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As a kid, I wanted to be a pro tennis player. I was pretty good; at the tennis academies I attended, I always 'played up' against older age groups.
When I told people that I wanted to grow up to be a tennis player, they laughed at me. My dad has always been supportive, but he was laughing, too.
Relationships are give-and-take, and when you're a tennis player, you're certainly not giving. You have to be self-absorbed. It has to be about you.
I'm an ardent tennis player. I'm like an overenthusiastic child out there and I've damaged my back. It's not that it's crippling pain, more mental anguish.
The most challenging thing is people do see me as a tennis player, but I've had a lot of opportunities because I am a tennis player. And I don't mind that.
People know me. I'm not going to produce any cartwheels out there. I'm not going to belong on Comedy Central. I'll always be a tennis player, not a celebrity.
I think Serena Williams is the best tennis player of this generation, if not the best ever. It is amazing for her to be playing as well as she is at the age of 31.
I'm a decent table tennis player, but if you were to put me up against any of the guys you see on television at the Olympics, I'd be lucky to get a couple of points.
You want to try and win as many slams as possible in your career. As a tennis player, that's what we always dream of as a kid, wanting to play slams, wanting to win them.
My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I've always been a tennis fan.
If you look at tennis, the girls have become much more attractive; they wear makeup. In my generation, you were a tennis player. It wasn't like you had to look a certain way.
As a tennis player you can win and you can lose, and you have to be ready for both. I practised self-control as a kid. But as you get older they both - winning and losing - get easier.
Lars Ulrich is not a jazz drummer, but he grew up listening to jazz. Why? Because his father, Torben - an incredible tennis player - loved jazz. Jazz musicians used to stay at their house.
I like playing tennis. I've always enjoyed the process of being a tennis player; I'm just not sure that I enjoyed the travel at the end, and my body didn't recover from the day-to-day grind.
I've been playing against older and stronger competition my whole life. It has made me a better tennis player and able to play against this kind of level despite their strength and experience.
It makes you also realize, 'OK, I'm excited to play tennis, and I work really hard to be the best tennis player I think I can be,' but I don't waste my time on stupid stuff, you know what I mean.
I'd much rather people knew me as a good tennis player than as an aboriginal who happens to play good tennis. Of course I'm proud of my race, but I don't want to be thinking about it all the time.
Masculinity comes from your look, all the way down to your attitude. It's a big part of being a tennis player. Even though tennis is a fairly friendly sport, intimidation is still a big part of it.
As a tennis player, or any professional athlete, our career has a shelf life. I don't want to waste any opportunities, I don't want to look back on it when I'm 45 and think I could have done a lot more.
I recall waking to the realisation that I was the best table tennis player under 17 in north Manchester and parts of Bury. The satisfaction lasted for half an hour before I saw into the nothingness of things.
I'm very proud to be a professional tennis player. I'm really happy to be doing something that I love. With this comes responsibility, and I am honored when I am told that I have inspired someone to play tennis.
My mom told me to cover up my arms ever since I was little because I was muscular. She wanted me to be feminine, which did not come easy to me. My body was what it was, and I worked it to be a better tennis player.
I was being groomed to be a tennis player for sure. My grandparents and parents realised I had a natural athletic ability and if I was forced to do it, I could probably do well. But all I wanted was to play pretend.
I work differently. I enjoy creating a space around me and not getting too high or too low. But I am continuously looking to get better - not just as a tennis player but also as a person dealing with new experiences.
I am happy with being a tennis player and the choice I took when I was 12. But clearly, if I wouldn't have been a tennis player, I would have loved to be a soccer player. But again, I am happy with the choice I made.
As a tennis player, you have to get used to losing every week. Unless you win the tournament, you always go home as a loser. But you have to take the positive out of a defeat and go back to work. Improve to fail better.
I think my family needs me more than anybody else, and tennis doesn't need me anymore. I respect my wife a lot for taking all that in. She said, 'I didn't marry a tennis player; you'd retired.' Now it's time to do something else.
