I think the passion that Breskvar had is the reason why so many ex-Yugoslavians are so good at sports. There’s a great passion for sport, understanding of sport, in that part of Europe – and it extends to Bulgaria and Romania too. Physically they’re all great athletes, and they’re all fighters – Goran Ivanišević was a fighter, Marin Čilić is a fighter. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first real coach was an ex-Yugoslav and the player I’m coaching today is ex-Yugoslav. I’m comfortable with the mentality.

The biggest individual thing Breskvar did for me was to completely remodel my serve. One weekend, I must have been 10 or 11, he was really unhappy with my serve, and he said ‘You’re not going to break an egg with the serve you have,’ so we spent the weekend completely remodelling it. By Monday I couldn’t serve at all, but he told me to stick with it. I then figured out myself which position I had to adopt, what body shape, what rhythm, but in the early days it needed a lot of thought before I tossed the ball. It was that preparation and thinking time that led to the rocking motion that my serve became known for, and which people like Mansour Bahrami and Novak Djokovic imitate when they do their tennis player impressions. It came about by my thinking whether I was in the right place, and whether my feet and shoulders were right – there was a lot to think about until it became second nature.

I don’t need to say how important that weekend of remodelling was to my tennis career. My serve was the cornerstone of my game, and when it was working well, the rest of my game was on. At the end of 2014, at a press conference to announce the formation of a new five-man ATP advisory committee, John McEnroe said the three best serves in the history of tennis were mine, Goran’s and Pete Sampras’s. I think I broke a few eggs with the serve Boris Breskvar taught me.

My ambition to play on grass – if only just once – was realised when I was 14, and I took to it like a duck to water. I loved it! Yes, there were bad bounces, probably a lot more then than there are now. They say you have to be prepared for every fifth ball to do something strange – the courts I played on were so bad it was more like every third ball, and on some courts you never got the same bounce twice. But people don’t understand that a lot on grass has to do with your movement. That’s the key. The players who do well at Wimbledon obviously have to serve and return well, but above all they have to move well. And from the moment I first played on grass I felt comfortable moving on the surface.

The first time I played on grass was at a junior tournament in 1982 in Thames Ditton, a private club on the south-western edge of London. I was the best junior in Germany (in indoor tournaments I was already the men’s national champion), so I travelled with other top juniors, people like Tore Meinecke, Christian Schmidt, Eric Jelen and Charly Steeb, some of whom went on to have good professional careers. We weren’t staying in hotels, it was the YMCA or a Bed & Breakfast, but it felt cool because we were on tour as tennis players. I was very excited about playing on grass, I’d seen so many Wimbledon finals, I’d heard so many stories about it and I was keen to find out what it was like to play on.

We practised for a short time the day before our first matches, and I immediately fell in love with grass. From my first few steps on the court, it felt as if it was the only thing I’d done all my life. I never slid much on any surface, I liked to plant my feet firmly and get a good footing before hitting my shots, and that works well on grass. I had quite muscular legs, I could bend down and get low without crumbling – that’s also a secret on grass.

I won my first round, and that night I remember being so excited having played my first match on grass. I think I reached the semis in that tournament.

It wasn’t my first time in London. That came when I was 10, when the best under-12s from Germany (Udo Riglewski and I) played against the best under-12s from Great Britain (Richard Whichello and Jason Goodall). Don’t ask me about the result – the English don’t like being reminded about defeats to Germany! It was my first-ever plane trip, from Frankfurt to London Heathrow. I don’t remember much about London because we stayed in a cheap hotel and spent all the time playing tennis, but I do remember flying over the city and thinking how big it was, certainly compared with what I was used to.

My first time through the gates of Wimbledon came in 1983, when I played the junior tournament. I was 15, and we were staying in a Bed & Breakfast somewhere in London. The German national tennis squad had a bus, and all the juniors travelled in the bus to the ground, or we may even have taken the train part of the way. As I walked through the gates, I was struck by how green it was, and so white. I walked the grounds, taking in the flowers and the foliage on Centre Court. I thought it was so quiet – you have 100,000-or-so people around you, but it was still so quiet. Back in the day you had no mobile phones and no other technical gadgets, so it was nothing like now – it was almost an eerie feeling.

Even at 15 I was playing in the under-18s because I was good enough. But there was one guy who dominated the whole year, and I happened to draw him in the first round. I wasn’t seeded as I wasn’t playing that many tournaments (I was still at school), and this kid, Stefan Edberg, was 22 months older than me. I’d played him before but never beaten him – two years is a big age gap when you’re 15 and 17 – and he came to Wimbledon having just won the French Open junior title. He didn’t like having to face me, and I didn’t like having to face him, but 6-4, 6-4 later I was out and he went on to win the tournament. He went on to win all four junior Grand Slams that year, the only time that’s ever been done, so in retrospect it wasn’t a bad defeat.

As a first-round loser, I was only at Wimbledon for two or three days, but I was determined to see Centre Court. So at the end of one of the days, a group of us from the German team sneaked into one of the last matches in the evening. As I walked in, I remember thinking how beautiful it was, almost like walking into a church. I was really quiet and in awe of the place. This was the arena that had hosted so many great matches, many of which I’d seen on television, and I was finally there. I was almost lost for words. In real life it looked a little smaller than it does on TV – the camera angles make it look bigger, but it’s more intimate in real life.