Deep in the Andhra desert, Rafael Nadal has created an oasis of inspiration

Press conferences with professional sportspeople are littered with more well worn platitudes than Indian streets are with food stalls. In cricket, it is talk of processes. In football, possession. In tennis, it is words of how good the opponent was. And every press conference always features a line about how great the crowd was. And yes, how the venue is special.

So it was with Rafael Nadal.

“India is a special place. I feel close to this country, and I’m happy to be back here”, he said after the draw ceremony for the Davis Cup World Group Playoff tie.

Thing is, he meant it. After all, not every tennis player who tours India has a foundation that invests lakhs of rupees every year in social welfare projects in the country. Rafael Nadal does.

So yes, India is special to Rafael Nadal.

“I have a part of my foundation here in Anantapur,” Nadal explained. “I have a centre there where we try to help a lot of kids.”

India is special for Rafa

October 2016 will mark the sixth year since the Rafa Nadal Foundation established the Anantapur Educational Centre in Andhra Pradesh. Every year, the centre imparts training in English, computer operations, and, of course, tennis to hundreds of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

It is a part of a larger project, the Anantapur Sports Centre, which has been undertaken by the Rural Development Trust (RDT), an NGO rooted in Spain, but as Indian as the soil of Anantapur. The Anantapur Sports Centre houses two cricket grounds (often rented by the Andhra Cricket Association), a hockey academy, floodlit clay tennis courts, volleyball courts, an athletic track, a fully equipped gymnasium, and boarding facilities.

“The goal is to have a holistic academy, where children are the main character and they can enjoy learning and doing sport, giving them this sport culture that we believe in,” said Xisco Marcadal Pons, who coordinates the project on behalf of the Rafa Nadal Foundation and the Vicente Ferrer Foundation (RDT’s parent organisation).

I was lucky enough to visit Anantapur more than a few times, for camps with the National Cricket Academy. While the campus has little to offer in terms of entertainment (which meant dumb-charades made a welcome return), the sports facilities are world-class, right from the lush outfield, the dressing rooms, and the gymnasium.

While we usually confined ourselves to the cricket campus, on one trip, the RDT arranged a tour of their operations for us. There, we were told the story of the founders, Vicente Ferrer and Anne Perry. Other writers have told their story better; I can only tell you of what I saw there: Financially independent women, with jobs making handicraft products from local raw materials. Children in schools with computers, in a town where a cyber cafe was hard to come by. Dedicated teachers, mostly all locals, working with visually and intellectually challenged children.

For a few hours, my teammates and I were brought out of our self-absorbed cricket universes and given a look at the real India, and how a man from Spain saw what most Indians pretend not to see. We got an answer to the question that always came to us when we came to Anantapur, but rarely ever asked: In the middle of this desert – for the land there is sandy and coarse – where did these oases come from?

Bringing tennis to the financially disadvantaged

It was with this visionary work that the Rafa Nadal Foundation attached itself. In 2010, Nadal himself inaugurated the centre. For almost all the children who pass through his centre, it is their first brush with tennis, a sport that has been the exclusive domain of the upper middle class and above.

“This year we have increased the number of pupils from 170 to 210, whom we provide a bus, clothes, shoes and a nutrition programme,” said Xisco over email. “The reality that exists in Anantapur and its surrounding area requires a combination of physical and educational approach in order to achieve the goals that the foundation sets.” Besides Xisco himself, the Centre hires four tennis trainers, two assistant coaches, one computer teacher, one English teacher and eight maintenance staff. The Centre also has a few students who play on the AITA level.

Judging by the fact that Spain have 10 players in the top fifty of the Association of Tennis Professionals rankings, the Spanish sporting culture is one to envy. That young students in far-off Anantapur – who if not for the RDT, might never have gone to school – can get a taste of this is the chance of a lifetime. And it is thanks to the lifetimes of the late Vicente Ferrer, Anne Perry, and their co-workers, that these children get that chance.

If you did not get a chance to see the Rafael Nadal forehand in Delhi, you might want to make a trip to Anantapur. There he has left a mark far more permanent than those his forehand made on hard courts of the capital.

You can donate to the Rafa Nadal Foundation here, and the RDT here.

Snehal Pradhan is a former women’s international cricketer. She tweets here.