When he was five, he had a favourite game. He would cross a road, he told his friends, with his eyes shut. And young Pullela Gopi Chand did so too. Once he was injured when he crashed into a bicycle. But the boy couldn’t care less — he repeated the feat at least 20 times. “I was a quiet child but always liked playing tricks,” confesses the former world badminton champion.

At 39, Gopi Chand still has that do-or-die attitude. But unlike the small boy who closed his eyes, the man who coaches ace shuttler Saina Nehwal keeps them wide open.

“It is important that players have a sense of self-belief and a ‘never say die’ attitude,” says the youngest Dronacharya awardee, sitting in Delhi’s India International Centre soon after the release of his biography, The World Beneath His Feat, written by former national badminton champion and coach Sanjay Sharma and his daughter, Shachi.

It is this strong sense of self-belief that’s been pushing Gopi Chand to success too. Today, his name is synonymous with Indian badminton. And mental strength and concentration — which prompted him to close his eyes and cross roads as a small boy — continue to egg him on.

Gopi, as he is called by those close to him, started playing badminton at the age of 10 when he was studying at St Paul’s School in Hyderabad. His first game, however, was not badminton, but cricket. Once, after he suffered from a sunstroke while playing cricket all day long, his mother decided she’d steer him towards another game.“Our house was close to the Lal Bahadur Shastri stadium where badminton was played. So I chose badminton,” says Gopi Chand, dressed nattily in a white shirt and a pair of black trousers, and sitting with his wife, P.V.V. Lakshmi.

He had to scale quite a few mountains as well. When he was 13, he ruptured a ligament. But undeterred by the injury, he went on to win the singles and the doubles titles in an inter-school competition the same year. He also reached the final round of the Andhra Pradesh state junior badminton championship, only to lose the title to his elder brother, Raja Shekhar. By the time he’d finished school, Gopi Chand had made a name for himself in the badminton circuit.

It was an expensive pursuit. But his middle-class family — his father was a banker, and his mother a homemaker — stood by him. “Those days, a racquet would cost Rs 20,000. In 1992, my mother sold her jewellery and bought me a racquet,” he recalls.

For years, his family never ate out to save money for Gopi’s game. “They sacrificed a lot for me. I just played the game with honesty and dedication.”

There were some terrible moments too. Disaster struck in 1994, a year after he won the under-22 national doubles championships in Chennai. At the national games in Pune, Gopi Chand was partnering with Vijay Raghvan and the two were expected to win the crown. But he and his partner smashed into each other while running for the same shot, with Raghvan falling on Gopi Chand. “I knew something had gone horribly wrong, as my leg seemed twisted at an awkward angle. When I tried to get up, I crumbled again.”

Doctors later said he had undergone an acute “anterior cruciate ligament tear with a lateral meniscal tear” on his knee. The injuries would affect his career, he was warned. He underwent a knee surgery and didn’t know what it would lead to.

“My mother used to cry silently so that I didn’t lose hope. When others, including selectors and other experts, raised doubts about my future in the game, it was my family which gave me the assurance that I could do it again,” he says.

Gopi Chand dispelled the darkness around him by first banishing the thought that he could play no longer. “I believed that I would get better each day and that one day soon, I would reclaim my lost legacy. Badminton was my life and I was not going to let myself or my parents down, I decided.”

And he began working towards that. “I started wall practice while in a wheelchair. I started feeling better as I would hit the shuttle every time,” he says smilingly.

Not surprisingly, he returned with a bang. First, he won the south zone inter-state game at Belgaum and then his first international title — the men’s singles in the 1996 SAARC games in Vijayawada. “It was a moral victory for me,” he says proudly.

He won the title again in Colombo the following year. A spate of victories followed — including the Toulouse Open and Scottish Open in 1999. In 2000, riding piggyback on Gopi Chand’s performance, India reached the final of the Thomas Cup after 12 years.

When he won the 2001 All England Open Badminton championship — the second Indian to win the title after Prakash Padukone — he was ranked fourth in the world. But despite all the victories, Gopi Chand always viewed his success with humility. It was this trait that attracted fellow shuttler Lakshmi, whom he was dating then.

After the triumph in England, when Gopi reached Hyderabad, among the first things he did was to call on Lakshmi’s ailing father. “I thought he would forget me after winning the title but I was bowled over by his humility. My father was also impressed and gave his consent to our marriage,” says Lakshmi.

He still holds the affable grin and boyish charm that attracted Lakshmi. He breaks into a childlike grin when I ask him about one of the most embarrassing moments of his life — when former sports minister M.S. Gill failed to recognise him after he and Saina Nehwal called on the minister after their return from the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. “I give him the benefit of the doubt,” he says, and smiles again.

Besides Nehwal, young badminton stars such as Jwala Gutta, P. Kashyap and P.V. Sindhu have all been trained by Gopi Chand at the Gopichand Badminton Academy, which he has been running in Hyderabad from 2008. The coach is known as a strict disciplinarian at the academy, and quite a tough taskmaster.

Once, Lakshmi recalls, they were returning home after dinner late at night, when he suddenly decided that he wanted to drop in at the academy. “He basically wanted to see if the players had gone off to sleep,” she says. And it was good that he went, for some certainly hadn’t. “Sports is never forgiving. If you fool around, you have to pay for it,” Gopi Chand told the players.

“I said something that my father had told me long ago. He said: ‘You will miss out if you are on the border line. You have to be on the top of the line, and for that, you need discipline’,” he says.

Among the young players, Nehwal is Gopi Chand’s favourite. “She has the right attitude of a player,” he says, refusing to comment on why Nehwal parted with him and went to Bhaskar Babu for training last year and then rejoined him a few months later.

Gopi Chand believes the young generation of players needs more patience and perseverance. What India also lacks — especially when compared to China, he says — is infrastructure. “If we had at least 70 per cent of the facilities that China has, I think we would have produced similar results.”

The recipient of awards such as the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna and the Arjuna and Padma Shri, Gopi Chand is full of energy. Every day, he heads for the academy at 4.30am to train his students. He takes a two-hour lunch break when he also checks his mail and takes phone calls. He resumes coaching after lunch, and continues till seven in the evening. He also does an hour of yoga every day. “Yoga helped me maintain my sanity during the worst years of my life. It gave me the strength to fight back,” he says.

But once he is back at home, he dedicates his time fully to his family. And though he meticulously helps his children — Gayatri, 8, and Sai Vishnu, 7 — with their homework, he himself tried his best to avoid it as a child. “I hated studying. To keep me interested, some teachers used to bring chocolates which they kept in their pockets to give to me from time to time. I still didn’t study — but I would put my hands in their pockets and take the chocolates out.”

Years later, he knows the fruit of hard work. And it’s as sweet as chocolate.