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I go from being not known to being so known in the tennis world, in Canada in general. It's going to be a little bit of a change to me. I'm going to have to adapt. But that doesn't change things. I still have to work really hard every day.
There are still going to be great players that are baseliners. That's the way tennis - courts, balls, everything - has shifted. But everyone has to find their own way to win. Not everyone can run around the baseline for five hours. I can't.
Sometimes you're talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.
Nothing against the Olympics. I played in 2012 and it was an incredible experience. It's different for tennis players than for swimmers and track and field athletes. That's the pinnacle of their sport and not so much the pinnacle of tennis.
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?'
It was okay for Wayne Gretzky's dad, for instance, to give him a hockey stick, or Joe Montana's dad to give him a football, or Larry Bird's dad to give him a basketball, but it wasn't okay for Gloria Connors to give her son a tennis racquet.
One of the thrills of playing at the top tennis centres of the world is to see the Indian flag go up whenever I'm participating in these events. That's enough motivation for any Indian who has the opportunity to perform at these tournaments.
I really like the smell of the tennis balls, the new ones. I don't need to do it, but it's just my habit, what I do on the court when we change for the new tennis balls. I just smell them. Maybe it's for luck. I've been doing it all my life.
My father used to play ice hockey, though not at a high level, and my mother wasn't involved in sport at all, but they were keen that we played some sort of sport. They chose tennis because they thought it was a good sport for girls to play.
I look at our sport as the same as tennis. Male and female tennis is very, very different. The men's is more quick and powerful, and the women's is more about finesse and has more rallies - and that's the same with men's and women's football.
The kids know what I'm doing when I exercise, and that's powerful. So don't just tell your kids to go play outside. Take a moment off your computer, put on your tennis shoes, hop outside and help them start their game and run off some energy.
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!'
Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either.
It was brilliant in LA. The kids were young enough for it not to disturb their education and it was an incredibly healthy lifestyle. The weather's so good that you're up every morning, walking in the canyons, playing tennis three times a week.
My parents wanted me and my siblings to practice some sports outside school. And since we lived next to a tennis club, we decided to play tennis. I didn't have an idol, so to speak, but I always enjoyed watching Pete Sampras and Alex Corretja.
If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life, and there's going to be a life after tennis that's a lot longer than your tennis life.
I really try not to read the tennis articles, because a lot of times they're guessing at how a player is feeling, and I like to keep myself kind of open minded about how I'm feeling, rather than have someone else explain to me what's going on.
Under a pulsating full moon, the gussied-up Billie Jean King National Tennis Center seems much softer and prettier at night, with the fountains bubbling and fans without tickets to the big stadium sitting in the plaza and watching a big screen.
My parents had the plan for my life from the moment my mother tested positive with me. Looking back now, I'd say the hard turn for me was when I left school after the eighth grade to play tennis full time and study some with a travelling tutor.
Comedy prepared me for drama. There are a couple techniques you can think of. One of my acting teachers said that comedy is like ping-pong, and drama is tennis. You take things a bit slower, so you do get to breathe more and take some more time.
We share the USTA's vision to promote and expand the game of tennis. I have been playing the game since I was 6 years old with my dad and five brothers, so I know firsthand how it teaches life lessons: integrity, dedication, and competitiveness.
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.
When I'm playing well because of my serve and trying to keep points shorter, I don't need to worry about my opponent. All I need to do is focus on myself and have them adjust to me rather than me adjust to them. That's when I play my best tennis.
I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle.
I never expected i, in the first place, when I started playing tennis, that I would ever carry the flag into the Olympic Stadium for an Olympic Games... So for me that was a surprise and a huge honor in my life to be able to represent Switzerland.
Teach a child to play solitaire, and she'll be able to entertain herself when there's no one around. Teach her tennis, and she'll know what to do when she's on a court. But raise her to feel comfortable in nature, and the whole planet is her home.
Tennis can be a grind and there's always the danger of going stale if you think about it too much. You can get embittered if you train too hard and have nothing else on your mind. You have to be able to relax between matches and between tournaments.
