Statistically, Sania Mirza could also be no match for all-time greats like Serena Williams, but it surely’s laborious to overstate the tennis star’s influence on sport in India, particularly for ladies.

Her black hair tied in a fast bun, Mirza’s darkish eyes targeted throughout the web on Tuesday, as she bounced the ball thrice earlier than serving.

She was taking part in towards Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova and Liudmila Samsonova on the WTA Dubai Duty Free Championships – a whole lot of spectators, lots of them followers from India, packed the courtside seating to look at her “last dance”.

Mirza and her associate Madison Keys misplaced the primary spherical match in straight units, drawing the curtains on her 20-year skilled tennis profession.

With six Grand Slam doubles titles beneath her belt, Mirza is well India’s most profitable tennis star.

Over the many years, she’s gained 43 main profession titles, changing into the primary ever Indian to make primary within the WTA doubles rankings, a feat achieved in 2015.

The devotion of Mirza’s followers has remained unrivalled, surviving triumphs by her opponents and accidents that dogged her through the years. Her greatest run got here in 2015 when she and Martina Hingis gained 16 titles, together with three grand slams, rating them the best ladies’s doubles pair of all time.

But Mirza’s story is particular as a result of she made it as knowledgeable sportswoman, regardless of the percentages being stacked towards her. Born in 1986, she grew up within the southern metropolis of Hyderabad at a time when tennis as a career was just for the rich.

She started taking part in aged six on pot-holed courts manufactured from cow dung – a frugal trade-off between between clay and laborious courts.

Mirza turned out to be a pure and located success as a junior tennis participant, successful the 2003 Wimbledon Championships women’ doubles title when she was 15.

But she burst into the highlight in 2005 when she made it to the third spherical of the Australian Open – the primary Indian lady to succeed in this stage of a significant in singles – to face celebrity Serena Williams.

It was a rare feat – cricket-obsessed Indians tuned in to look at {the teenager} go up towards a participant already cementing her place as the best of all time. Mirza misplaced the match however her profession embodying not simply tennis however ladies’s sport in India had taken off.

In a pre-internet period, her matches introduced folks collectively as they watched her play, glued to their TV screens. She was a daily characteristic in Indian sports activities pages. Many Indians have early recollections of a participant who, for as soon as, regarded and spoke like them, and was doing nice issues.

But whereas many celebrated Mirza’s rise, a bunch of Muslim clerics issued a fatwa, denouncing her tennis garments as “indecent”, “un-Islamic” and “corrupting”.

It marked the beginning of waves of backlash the star, then simply 18, would obtain for the alternatives she made on and off court docket.

Mirza, proudly Muslim, practised her faith on her personal phrases with out it actually impeding her objectives and aspirations and it was liberating to look at this unfold in public.

Her responses to feedback on her garments, like her tennis strikes, had been measured but incisive, typically even dramatic. The participant would put on T-shirts and caps with searing one-liners – ‘You cannot deal with the reality’ or ‘You can both agree with me or be fallacious’ – to tournaments and occasions.

Her immense reputation would typically make her the topic of intense scrutiny and vitriol in her personal nation. But Mirza appeared to have an ironclad sense of self and was by no means seen cowed by it.

In 2008, she introduced she had no need to play in India as she selected to boycott its most prestigious tennis event, the Bangalore Open.

“Every time I play in India, there is a problem,” she advised reporters.

Days earlier than she had been accused of desecrating the nationwide flag after she was caught on digital camera resting her naked toes on a desk in entrance of the Indian colors. Earlier that month, she had additionally drawn the ire of Muslim teams after she filmed an advert at a historic mosque in her hometown, Hyderabad.

In 2010, Mirza married Pakistani cricket participant Shoaib Malik, prompting frequent questions on her loyalty to the nation of her beginning.

Eventually, Mirza managed to do one thing seemingly inconceivable – transcend these variations to change into a South Asian icon as a substitute of simply an Indian one.

On Tuesday, her followers within the Dubai enviornment and on-line cheered her on as she hugged her son after the match. It’s a testomony to how Mirza managed unapologetically to dismantle notions about what she ought to or should not do.

In a rustic the place ladies have been discouraged from constructing knowledgeable profession in sport, Mirza managed to do precisely that – and a lot extra.

When Rajdeep Sardesai, one in every of India’s most revered journalists, requested her about “settling down” throughout an interview in 2016, she chided him for “sounding disappointed I’m not choosing motherhood over being number one in the world”.

“That’s the question I face all the time as a woman, that all women have to face – the first is marriage and then it’s motherhood. Unfortunately, that’s when we’re settled, and no matter how many Wimbledons we win,” she mentioned.

Through her time in public life, Mirza’s been a vocal advocate of ladies’s rights, routinely talking towards home violence, sexual assault and different points. She’s additionally been an incessant critic of the unfair requirements in Indian sport, the place good amenities and honest pay are nonetheless laborious to return by for ladies.

Some see her cool, hard-talking perspective as vanity. For her followers, her outspokenness was golden.

“I would like people to remember that this girl fought for the right things. She believed in herself when nobody else did,” she advised ESPN, days earlier than her retirement. “She always thought that you can fight the odds.”

Mirza’s tennis profession might have come to an finish however her legacy as a sportswoman seems removed from over.

Apart from her tennis academies in Dubai and Hyderabad, she will likely be mentoring ladies cricketers of the Royal Challengers Bangalore franchise who will quickly be taking part in within the Indian Women’s Premier League.

“The thought process is to try and help the next generation and try and find the answer to that question I’m asked all the time – ‘Who will come after you, that we have not been able to find for the last 20 years?”