The Pull Towards Play: Series 002
stories about why players return
The Pull Towards Play is a series of short features on real tennis players from around the world. Not professionals. People who keep showing up, week after week, for reasons that have nothing to do with rankings or results. Each feature begins with the same question: what is it that keeps bringing you back?
This is the second.
YADUSH: INDIA
For 448 days, he lost.
Every morning at 4:30am, he showed up to the court and his partner dismantled him. Not occasionally. Every single time. For a year and a half, the result was never in question.
He had come to tennis at 38, essentially from zero. An age when most people lean into the things they are already good at. He chose instead to be a complete beginner.
“You are never too old to start from zero,” he says. “True growth happens when you have the courage to show up every day knowing you are going to lose.”
On day 449, he won a set.
He still thinks about that morning. Not just because of the victory, but because of everything that made it possible. The patience of his partner, who dismantled him every day and then stayed to rebuild him. The footwork corrections, the technique adjustments, the slow accumulation of something that eventually, quietly, clicked.
Yadush is Head of Global Field Marketing at a technology company in Bengaluru. He runs a small pickle business with his mother. He photographs wildlife. He captained a cricket club and played football on the wing. He is, by his own description, a lifelong athlete with a quieter creative side.
Tennis found him when he needed something that asked for total individual accountability.
“In team sports, you can share the burden. Tennis strips all of that away.”
What the court gives him is harder to name. He tries anyway.
“There is a heavy, often unspoken societal script for a man approaching forty. You are expected to be the anchor. To have all the answers. To be the stoic provider, the leader, the relentless problem-solver.”
The court dismantles all of that. On the baseline he is not a corporate executive. He is not expected to have it figured out. The game demands vulnerability. You are going to miss shots. You are going to be humbled. There is nowhere to hide.
“It is one of the very few spaces in a man’s life where it is perfectly acceptable to struggle openly, to be a student again, and to pour your soul into something just for the pure, unoptimised joy of it.”
He describes tennis as the collision of everything that came before it. The geometric vision of cricket. The fluid improvisation of a football winger. The hyper-focused timing of a wildlife photographer waiting for the perfect frame.
“Finding the art within that chaos is incredibly beautiful.”
What is tennis to him, really?
“It is the great equaliser. It doesn’t care about your job title, your age, or your past successes. It demands respect, focus, and immediate execution.”
He still sets his alarm for 4:30am. He still shows up. The result is no longer certain.
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