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.

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

People don't seem to understand that it's a damn war out there.

I think my greatest victory was every time I walked out there, I gave it everything I had. I left everything out there. That's what I'm most proud of. I can't go win Wimbledon anymore, so if what I've done in the past is not good enough, let it go. Because I'm certainly not sitting around thinking about it.

Tennis was never work for me, tennis was fun. And the tougher the battle and the longer the match, the more fun I had.

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.

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.