I was a very good tennis player in Ottawa, Canada - nationally ranked when I was, like, 13. Then I moved to Los Angeles when I was 15, and everyone in L.A. just killed me. I was pretty great in Canada. Not so much in Los Angeles.
I don't mind fans coming up in a friendly, respectful way. That's all part of the fun of being a top tennis player. But if people take pictures without permission, particularly if my children are in the shot, I feel uncomfortable.
I enjoyed the position I was in as a tennis player. I was to blame when I lost. I was to blame when I won. And I really like that, because I played soccer a lot too, and I couldn't stand it when I had to blame it on the goalkeeper.
I played tennis. My older brother, Joseph, was a cello player, and I played the cello, but he was better than me at the cello, and he was also a better tennis player than me, so I was always like, 'I wish there was something that only I did!'
If they had rankings in baseball, maybe I would have been able to do the math and figure out my chances of being a professional baseball player versus a tennis player. But that was the decision-maker for me, I just thought I was better in tennis.
A major final to a tennis player is sacred ground. Short of any type of serious injury - soft-tissue tears, serious orthopedic injuries or a major illness like throwing up, dehydration or cramping - you keep going, especially in the final of a Slam.
I knew I was the second-best tennis player in the state of Florida and No. 8 in the United States of America when I was 12 years old and I couldn't tell you what I was in baseball, but I liked my chances in tennis of getting a scholarship to college.
Team sports, there's always some kind of sacrifice happening... A team, if we lose, if Michael Jordan has a bad night, you hang it on him a little bit... but if you lose as a tennis player, you have no one to blame but yourself, and that's a different beast.
At the very beginning of my career, when I opened my business in Italy, I was also a ranked tennis player. I had won many tournaments. To be an athlete was my first choice. Second choice: designer. However! There was more money in being a designer at that time.
If I hadn't become a chef I would have loved to be a top tennis player, although I was never good enough so it wasn't really an option. But that has never dimmed my love of the game, which started in childhood when I was lucky enough to be a ball boy at Wimbledon.
That's my contribution - running a sound, healthy company that serves millions of customers well and employs hundreds of thousands of people. What else am I going to do? I'm not an artist. I'm not a writer. I'm not a musician. I'd love to be a tennis player or musician. I'm not.
Any quality player can adjust well to the different demands. It is like a good tennis player who is expected to adjust to the clay at the French Open, the grass at Wimbledon, the hard courts of the U.S. and the heat of the Australian Open. A professional is expected to do all that.
My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'
I was in a very multi-racial, multi-cultural schooling system. I had a really delightful childhood. I was a jock. I became a very competitive swimmer in Zimbabwe. I was a swimmer, a tennis player, a hockey player. Then, when I was 13, I joined a Children's Performing Arts workshop in Zimbabwe.
When I fight for a cause and I know it, I fight for it. I'm not scared to say something. I think some tennis player, maybe they're a bit scared, whatever is the reason. Definitely, some athletes, they fight for big cause. They speak it loud. I think it's great. It's great for sport. It's great for life.
As tennis players, we work and we sacrifice many things. To lose, that's not a happy thing - I mean sure, I was disappointed. You have to come back strong. But to win the last point in a grand slam tournament, that's the most beautiful and most satisfying feeling you can get as a tennis player. It's worth it.
No tennis player is perfect. Even if you're world #1, I don't think, you still have things to improve on, and I'm not even close to that. So I am going to have weaknesses in my game; I am going to have strengths in my game, but I still have time to develop a lot of things, hopefully, and we'll see how it goes.
That $27,000 that a young player will now get just for making the main draw at the Australian Open is huge. It can set them up for a couple of months which at that level you really do need that kind of help. It sounds like a lot of money, but when you're travelling the world trying to make it as a tennis player, it doesn't last long.
Have I ever pretended to be something? I think back in college I think I might have told a girl that I was a professional tennis player once. And then, of course, she had never heard of me so I had to dig deeper. 'I'm just sort of on the playing satellites. You know, I'm kind of working my way up. I'm not ranked in the top 100 or anything.'