Tennis Quotes
-
Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater. When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It's the crisis of my life.
-
There was never anything I wanted to do more than play tennis. Never once walked out there and thought, 'I wish I was doing something else.' Not once.
-
Seeing the intensity and power she brings to the game, it's hard to imagine her being anything but single-minded in pursuing tennis. But Serena Williams has other passions, too. In fact, there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day, week or month for one of the world's most gifted athletes to chase her many interests.
-
I started in a very small tennis club in a South American country where I never thought about becoming the best tennis player.
-
I am very blessed to be able to play tennis, the sport that I love and very grateful for the opportunities to play in the finals of big events, when the season starts you are on the roll constantly and obliged to be committed to daily routines on and off the court.
-
Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?
-
My game is a lot about footwork. If I move well, I play well.
-
Playing tennis, I didn't tie in my self-worth into winning or losing matches.
-
Golf can be tougher than tennis when things go wrong, because you can't explain things by saying that your opponent played better than you. It's a cruel sport in that way.
-
It's very expensive to be a professional tennis player with all the travel and the flights and the hotels and everything.
-
Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn't the real thing. If you weren't playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside.
-
While I'm more of a soccer and tennis fan myself, I still enjoying catching some football games when I get the chance.
-
I did a really good job of sticking to the tennis court.
-
I knew I was the second-best tennis player in the state of Florida and No. 8 in the United States of America when I was 12 years old and I couldn't tell you what I was in baseball, but I liked my chances in tennis of getting a scholarship to college.
-
I don't think about tennis 24/7. I enjoy time on the lake at my Florida home and just being lazy on the sofa.
-
I loved to play, I was competitive, I wanted to win, that was all I knew. In the first few years tennis is a game. Later, it becomes a job.
-
I don't want to live and die with every point that's being played out there now. I'm going to let my coach live and die with every point.
-
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.
-
Tennis was never work for me, tennis was fun. And the tougher the battle and the longer the match, the more fun I had.
-
I think the whole boycott thing was a bit too much. It's because we're accomplished so much in women's tennis in the last two, three years. We deserve something better.
-
Some folks call tennis a rich people's sport or a white person's game. I guess I started too early because I just thought it was something fun to do. Later, I discovered there was a lot of work to being good in tennis. You've got to make a lot of sacrifices and spend a lot of time if you really want to achieve with this sport, or in any sport, or in anything truly worthwhile.
-
Now I do bowling, golf, and tennis. I want to be a good bowler.
-
With all the injury problems we have in men's tennis at the moment, I'm happy to still be standing.
-
The key to the match might have been his serving. Maybe I should have concentrated harder on watching them go by me, I don't know.
