennis can shrug and say, “duh. i already knew that”, while the other five of you scroll on impatiently because you are looking for the next installment of the manish vij book club. no matter. thanks for reading! 😉 Continue reading →

Vicious OpEd in Rediff –The Great Indian Excuses resurface.

If Anjali Bhagwat had stiff muscles, K M Binu ran with the wrong spikes, Karnam Malleswari suffered a last-minute back problem, and Suma Shirur was done in by a mental block!

The exceptions were heptathlete J J Shobha, who braved excruciating pain to finish the event in eleventh place, and tennis stars Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes.

There seems to be no end to the excuses given by Indian athletes for their shoddy performances at yet another Olympiad that ended last night in Athens.

Whether these were genuine reasons for their failure, only the athletes can tell. But one thing is for sure. They have got readymade excuses for every failure and it appears to come to them naturally.

Indian medal hope Anju Bobby George set a personal best and broke the Indian national record with her sixth-place finish in the long jump at the Olympics.

Vinod has rightly complained about the unsupportive Indian press, but the Indian Express had kind words for George:

It may have been a failure for Anju Bobby George. But it was a success story for Indian athletics… In fact her 6.83 was better than her own national mark of 6.74 which she had done twice.

And the Times of India sent this valentine:

It’s alright, Anju, you are our Athena

She aroused great passions among Indian sports fans just as sprint queen P T Usha had two decades ago… To her credit, Anju kept her cool and pushed herself to the limit. In the end, Anju Bobby George achieved what she was meant to: break through a mental threshold for millions of Indians.

Meanwhile, the women’s 4×400 relay team, a.k.a. the Secret Punjabi-Malayalee Sprinters Alliance of Rajwinder Kaur, Manjeet Kaur, K.M. Beenamol and Chitra Soman, qualified for the finals, just as a previous women’s 4×400 team did in Los Angeles in ’84.

Update: Mango Swami observed their shapely modesty:

[T]hey were the only team not wearing those skimpy bikini running shorts. Forget cutting-edge aerodynamics, we kick it old school, Umbro shorts and waist-length plaits.

Update 2: The relay team placed seventh in the finals after their anchor, Manjeet Kaur, fell ill and had to be replaced with an alternate.

A couple desi coworkers were mentioning some flare up in the cricket world and I decided to check it out… Very interesting stuff. The brouhaha erupted over comments from an Aussie player – Mathew Hayden.

SYDNEY, August 24: Matthew Hayden says Australia are the leading cricketing team in the world because its players play as a team whereas cricketers from the sub-continent, including India, play for personal milestones.

…‘‘In one-day cricket, if you get to 70 or 80, you can obviously get a hundred by just batting carefully but we just donÂ’t do that. It affects a batsmanÂ’s statistics but we just donÂ’t go for those personal marks,Â’Â’ he said.

…‘Counties like India suffer from that. We back ourselves against those countries because theyÂ’ll get two or three players in the 70s and beyond and theyÂ’ll be eyeing off that personal landmark and it will cost their side 40 or 50 runs as a result. Pretty much all the sub-continental sides are like that. They really can waste a lot of time and thereÂ’s no time to waste.

God, if I knew more about cricket, I could fully appreciate the significance here… BUT, there’s some interesting commentary in this column responding to Mr. Hayden –

Why there’s an ‘I’ in Team India
The self comes before the team because thatÂ’s our way of life
HARSHA BHOGLE

It would be tempting, and egotistical, to ignore Mathew HaydenÂ’s remark about players from the sub-continent being selfish. You could call it gamesmanship, and there will be a substantial element of that, but if it hurts there is probably some truth to it.

…It is my hypothesis that in over-populated, and therefore insecure, countries the self will always dominate. Feelings of comradeship, of surrendering the self to the wider cause, can only arise in either a highly spiritual phase or where the performer has ascended to a level of personal calm about his achievements.

Where you are in a mob, and we are in a mob, self-preservation will always prevail; whether it is catching a bus, or getting out of a movie hall or getting admission to a professional college.

There’s some serious wisdom here.

The gymnastics floor exercise finals just ended in Athens, and Mohini Bhardwaj finished 6th out of 8. The Romanians were dominant as always, winning gold and silver, with Spain taking the bronze. Bhardwaj’s teammates did well in their individual finals, winning gold in the all-around, silver and bronze on the uneven bars and silver on the vault.

The team silver medal is probably the end of Bhardwaj’s Olympics career, a graduation ceremony into the rest of life. The end of an intensely competitive tournament can be a relief, but also a huge letdown. Gymnast Kerry Strug, who several years ago became famous for landing a critical vault on an injured ankle, Karate Kid-style, now works in the Treasury Department’s general counsel office.

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Finance millionaire and Indophile Andrew Krieger is investing $120M in a Hyderabad sports training center to boost India’s Olympics results:

As India awaits glory in Athens, its star athlete, markswoman Anjali Bhagwat, is peeved that she had to pay for a coach on her own… Krieger, who studied Hindu philosophy, is pouring $120 million into a planned sports facility in the Indian tech hub of Hyderabad, where international coaches will groom future champions in all sports. It will be a replica of IMG Academies, a coaching center in Bradenton, Fla., that has produced the likes of tennis champ Maria Sharapova.

It’s just shameful that it’s not an Indian investor doing this. Indian marksman Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, a major in the Indian army, won India’s sole medal, and its first ever individual silver medal, in double trap shooting last week. There are many ways to slice India’s medal drought, all of them wince-worthy:

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The latest Sports Illustrated (subscription only) commemorates Vijay Singh’s PGA victory last week with its own laurels: world’s best golfer. Singh, a 41-year-old, 6’2″ desi from Fiji, can be prickly but is intensely disciplined. With Tiger Woods in a Swedish slump, Singh has been the most consistent golf tourney winner over the last 12 months, earning $6.9M so far this year.

A huge congrats to Mohini Bhardwaj on medalling in her first, and probably only, Olympics! The U.S. women’s gymnastics team won silver today, 2nd to Romania and ahead of Russia. This is a historic day: Bhardwaj is the first Indian-American Olympic medalist ever, and as far as I know, the first Indian-American Olympian. She’s been working toward this day off-and-on for 21 years.

The U.S. team leaned heavily on the veteran Bhardwaj in their medal quest. She competed in every finals event except uneven bars:

[T]hey could also be proud of the way 25-year-old Mohini Bhardwaj came in at the last minute to replace Kupets on the balance beam, allowing Kupets to nurse her sore right leg a little longer before performing on the floor. “For Mohini to come in like that, with three minutes warning, that shows the preparation this whole team had,” Bela Karolyi said.

They used her in as many events as the team star, Carly Patterson, and more events than any other team member. Poor Courtney McCool was benched entirely due to preliminary round jitters.

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The U.S. women’s gymnastics team made it into the finals yesterday, in 2nd place after Romania. Mohini Bhardwaj also qualified for the individual finals in the floor exercise. That’s the event that resembles acrobatic street teams in New York City, but without the black people 🙁 And it’s got some dated, frou-frou, high school cheerleading moves interleaved with all the tumbling, as breaks for muscle recovery.

Now, most of these teen gymnasts look incredibly stressed with the weight of national prestige on their shoulders. You can see the relief on their faces when they step off the mat. In contrast, if you watched Bhardwaj on Monday, her features settled into a frightening, wide-eyed, murderous look the instant before she launched onto the runway; later she said she needed to dial back on her aggression to land her vaults. Sistah is so hardcore. Her style seems higher on power than grace, the opposite of the skinny, lanky Russian diva Svetlana Khorkina.

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