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

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

I never lost a tennis match, I just ran out of time

The minute you think you know everything about tennis is the minute your game starts going down the tubes.

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.