I am not looking to be understood or liked. Like me or not, I don't care. I am an outsider, that is the way I was brought up.

I can't say that I was my happiest on court, but I felt completely free. Free from family obligations, free from my own torment. In a real sense I was a different person. It was a place where I could not tolerate the idea of being beaten. I psyched myself up into a state where I felt something close to hatred towards my opponent, a state where I detested the idea of someone making his name at the expense of Jimmy Connors. I was in my element on court, measuring myself against someone else. I was not competitive for show. It came from deep within.

That's something a lot of athletes miss - a lot of them walk away too soon. They don't get everything out of their system. They have a lot of what-ifs when they're sitting around later in life. I don't have that. I got all that out of my system. I pushed it to the brink, I loved it, and when I walked away, I'd had enough.

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 had true rivalries. Not only did I want to beat my opponent, but I didn't want to let him up, either. I had a rivalry with Mac, Lendl, Borg. Everybody knew there was tension between us, on court and off. That's what's really ingrained in my mind: 'This is real. This isn't a soft rivalry.' There were no hugs and kisses.

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.

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.