My defeat to Edberg in the 1988 final hardly did me any damage for the rest of the year. I played five more tournaments and two Davis Cup ties, and lost a total of just two matches, and one of those didn’t matter as it was a round robin match at the Masters. I won the titles in Cincinnati, Tokyo, Stockholm and the Masters in New York – a title I won on a fifth set tiebreak in the final against Lendl on one of the biggest strokes of luck in my whole career. We had a long baseline rally at 6-5 in the tiebreak, and suddenly I hit a forehand that crashed against the netcord and dropped over stone dead. Two weeks later I achieved one of my life’s ambitions: to win the Davis Cup. It was my biggest triumph after Wimbledon, and we’d done it away against a great Sweden team.

There’s a little story that followed my win on the netcord in New York. It was my first Masters title, I’d lost to Lendl in my other three Masters appearances (1985–87), and I’d finally made it. When I woke up on Monday morning I decided to buy myself something big as a treat. I had befriended an American tennis journalist called Peter Bodo, and he knew Manhattan very well in those days, in particular those parts of the city where tourists don’t usually go. He knew which areas were safe and which weren’t, how to avoid the drug dealers, and so forth. I loved it because I was intrigued to get to know the real New York.