The first time at age 5 and a half, when I took a racket in my hands and my father fed me some balls, I made 50 backhands in a row - didn't miss a single one.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My serve and my forehand I pretty much always had, but my backhand was a made backhand. I worked on it for years.
I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.
Basically I started playing double handed on both my forehand and backhand side because my first racket was very heavy.
I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn't do only tennis.
I struggled quite a long time with my backhand, which was one of my best weapons before my surgery. It took me a long time until I regained full confidence in it again and only tried to keep the ball in play at the start of the '09 season.
I was 11 years old and have the same curveball I have now. So I was literally striking everybody out. I always threw hard, and I was bigger than all the kids, so I would throw hard and throw that curveball, and no one could hit me.
My dad's a scratch golfer and I've got the knack of seeing something and then replicating it. I saw my dad swing a club and I worked out how to do the same thing. My backswing and follow-through have been basically the same since I was two.
It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
I started playing golf at about four years old.
I started tennis around age 2.