[0:00]People keep asking me what it feels like to be 66. Honestly, it feels like any other age. You wake up, you think about what you could have done better, and you move on. That part never changes. Someone asked me recently which rivals gave me the most trouble. I told them I would have to think about it. That was not entirely true. I did not have to think about it at all. Those names have been sitting in my head for decades. I want to be clear about something before we we go further. When I say tough, I do not mean the players I admired most. I mean the players who forced me to become someone different. The ones who found something broken in my game and pressed on it until I fixed it. There were six of them. Some you will expect. One or two might surprise you. Let me start at the beginning.
[1:02]Bjorn retired before I fully figured him out. That is the most frustrating sentence I can say about anyone on this list. When I was coming up, Borg was not just a player, he was the standard, the way he moved, the way he constructed points from the baseline, the way he never seemed to feel pressure the way the rest of us did, and I watched him and thought that is the kind of player I want to be. Quiet, efficient, impossible to rattle. Then I played him. The 1981 French Open final was my first Grand Slam final. I was young, I was ready and I genuinely believed I had a chance. What I did not understand yet was that Borg did not beat you with power, he beat you with patience. He would slow everything down, change the pace just enough, feed you balls that felt comfortable until suddenly they were not. You would find yourself making errors and not quite understand why. I won two sets that day, which means I also lost three. The fifth set was not particularly close. What stayed with me was not the result, it was the feeling of being outthought by someone who appeared to be doing very little. That lesson took me years to fully understand, and then he was gone. Retired the following year, no rematch, no chance to apply what I had learned. He retired before I got my answer, very inconsiderate of him if you ask me.
[2:42]Jimmy won our first eight matches. I did not win a single set. Let that sit for a moment. People forget that part. They remember the rivalry, the tension, the fact that I eventually turned it around. What they tend to skip over is how long it took and how completely he owned me in the beginning. Jimmy did not play pretty tennis. He played tennis that was almost impossible to deal with. Every ball came back. Every ball came back harder than you sent it. And he did it with this energy that felt almost personal, like beating you was was not just a job, but something he genuinely enjoyed. Jimmy once said after one of our matches, nobody likes to see the ball coming back at you faster than you deliver it. He was talking about me. But for years, that sentence described exactly what it felt like to play him. The US Open was the worst of it. He beat me in the final two years in a row. Flushing Meadows felt like his living room and I was the guest who was not welcome. The crowd loved him. He fed off that. The more noise there was, the better he played. I did not have that relationship with crowds, not then, anyway. What Jimmy forced me to do was move faster. I had to get around the ball quicker, take it earlier, stop giving him time to set up. Once I did that, the results started to change. But it took longer than it should have. After tennis, we both went into coaching. We did not become close. We were professionals, that was enough.
[4:34]John is the player I learned the most from. I want to be careful how I say that because he will probably find a way to be annoyed by it. John was different from everyone else on this list. Connors fought you, Borg outlasted you. McEnroe confused you. His serve came from angles that should not have been possible. His volleys were placed in spaces you were not standing in. And he moved through a match like he was having a conversation with the court that nobody else could hear. Playing him was like trying to solve a problem that kept changing its own rules. For most of 1984, he was the best player in the world. And I mean that in the way that actually hurts to say. He was better than me, not slightly, clearly. Then came the French Open final. He was leading by two sets. People have described that moment as me coming back from the dead. I prefer a different version. I was never dead. I was waiting. I had been in better physical condition than him for months. I knew that if the match went long enough, that would matter. In the third set, it started to matter. By the fifth, it mattered completely. After the match, I said that John was playing great in the first two sets, that he was hitting corners and lines all the time, and then I think he got a little tired. That was accurate. What I did not add was that I had spent the previous several months making sure exactly that would happen. That loss changed things for both of us in opposite directions. John never won the French Open. I had finally won a Grand Slam. The scoreboard does not care about narratives, but sometimes the timing of things tells its own story. What John exposed in my game was simple. My net game was not good enough. My second serve was a problem. My conditioning before 1984 was not where it needed to be. He did not tell me any of this directly. He showed me by winning. So I hired Tony Roche. I brought in a nutritionist. I changed how I trained completely. There is also the personal side of things. John did not like me. He has said so publicly many times.
[7:14]He never invited me to play on the senior tour. When someone asked me about this once, my answer was simple. He does not have to like me. I won more matches than he did, and someone once told me that John said he did not know I had a sense of humor. I told them I bought one on the way here. I think that ended the conversation. John and I never became friends. Honestly, I think we both preferred it that way. Cleaner.
