Remember the previous year against Bill Scanlon? – I’d just lost the third set on the tiebreak, but I’d broken early in the fourth when my ankle went. Well I broke Mayotte early in the fourth, so I’m leading 2-1 and serving. And what happens? – I twist the exact same ankle as I twisted a year before on the exact same move. I served, came into the net, and turned the ankle doing my split step. I was on the floor in pain, I was frustrated, and at that moment I’d had enough. I looked up to Ţiriac and Bosch and signalled with my hands that it was over – that I wanted to shake hands and get out of there.
We then enter a scarcely credible dream sequence. Fortunately for me, Mayotte is too far away from the net. If he’d have been at the net I would have shaken hands for sure, but he’s at the baseline. I look at the umpire, and spread my hands in the gesture that means it’s over, but the umpire is a little slow to be certain what I’m saying. The next thing I hear is Ţiriac at the side of the court screaming at me – in German, because if he’d done it in English I could have been penalised for being coached – ‘take an injury timeout, take an injury timeout!’
I’m still in shock and frustrated so I look at him and signal ‘Enough, I want to quit’.
Mayotte walks to the net.
‘Take a timeout!’ screams Ţiriac again. And in a split second, I process what Ion is saying. So I clarify to the umpire that what I’m signalling is that I want to take an injury timeout. Mayotte then arrives at the net – if he had got there a moment earlier the match would be over. As it is, the trainer is called. The trainer, Bill Norris who later became a good friend, takes an age to reach the court, and in the time I’m waiting, my emotions calm down. Bill checks the ankle and says nothing was broken – it’s swollen but not broken. He tapes it and gives me anti-inflammatories which he warns me won’t kick in for another 20 minutes.
From that point I relaxed. I thought I’d lost the match but miraculously I was still in it. I won the fourth set on the tiebreak, and then with the anti-inflammatories kicking in I was relaxed and pain-free in the fifth set. And poor old Tim felt the tension of feeling he should have won the match – he didn’t know how badly injured I was, whether I was faking it, and the rest of the match was mine (I took the fifth set 6-2). He never held it against me, it was just part of the game. And I was too young for gamesmanship – I had a genuinely swollen ankle.
After that, I had the feeling I’d come back from the dead. What was there to lose now? I was in the quarter-finals and I was playing my old practice partner and friend Henri Leconte. So on my day off between the Mayotte and Leconte matches, I didn’t practice, I just had the ankle massaged and iced. There was a different energy about me now – having expected to lose the last two or three matches, I suddenly felt confident.
I’d got to know Leconte as a member of the group of players Ţiriac managed. On his day, Henri was unbeatable, but if you could get into his mind, the more predictable he became and the more fragile. We were proper hitting partners in those days, we spent a lot of time together, and I knew that I was never the best in practice. I needed the match atmosphere, while Henri was the opposite – you couldn’t touch him in practice, so I always felt that if I lost a practice set to him 6-4 I was in good shape. We knew each other’s psyches and weaknesses, and I knew what he didn’t like better than he knew what I didn’t like; I had a stronger mind. His biggest weakness was that he wasn’t a competitor – he was a shotmaker: he played beautiful tennis for the spectators, he played to hit that one incredible shot off the back of five bad shots, whereas I felt I could compete with anybody.
The nature of a tournament format suits the competitor more than the shotmaker, and the further in I progressed the more aware I became that we were in a different tournament emotionally. There were fewer players around, every match was on Centre or No. 1 Court, it was quieter in the locker room, everyone was more careful, there were more media obligations – it was just a much bigger deal, every match was a final from the quarters onwards. I felt this was playing to my strengths, along with the scheduling and another twist of fate.
We were scheduled second match on Centre Court after the eagerly awaited match between the defending champion John McEnroe and the big-serving South African Kevin Curren (he played under the US flag due to issues with the apartheid regime in South Africa). McEnroe was the big favourite, but Curren beat him 6-2, 6-2, 6-4, and as I took in the enormity of the result, I thought ‘Hmm, so the defending champion, somebody no-one wants to play, the champion in the last two years, is out. Let me think about this.’ It was the first time I thought I might win the tournament.
Yet I didn’t let it affect me as I walked out to play Leconte – I had learned my lesson from the way my mind wandered against Pfister in the first round. The place was still settling down after Curren’s amazing win, but for some reason that suited me. The atmosphere is often a bit flat for the start of the second match, but I preferred playing second – I was emotionally, physically and spiritually in the match. If I played the first match, I never knew whether I’d properly arrived – occasionally I was too fresh, my body and soul weren’t quite there, so playing Leconte after a shock result suited me fine. I lost the second set on the tiebreak, but I started to serve really well in the third and fourth sets. When I broke him in the third set I started to get the taste of blood – that sense of not being far away from victory. I still had to concentrate on my serve but subconsciously and emotionally I could taste the victory, and I beat him in four sets.
