“Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner.”
“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”
“Life is like a tennis game. You can't win without serving.”
“In America you're conditioned to regard everything as a contest. You have to make the Ten Best Dressed List, win this, win that. It drives me nuts sometimes. Who cares, for Christ's sake?”
“It is not just the more talented player who wins. Some players may try a little harder.”
“Martina's like the old Green Bay Packers. You know exactly what she's going to do, but there isn't a thing you can do about it.”
“If I didn't play tennis I probably would have to see a psychiatrist.”
“There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.”
“I don't want to be remembered for my tennis accomplishments. That's no contribution to society. [Tennis] was purely selfish; that was for me.”
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