Ninety percent of my game is mental. It's my concentration that has gotten me this far.
If you're a champion, you have to have it in your heart.
Training the body to obey the mind as I have done differs from the more conventional method of getting the mind to obey the body.
To be a tennis champion, you have to be inflexible. You have to be stubborn. You have to be arrogant. You have to be selfish and self-absorbed. Kind of tunnel vision almost.
If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment.
When I was younger, I was a robot. Wind her up and she plays tennis.
Ninety percent of my game is mental. It's my concentration that has gotten me this far. I won't even call a friend on the day of a match. I'm scared of disrupting my concentration. I don't allow any competition with tennis.
In tennis, at the end of the day you're a winner or a loser. You know exactly where you stand... I don't need that anymore. I don't need my happiness, my well-being, to be based on winning and losing.
Of all my achievements in tennis, I'm probably as proud of my record on clay courts as any of my Wimbledon, U.S. Open or French singles titles.
