Boris Becker

I know what it’s like to be married and to live in a house with a garden, but it’s not something I’m striving for at the moment.

I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.

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.

So this is it. Match point for eternity.

The eyes of some of the fans at Davis Cup matches scare me. There’s no light in them. Fixed emotions. Blind worship. Horror. It makes me think of what happened to us long ago.

I’m getting excited before every single game. The trophy at the end is less important than the process itself.

You can swim any way you like in the Dead Sea, actually.

However great your dedication, you never win anything on your own

I am not the most courageous guy in the world outside of the court.

If you don’t lose, you cannot enjoy the victories. So I have to accept both things.

The bad thing about the tennis calendar is how it is made and obligates you to play tournaments all year. If you want to achieve the most you can and go as high up in the rankings as you can, you have to play from the start to the finish because there are important tournaments from the beginning to the end.

The guy comes up to the plate, there’s always a chance where he can get a grand slam and everybody forgets about all the times he missed.

In the second, I told myself just to hold my serve and try and be aggressive on his serve, and hopefully get a break. I also applied more topspin on my forehand. Once I won the second game after being 0-30 down, my confidence also went up.

Girls had never been important. I’d had a girlfriend or two and had liked them a lot but it wasn’t love, because my first love was tennis.

Honesty, willingness to exert oneself, friendship – all these things shaped me too.

If you want to belong to the best, you need good technique and, perhaps even more importantly, a good eye. If you see the ball sooner, you have more time to think about how and where to return it.

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.

I didn’t play a great match, but once I pass the first two rounds, things get easier. I’m used to the court and the conditions.

Above all, such sports as judo, in my view, teach people to relate to each other. They teach us to respect a partner, teach us to understand that an externally weak partner can not only put up worthy resistance, but, if you relax and take too much for granted, may even win.

I have lived my whole life with high intensity.