Having won two Wimbledon titles at 18 – which, let’s face it, no-one had done before or has done since – it’s very easy to look back on my haul of three Wimbledon titles and six Slams in total as a bit of a disappointment. I share some of that disappointment, but I think you need to see the bigger picture. I reached six Wimbledon finals in seven years, and even in the three years after 1991 when I concentrated more on my private life I still reached one quarter-final and two semis. That’s not bad going.

The period 1988–91 was the peak of the Becker-Edberg rivalry. Stefan and I played three successive Wimbledon finals, and it should have been four but for Michael Stich hitting the form of his life and beating Edberg in the 1991 semi-finals (and even then Stefan didn’t lose his serve). It was also the peak of my career, though if you look carefully you see the signs of a young man still trying to make sense of the world and his own place in it.

Looking back, there were two themes running through this period – one to do with me, the other to do with the health of tennis in general.

The sport today is terrific. We have a great generation of players, but one of the things we’re missing is real tension between two characters in a top-level match. I think today’s tennis can be a little too politically correct. The guys at the top are all competitors, they don’t like losing any more than I did, but I wish we could see a little more of their rivalry and aggressiveness. I understand why they don’t show too much – it’s a family sport, kids are watching, and through their demeanour players have become household names and role models, unlike players such as McEnroe or Connors who may have been household names but weren’t held up as examples. But I find it sometimes a little too fake, because we all know how much they want to win. It would add an extra dimension to the game if we could see more of the honest competitiveness and the drive and desire to win.

My quarter-final against Pat Cash at Wimbledon in 1988 was an example of the kind of match we lack today. Pat was a very aggressive competitor, and so was I. He was an Australian tennis prodigy who started playing well in his mid-teens, he represented Australia in the Davis Cup very early, and he’d been a semi-finalist at Wimbledon in 1984, so it was a logical step for him to win Wimbledon. He did that in 1987. Everyone expected him to win a lot more, so in 1988 he was one of the top players – the defending champion, runner-up at the Australian Open a few months earlier, and member of the elite. Now he came up against this other young, aggressive competitor from Germany, one with a very different family background and very different upbringing, and a rival for the accolade of ‘the best on grass’. We’re really good friends now, but back in the day Pat was not a popular face in the locker room because of his brashness and cockiness. I didn’t care about that because I was similar, but you can see why our quarter-final was massively hyped – it was the meeting of the champions of the last three years who didn’t really like each other. He was 23, I was 20 and there were masses of teenagers in the crowd chanting our names.

The match was pretty one-sided, I beat him in straight sets, but that’s not what it’s remembered for. There was a little harmless incident in the second set which told the world about the ‘needle’ between us. By then I was a set and 4-1 up and he was upset about the way the match was going. I played a drop shot, he was physically very fit so he chased it down, but his momentum made him hit the net and roll over onto my side. I decided to have a bit of fun and roll over the net onto his side, and the crowd enjoyed it. I offered to shake hands with him as part of the fun, but he refused. At the next change of ends he muttered a few words that should not be repeated in polite society, words I told the press that he had taught me. And after the match he had this spiky bright red wig in the press conference. I think he was trying to get back at me.

After that we were proper rivals. When we played each other, it became one of those matches that we could do with seeing today – a match when two fiercely competitive guys go at each other not just during the match but before and after as well, creating a bit of a scene. It’s good for ratings and interest in tennis. That stayed with us throughout our careers. Fortunately, I was always able to answer him not verbally but with my results – I won all our three matches on grass and only lost to him once.

So why don’t players make more of their rivalry now? I’ll give you one example from my era that might explain it. Michael Stich and I didn’t particularly like each other, and we told the world about it. Like with Pat Cash, Michael and I are good friends now, but when we were rivals we were happy to admit that we weren’t friends. It meant we were asked about it every single time we played each other, which was not only very wearing, but it made life complicated because our wives and girlfriends at the time couldn’t get along either – that was almost the bigger problem for us. Yet the only reason we didn’t like each other was because we didn’t know each other and saw each other only as competitors and rivals. Eventually I told the media, ‘Listen, I only have a couple of friends – I think that’s natural, most people are like that – and Michael is not one of them. But that doesn’t mean I hate him, it just means he isn’t one of my close friends.’ Yet throughout our whole careers people created difficulties for us, so I think it’s easier, or less complicated, if today’s top players sometimes don’t tell the full truth.