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.

Tennis was always there for me, which was lucky. I would go play baseball, basketball, football, hang with my brother, do whatever, and at the end of the day I'd come back and say, 'Hey, Mom, would you hit 15 minutes worth of balls with me?'

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.

With everything else that would swirl around me when I got involved in it, tennis was my main concern.

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.

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.

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.