I met with my lawyers. They gave me all the wrong advice. For a long time I refused to accept the child was mine. I should have met her, arranged a DNA test and accepted my responsibility.
Winning is a way of expressing yourself.
If I go into a club now, all the blonde girls leave my corner and all the black girls come into my corner. It’s as if I’m racist towards white girls!
I believed in raising my children as I had been raised.
I go to London, my favourite city in the world, and I feel at home.
How do you build a relationship when you’ve hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don’t see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?
That’s the hard part about sport: as men we haven’t started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.
Where do you go when you’re the best in the world? What’s next?
So this is it. Match point for eternity.
Tennis is a psychological sport, you have to keep a clear head. That is why I stopped playing.
I’m a different man now. I’m still a romantic, I still believe in love, but when I met Barbara I was looking for it. Now, I don’t know.
When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.
I believe that everything in life happens for a reason.
I don’t really care what the man on the street thinks. I never did anything to please him in the first place, and I’m not going to start now.
It’s not that difficult to play well and win titles in a team like Barcelona, but it’s in the national side where you see a player’s true class. That was the case with figures like Pele, Diego Maradona and Zinedine Zidane. With Spain, Iniesta has shown that he is among the best players of all time and that’s why I rate him higher than Messi or Ronaldo. Even though the latter two have incredible scoring records for their clubs, they still haven’t won anything with Argentina or Portugal respectively.
A few years after my first son was born, he wanted to know how we chose his name, so I began reading him the story of Noah’s Ark.
When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.
I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn’t thinking about the big picture. I didn’t notice what they said on television, I wasn’t reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.
Tennis has to be very careful.Not everyone is a computer, it is very good we have John McEnroe. I hope we have a couple more.
I didn’t start a war. Nobody died.
I’m not a God, I make mistakes.
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