That made me the first German semi-finalist since Wilhelm Bungert in 1967 and everyone was now waking up to the fact that I might win the title. Fortunately my semi-final opponent Anders Järryd was not John McEnroe. He was good, he was No. 1 in doubles and sixth in singles, but he was no McEnroe or Connors. I wasn’t the favourite but people were saying I could win this match.
Again, the scheduling and other results helped me. Järryd and I were scheduled second after the Curren-Connors match, and after Connors had lost 6-1, 6-1, 6-2, I went out thinking ‘McEnroe’s out, Connors is now out, no-one’s left who has won a Grand Slam singles title – this is unbelievable.’ I felt the circle coming round. And perhaps as a result, I started my own match too carefully. Anders killed me in the first set, 6-2. In the second set he had lots of chances, he had a great return against my serve, and he was close to going two sets up. So I did something different – for the first time that Wimbledon I stayed back after my second serve. Nobody thought I could play from the back of the court, but I could, and that threw him off. He had a set point for a two-sets lead, but I won the tiebreak, and then I felt in control. I knew I couldn’t just serve and volley, I had to mix it up and play more clever tennis and slice my backhand more. I think he was completely taken aback by that – he didn’t think I had it in me. I also think the emotional pressure of a Wimbledon semi-final got to him more than me.
People have asked me over the years whether I was ever seized by the thought that this was little me, the teenager who seven months earlier had been questioning whether he would make it as a professional, in a schoolboy-daydream scenario of being in the final of Wimbledon. The answer is no. The only time it happened was in the first set of my first match against Hank Pfister, and it never came back.
After the third set the match was called off because of rain or darkness, but I felt I could handle the situation when we resumed on Saturday. The break in proceedings also helped manage the emotions of a Wimbedon final at the tender age of 17.
The fact that my semi was carried over to Saturday meant I didn’t have time to think too long about the final. I played the closing set of the Järryd match on Saturday lunchtime, which was essentially my pre-final practice; this meant I didn’t have time for all the interviews, and I think it backfired on Kevin that he had the whole day off to reflect on the occasion. He had time to think about his first major final but for much of that time he didn’t know who he’d be playing – I think it worked in my favour.
On the Saturday night, we went to our usual restaurant, San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, and I had the same meal as I had every night – T-bone steak, pasta, tomato and mozzarella, with lemon sorbet for dessert, only water to drink, and no espresso. When we got back to the Gloucester, I had my usual hot bath, and I suddenly started to daydream about the final. I was imagining holding up the trophy. It was so clear in my head. It wasn’t a conscious effort to picture what I wanted to happen, it was a dream with my eyes open – I even had a crystal clear picture of match point: that I won the match with an unreturnable serve. And then I slept really well.
I had the same warm-up partner for the semis and final, Pavel Slozil. He hit with me on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so I didn’t have to get used to a new partner. The final was at 2pm, so we hit at noon, as two hours before the match was enough for me. We hit for 35–40 minutes, it was sunny, I felt good about being there, and I think that made a difference. I was excited to be there, whereas I felt Kevin seemed intimidated. He was 27, I was 17, so I felt I’d have more Grand Slam finals, whereas it had taken him a long time to reach his first final, so there was more pressure on him. There was also a clash of styles – I never liked to play against good returners but I was fine against a big serve; Kevin had a big serve but didn’t have a good return. It meant that when I was comfortable holding my serve, I could concentrate on trying to break his serve. So I wasn’t afraid in the final, especially when a couple of little omens fell in my favour.
The British have this slightly cheeky view of the Germans – that at holiday resorts the Germans get up early to drape their towels over the best sun loungers in order to reserve them for that day’s sunbathing. It’s not really fair, but something I did that day played right into this stereotype. I wanted the first chair, the one nearest the Royal Box, because I’d been sitting on that chair in all my Centre Court matches, so it became a matter of superstition. But Kevin had been sitting on that chair too, so who would get it? These days there’s a convention at most tournaments that the lower ranked player walks out first, but not at Wimbledon; in fact before the 2014 final I told Novak Djokovic to ‘get that first chair, make sure you go out there first’. So back in 1985, I sprinted ahead when we walked out onto the grass, a bit like Nadal does after the coin toss today. That was my first victory – I got the chair I’d wanted, and that felt important.