I think tennis is very different than most of the other sports when you have the opportunity to go pro. For me, it was pretty simple. Tennis was always an individual sport, and your direct results determined where you could go and what you could do.
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.
When you become a top player, you think that nothing else and nobody else matters. You can tell everybody on earth, 'Listen, I'm playing tennis, I don't have time for you. I'm in the semifinals of the U.S. Open, screw everybody and everything else.'
Tennis was always sort of a - a learning. It was a vehicle for me to discover a lot about myself. And the things that I sort of discovered at times I not only didn't want to see it for myself but I certainly didn't want millions of people to see it.
Sometimes you have a bad day, and you're like, 'I'm over this, and I just want to play tennis,' or do another sport that doesn't require any other variables, but then you have a good day, and it's like, it's amazing, and the success makes up for it.
I think tennis is going towards the direction of powerful, hard hitters, and that's what us tall people are. We are trying to play very aggressive; we're trying to make a lot of winners, and, I mean, I don't know. That's what tall players kind of do.
I gave up tennis to study, but not before it had shown me how to focus and concentrate. It taught me self-discipline: I was playing four or five hours a day and doing five-mile runs. When I stopped, my energy had to be channelled into something else.
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.
My father actually moved out from Chicago just so he could play tennis 365 days a year, so it was - it was a place we played every day. We played before school. We played after school. We woke up. We played tennis. We brushed our teeth in that order.
I remember when I first started playing tennis, it was always my sister dressing me. She wanted me to look good. And then it really became a routine for me. It doesn't consume too much of my day, but it's something I always pay conscious attention to.
I played tennis a lot when I had the skull injury. For the first two months of my preparation, it was all I could do. It is a great sport for me because it helps my hand-eye coordination, and you need quick feet, which is a good exercise for a keeper.
I just wanted to play tennis. I started because I wanted to pick up another sport and then as I was slowly getting better I wanted to see how far I can go but I always wanted to be myself. I wanted to be original. I didn't want to copy anybody's style.
You will never have great tennis champions from England because of the cold and dark, but most of all because people only care about the sport for two weeks a year, and then they're on to something else. There's just not a great love of the sport there.
My mom played tennis for, like, six hours a day and went to college on a tennis scholarship, because that was the way she could go to school. So they instilled in me the idea that you have to work hard for the things you want in life and never complain.
If I need a pair of tennis shorts, I'll buy them online. I don't really care. Not going to go and try on a pair and see how my bum looks. Who cares? But for things that you care about - I mean, a jacket and a pair of trousers, you've got to try them on.
It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.
Tennis is a game of angles. You never have time to figure the angles. It's practiced. It's so practiced that it becomes an instinct. You just know where to put the ball. You just feel it. It has been computed into your brain so many times it is there.
In football, there were drinks available everywhere you looked. On a golf tournament, you could find one free anywhere you wanted it. In tennis and NBA basketball, everybody had a hospitality suite, and so you could go there and load up if you wanted to.
Normal adults can doodle, amble, and drift with no need to assess risk, since there is normally no risk at all. Jazz improvisation seems less subject to standards of risk than surgery, and less than much formal athletic performance, as in a tennis match.
I have found - and tennis may be the greatest manifestation of it - Americans have become more international in taste. Remember the old axiom that you have to have American players for Americans to be interested? And in tennis, it's just not true anymore.
In the '70s, Florida-style golf communities started to be built for America's baby-boomers who were doing well and taking up the game but couldn't get into exclusive golf and tennis clubs and were looking for a nice place to live and raise their families.
I used to go swimming and passed the tennis courts every day, and that's how it started. My mum said, 'Why don't you play tennis in your summer holidays because you have nothing to do except swim for an hour or whatever?,' and that's how I started playing.
In tennis, a lot of parents are accused of driving their kids into tennis. I would say I'm the opposite: I drove my parents into it. They didn't take it that seriously until I was about 11 or 12 years old, when they realised I had an opportunity to go pro.