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.
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.
I was never part of the crowd.
For the last five or six years the most important thing in my life has been my family.
Bjorn was a different breed, I threw my best material at him, but he would never smile, but that added to the charm when he played me and Mac. We were going nuts and losing our mind and he was sitting back like he was on a Sunday stroll.
From where we lived, to practise in St Louis was an hour-and-a-half drive each way, so that took a lot of the time. So really, our lives just took different paths.
People don’t seem to understand that it’s a damn war out there. Maybe my methods aren’t socially acceptable to some, but it’s what I have to do to survive. I don’t go out there to love my enemy. I go out there to squash him.
People don’t seem to understand that it’s a damn war out there.
Tennis would be much more exciting if they had pitching machines firing Tennis was given to me to keep me off the street corners of east St. Louis.
Tennis was never work for me, tennis was fun. And the tougher the battle and the longer the match, the more fun I had.
The trouble with experience is that by the time you have it you are too old to take advantage of it.
When you’re hot, anything can happen.
It was okay for Wayne Gretzky’s dad, for instance, to give him a hockey stick, or Joe Montana’s dad to give him a football, or Larry Bird’s dad to give him a basketball, but it wasn’t okay for Gloria Connors to give her son a tennis racquet.
But why should I read what somebody else thinks of my life when I know the real story?
I always insist on my jeans being ironed. Is that a problem?
No, like I said, my dad was never really part of the tennis. His involvement around what I did with the tennis and with my mom and my grandparents was really not a part of my life.
You have to remember that I played longer than anybody else on the main tour; I played until I was 40, and then played another six years or so on the seniors tour.
Playing in front of 25,000 people and millions more on television, and performing and doing what I worked so hard to try to accomplish was, in my opinion, the ultimate. Do I miss it? Of course I do.
Equality? They ought to play the women’s final on opening day. Everybody knows who’s going to be in it.
What works for the person you’re imitating may not work for you.
There is only one number one. It is a lonely spot but it has got the best view of all.