Such are the changes that have taken place over the past 30 years. As teenagers, my friends and I didn’t feel we were living in prehistoric times – we may not have had email, mobiles or even faxes, but we had telephones in every home. We also had television, the cultural development that frightened our parents and made them think we’d all end up with square eyes. And it was thanks to television that my love affair with Wimbledon began.

I started playing tennis at about three, and at six I won my first tournament. So I was into tennis early, but in those days there was virtually no tennis on German television. We only had three channels – two national ones and a regional ‘third programme’. Football had its regular slot on Saturdays and in midweek, but tennis was hardly on TV at all. And then one day a tournament appeared: Wimbledon. The first Wimbledon I remember was when I was eight, and it was Björn Borg winning the first of his five titles. That was 1976, and it was the first time the term ‘Wimbledon’ entered my consciousness.

It was fascinating to me because they were playing on grass. Some of my courts were green with white lines – the indoor courts of TC Blau-Weiss Leimen (literally the ‘Blue & White Tennis Club of Leimen’), which were on a carpet. That’s where we played in the winter months, while in the summer we played on red clay. My father was an architect, in fact he designed the buildings for Blau-Weiss Leimen, as well as the national training centre next to the club which players like Steffi Graf and Anke Huber have used over the years. And what do people like him do with their kids at weekends? They go to the tennis club, so I learned to play. My sister Sabine – who’s four years older than me – became my first tennis coach.

I’ve been back to the TC Blau-Weiss a few times since. Nothing has changed; it’s still exactly the same. I don’t really mind that – it’s a small clay court club that serves its purpose. I feel it was an important part of my life, it gave me a great foundation away from the glitz and glamour, and it can happily remain the same. What I find sad is the fact that the national tennis centre next door hasn’t changed; it even has the same coaches that were there 25 years ago. That shows where the DTB, the German tennis federation, is going wrong. We’re not moving with the times, the understanding about how professional tennis is now played hasn’t arrived in Germany yet.

If you’ve followed my career, you’ll know the name ‘Leimen’, but this isn’t some regional metropolis. Leimen is a sleepy, semi-industrial town, and when I was growing up it had less than 20,000 inhabitants. The nearest centre is Heidelberg, seven kilometres away, or a 20-minute bus ride. I’d go there with my friends on a Saturday night or with my mother if I needed some clothes. For this size of town there could easily have been no tennis centre at all, or perhaps just a small club with two or three clay courts that you could use for about seven months of the year until the first frosts came. So to have a club with indoor courts next door was a stroke of luck for me.

Being a tennis fan, Wimbledon as the only televised tournament was very important, and my fascination with grass grew with it. Just to practise on it once, or play a match on it once, became one of my goals. There was only one grass court in the whole of Germany, in Grünwald, a suburb of Munich, but it was privately owned by a family so no-one could play there.

In retrospect, the work I did in the winter on the indoor courts laid the foundations for my game on grass. The indoor surface was a pile carpet; you play on it wearing tennis shoes that have totally flat soles, and it was very quick. The game you have to play on that kind of carpet is very similar to the game played on grass at that time – you had to serve and volley, the return was very important, and basically the first shot is the one that counts. The bounce was fairly low, and there weren’t many long rallies. Grass is softer than carpet, but the movement and playing style were very similar. So although I had no idea what playing on grass was like, what I watched on TV from Wimbledon was very much the same game I played indoors in Leimen.

The one thing they didn’t seem to do at Wimbledon was dive, and I did dive. No-one taught me, I just did it. You had to do it well, because on a carpet court you could easily burn your knees. I did it very innocently. I guess people looked at me and saw a ‘never say die’ attitude, but I wasn’t aware of that. It was just a quick and instinctive reaction on my part – if I couldn’t get to the ball using my feet, I instinctively dived. It wasn’t something I thought about, though obviously it gives you great satisfaction afterwards. The roll after the dive was also something I just developed – I played a lot of football, I was a good goalkeeper, so the roll came very naturally to me. My coach at the time, Boris Breskvar, later introduced tennis practice with soft mats, so people could learn to dive like me, but he never did that when I was learning.

Breskvar was an interesting character, and there are echoes of him in my life today coaching Novak Djokovic. He came from Slovenia, which was then part of Yugoslavia, and he had a passion for tennis. He later wrote a book about the way he coached, which a lot of national tennis associations could learn from today. He was more interested in getting the mentality right than focusing on strokes. He had a passion for winning and for competing, whether it was tennis, football, basketball or some other sport. It wasn’t about the perfect forehand but about the physical and mental sides, and that made a difference in my professional life. He was all for playing eight hours a day, just to compete. The atmosphere in his training centres in the afternoon was great – there were lots of people playing, there was action, there was noise; it wasn’t just hitting the ball, it was loud, it was passionate, and everyone loved it and wanted to come back the next day.