[7:43]Mats was my neighbor in Greenwich, Connecticut. We had dinner together, we played golf together. Our families knew each other. And then we would walk onto a tennis court and try to destroy each other for five hours. That is not a contradiction. That is just how it was. Playing Mats was unlike playing anyone else on this list because he played the same game I played, baseline, heavy top spin, relentless consistency. When you play someone with a completely different style, you have a clear problem to solve. When you play someone who mirrors you, the problem is harder to name. You are essentially arguing with yourself. What what made Mats genuinely dangerous was not his power. It was his patience and his intelligence. He would wait and wait and when he finally moved, it was it was exactly the right moment. In 1988, at the US Open, he beat me in a final that lasted nearly five hours. That was the longest final in the history of that tournament. He did not beat me with anything spectacular. He beat me with something worse. He outthought me. He mixed in a few unexpected approaches to the net at exactly the moments I was not ready for them. Small adjustments, big consequences. That loss ended my consecutive weeks at number one. Over three years of holding that ranking gone in one afternoon. But I will tell you something I do not say often. The year before in the same final, I beat him. I was sick with the flu that entire week. I could barely breathe between points. That victory felt better than most of my healthy ones. Not because of what it proved about me, but because of what it said about him. You had to be at your absolute best just to stay ahead of Mats. Even when your absolute best involved a fever. Mats is still one of my closest friends from that era. Tennis and friendship were always separate things. For us at least that worked perfectly.
[10:15]The first time Boris served at me on grass, I thought something was wrong with my eyes. The ball just appeared on my side of the net. No warning, no readable motion. Just suddenly there, moving faster than seemed reasonable for for a human being to produce. Boris was 17 when he won his first Wimbledon. 17. I remember thinking it was some kind of accident. Then he won it again the following year. At that point, I stopped calling it an accident. Here is the part that still bothers me when I think about it. Overall, across our entire careers, I had a winning record against Boris. On most surfaces, on most occasions, I was the more consistent player. But every time we met in a Grand Slam final, he won. Every single time. You tell me what that means. I I am still not entirely sure myself. The 1986 Wimbledon final was the closest I ever came to winning that title. I had worked specifically for that tournament. I had changed my preparation, adjusted my serve, spent weeks on grass, trying to build something that could compete on that surface. And Boris walked out and dismantled it in straight sets. His serve that day was simply not something I had an answer for. What I eventually accepted was that on grass, against Boris, I was solving the wrong problem. I kept trying to improve my own game when the the real issue was that his game on that surface was something close to unplayable on its best days. On indoor carpet, the story was completely different. In 1986, I beat him twice in the same year without losing a set. On carpet, I was the one with the answers. On his grass, he was someone else entirely. Boris was the reason I never won Wimbledon. I can say that plainly. No drama attached.
[12:33]Stefan is the only person on this list who leads our head to head. I want to get that out of the way immediately before someone else brings it up. Stefan played a style that was almost designed to make my life difficult. Serve and volley, executed at the highest possible level. He would serve, move forward and be at the net before I had finished processing the return. There was no time to build anything, no rally to settle into. Every point started with me already under pressure. The match that I think about most happened in 1985 in Australia. I was number one in the world. I had won 31 consecutive matches going into that semifinal. Stefan was 18 years old and ranked sixth. He did not appear to be aware of any of those facts. He played with a freedom that I found genuinely irritating because it was the kind of freedom that is very difficult to prepare for. You cannot study someone out of that. The match went to five sets and lasted two days because of rain interruptions. He won. I was not gracious about it afterward. I I said some things about the tournament that I probably should not have said. But I was frustrated. Losing to an 18-year-old when you are the number one player in the world has that effect. What Stefan took from me in those matches was time. My entire game was built around having enough time to set up, to dictate, to impose my rhythm and he he simply did not give me that. Every time I thought I had found a solution, he adjusted. There is one small consolation. In 1991, also in Australia, I beat him from two match points down in the semifinal. That one I remember clearly. Not because of what I did right, but because of how close I came to not doing it at all. He beat me often. He always did it quietly, politely, with that calm Swedish expression. Stefan would defeat you and then apologize with his eyes. Very Swedish indeed.
[15:00]Six names, six different problems, six reasons I had to become someone better than I already was. Bjorn taught me that patience is a weapon. Jimmy taught me that speed is not optional. John taught me that talent alone is never enough, and that fitness can outlast genius. Mats taught me that someone who thinks clearly will eventually beat someone who simply hits hard. Boris taught me to accept what you cannot change and focus on what you can. Stefan taught me that time is the most valuable thing on a tennis court, and that if you let someone take it from you, you have already lost the point. People ask me which one was the toughest. I always give them the same answer. The next one. Because the next one is always the one you have not solved yet. That is true in tennis. I suspect it is true in most things we are doing.
