Mythbusters: Washed Up at 19? Not This Guy By Ricky Becker

Mythbusters

Washed Up at 19? Not This Guy

By Ricky Becker

“I could have had it all. So many doors were open to me and I blew it. I hope I didn’t mess up my life forever.”

This is something that middleaged people might say aloud. But I wasn’t walking and talking with an adult my age. I was with a 19-year old who was a top-nationally ranked tennis player who hadn’t even stepped onto a college campus yet.

The cycle of a top national junior tennis player from Long Island usually follows a straightforward path.

It goes like this: Earn a high national ranking and either get a college scholarship or go to a very strong academic school; sometimes even go professional early. After that phase ends, the player “gets a real job” and either lives in New York City or the home state of where they went to college.

Or the player might go back into tennis in some capacity.

Kabir Rajpal had these doors open to him, made some mistakes, has owned up to these mistakes and is ready to make amends. Mainly, make amends to himself.

I knew Kabir a little bit ten years ago when he was nine-years-old. He took lessons on the court next to where I was teaching. We would sometimes joke around with his coach. I knew him as a good kid who had a lot of talent. We went separate ways but I came across his success in different ways through Long Island Tennis Magazine, Newsday, and feature articles in the Jericho-Syosset Tribune. Kabir reached the top ten nationally on TennisRecruiting.net, won national level tournaments and went undefeated on Long Island in two years of high school tennis.

One night during the week while watching an Islanders game in March, a mutual friend called me from Lifetime gym.

“Yo, Ricky! A buddy of mine wants to teach for you this summer at Pine

Hollow. He’s a D1 player. His name is Kabir Rajpal. He’s ready to start now. He’s working at Chipotle but he wants to go out and teach so he can make more money.” I replied, “Kabir Rajpal!?”

But in my mind, I was thinking,

“What’s this backstory?” I mean we are talking about a 19-year old kid who was a local tennis star, has his life ahead of him and is working out not with a college team at a worldclass facility, but at Lifetime gym.

Not playing college or money tournaments, but working at Chipotle.

I’m not going to lie. When I spoke to Kabir, I was a little taken aback. We hadn’t spoken in about ten years and this was kind of a like a job interview. We are talking an expletive every 20 seconds and him trashing a previous supervisor. His past experience didn’t completely connect. I got this all within the first three minutes of talking. Not exactly who one would hire to teach at a high-end country club. I don’t think he read too many job interview books.

The first time I unexpectedly ran into him after our conversation, Kabir looked at the guy he was with and whispered, “Who the hell is this guy? I have no clue.”

Maybe his playing credentials and

Kabir Rajpal

his availability blinded me to all of this. But I saw a kid who had a good heart. I also saw someone who, if filtered, had a confident, fun personality, and could be an asset to the Pine Hollow Tennis Program. I’m always short on coaches early in the season and if it didn’t work out, I always had my mainstay pros coming in six weeks. But in my mind, I am thinking how is this guy, months after high school graduation and with his playing credentials, in a spot where a local Country Club Director like me is thinking there is a good chance he won’t be able to hold a position at a local club and is probably better suited for Chipotle?

How Kabir got to that spot is interesting, and how he is on his way out of it is uplifting. And he is not looking for any sympathy.

By other people’s accounts, as a junior player, Kabir had world-class talent but no work ethic. By his own account, he won’t come out and say he is talented but he would admit to the work ethic part. While talking with him now though, and seeing him succeed immensely months later at the country club, I am not at all convinced that it’s laziness. I am not a psychologist but I think the pressure of it all was too much to handle, combined with the fact that Kabir probably never had a passion for tennis. It’s easy to try and read a book by its cover, but it isn’t always accurate.

While in high school, Kabir was being recruited by Ivy League, SEC, Pac 12 and Big 10 schools. He skipped Kalamazoo, the biggest national tournament of the year, to party with his friends. He had matches with 20-25 college coaches watching him, and he didn’t even try in front of them. The recruiting calls went quiet. He didn’t particularly care either. At some point, a friend told him about the coach at the Air Force Academy being nice. Kabir reached out to him. The coach flew from Colorado to Syosset just to meet Kabir and his family. He made a casual verbal agreement with Air Force just get people off his back and to possibly ease the pressure and expectations.

With a little bit of the stress gone, Rajpal alternated from working hard to finding excuses not to play tennis. He had enough good results in the tournaments that he played that the University of Wisconsin, a Big 10 school, started pushing for him. Rajpal decided that was the place for him.

Then the pandemic hit. Not a good scenario for an 18-year old that has a family member with a pre-existing condition or for an 18-year old who has a love-hate relationship with tennis. He now had a reason to stop playing even after things started opening up last summer. The tennis training stopped and weight lifting time in the basement increased. With

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COVID-19 causing havoc on college campuses, Rajpal and the Wisconsin coach decided it would be best to take a gap year which wasn’t necessarily the best thing for someone prone to procrastinating to have in front of him. He pretty much stopped practicing and completely stopped competing. When Wisconsin was hit with budget cuts, Wisconsin told Rajpal he wasn’t welcome anymore. They knew that he wasn’t training and they didn’t want someone who hadn’t been training to just join the team.

With his free time, Rajpal took some classes at Nassau Community College and started working at Chipotle to fill his time. He felt the vibe of the whispers and others thinking he was lazy, had no work ethic and were wondering what he was doing. He didn’t like telling people that he went to Nassau and hoped that he wouldn’t see anyone at Chipotle from tennis. When his co-workers at Chipotle in Huntington Station Google’d his name and saw what came up, they were shocked to hear about his tennis career.

This brings us to Rajpal’s tenure at Pine Hollow. It started well enough. The members seemed to like him, I saw right away he was a good tennis coach and fortunately his interview persona didn’t infiltrate to our tennis courts. I also admired that although he was able to make more money teaching tennis, he was still loyal to his bosses at Chipotle and did not want to leave them high-and-dry. He also cultivated lessons on the outside and started them at 7:00 a.m., and often ended them around 10:00 p.m. without him telling me. This was in addition to working at Pine Hollow, two other clubs I put him in touch with, and making sure that he left Chipotle on the right terms. I was becoming a fan. And I wasn’t the only one. The members of our club loved him. They wanted to take lessons with him, they liked talking with him and they always requested to be on his court. The work ethic was second to none.

Then Rajpal hit me with the news. He decided that he was going to go to Air Force, play for their tennis team and he had to leave earlier than I originally anticipated. He wanted to move forward with his life. He was enjoying the coaching and he appreciated the opportunity, but it was time to see what he can do in the world. Now I didn’t know Rajpal for very long and we never spent time together away from the club, but seeing him mature in front of my eyes was awesome.

I will miss Kabir and as one of the most loved pros we ever had, I know his presence will be missed. But hearing him, a 19-year old, casually say to me that he knows he made mistakes, hearing him own up to those mistakes and seeing him go off to a place like the Air Force Academy, where he was craving the hard-work, Kabir Rajpal is very easy to root for.

Writer’s note: I want to thank Kabir for approving this article. I have all the respect in the world that he agreed to let me tell his story in the hope that it will help someone else.

Ricky Becker is The Director of Tennis at the prestigious Pine Hollow Country Club for his tenth year. He also coaches high-performance juniors throughout the year and has been the Director of Tennis at three of Long Island’s biggest junior programs. As a player, Becker was the Most Valuable Player for the 1996 NCAA Championship Stanford Tennis team and ranked in the top-five nationally as a junior. He can be reached at rbecker06@yahoo.com, 516-359-4843 or via juniortennisconsulting.com.