I can't say that I was my happiest on court, but I felt completely free. Free from family obligations, free from my own torment. In a real sense I was a different person. It was a place where I could not tolerate the idea of being beaten.
It's difficult for most people to imagine the creative process in tennis. Seemingly it's just an athletic matter of hitting the ball consistently well within the boundaries of the court. That analysis is just as specious as thinking that the difficulty in portraying King Lear on stage is learning all the lines.
Speed in tennis is a strange mixture of intuition, guesswork, footwork, and hair-trigger reflexes. Many of the players famed for quickness on the court would finish last in a field of schoolgirls.
Being beaten in tennis is not the same as being beaten in football. Tennis is one-to-one combat: you physically, mentally and emotionally beat the other guy. When you've done that for 15 years it creates a lot of resentment.
