To be a tennis champion, you have to be inflexible. You have to be stubborn. You have to be arrogant. You have to be selfish and self-absorbed. Kind of tunnel vision almost.
Even though there are a lot of bright tennis players out there, you still have to protect yourself and save all your mental and emotional energies for tennis.
You can never guarantee the wins but you can guarantee that you give it 100%. That way you can always look back and feel comfortable, as a player or a coach.
Once you win, you have no doubt that you can win. So you have gone through it once, and you can do it again.
I just want to get to the level where I can say that that's my level, just try to play well, get up there.
I had an instinct before and maybe now I don't have that instinct as much as knowing what to do, what shots to hit, where to place the ball, things like that.
Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn't the real thing. If you weren't playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside.
There was never anything I wanted to do more than play tennis. Never once walked out there and thought, 'I wish I was doing something else.' Not once.
I retired because I had a knee injury, my cartilage was wearing out, it was painful and I couldn't put in the four hours of practice each day that I needed to.
If you lived the doubles, as I did, which was very stressful, you are sitting down in a chair experiencing a match without being able to hold a racquet in your hands.
What is the single most important quality in a tennis champion? I would have to say desire, staying in there and winning matches when you are not playing that well.
No one cares about the Davis Cup. How many people know I won five Davis Cups and seven majors, but that I rarely played the Australian Open?
I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading.
I think you always have, you know, new players. Every year you see new faces, juniors coming into the seniors. I was one of them at the time long time ago now.
When we want to reach a dream for the second time, you want it to come true, when you try so hard, you are so close to achieving it, it makes things very difficult to live with afterwards.
Sometimes I wouldn't give an interview because I didn't have the time or something else was more important. So they come up with a story which I don't think is always true, but they have to sell papers.
Rev. Sykes: Miss Jean Louise. Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing.
There's something deeply satisfying when it succeeds, but I'm not going to do another book just to put my name on something and make some money if it's not something I deeply care about.
I've been asked a lot lately if tennis is clean or not. I don't know any more how you judge whether a sport is clean. If one in 100 players is doping, in my eyes that isn't a clean sport.
Golf can be tougher than tennis when things go wrong, because you can't explain things by saying that your opponent played better than you. It's a cruel sport in that way.
When we as a society lose the ability to comment on what we see and to have an opinion on what we are exposed to, then we have all lost what makes us unique on this planet.
