My big match that year was playing Stich in the quarter-finals. It was a rematch of the 1991 final and he had developed since then into a very good all-round player. In fact 1993 was his best – he finished the year ranked second behind Sampras, and he won the Davis Cup pretty much single-handed. At that time, he was probably better than me overall, but at Wimbledon I liked my chances, and it felt like a final for me. I beat him in five sets in a match that finished in near-darkness, and it felt like a sort of redemption.

The conclusion of the Stich match made the semi-finals so much harder because physically I was struggling. I had a day off, of course, but even with Bresnik’s fitness work I was not in the greatest shape in those days, I felt Sampras was going to be tough, and he was. He beat me in three tight sets. I was obviously in good form, but I didn’t really have a chance. Afterwards I was trying to explain to people just how good Sampras was, in fact as good as they come on grass. There were echoes of the time I had beaten Johan Kriek in the Queen’s final of 1985. Then the media felt Kriek was trying to explain away a bad defeat against me by saying I might win Wimbledon, when what he was saying was that I was better than they thought. This time the media said I was just praising Pete because I’d lost and wanted it to look better, but I asked them to trust their eyes – they’d seen the match, I couldn’t touch his serve for three sets, and my return wasn’t bad. Again you need your best perspective – facing Sampras in a semi-final wasn’t bad. Today everyone agrees with that, but in those days only the player on the other side of the net can tell how good the opposition is, and I was one of the first people to spot that. I had no regrets, I wasn’t whining, I just lost to the better guy. I’d beaten Stich in a very good match and I’d done as well as I could, so it made the departure from Wimbledon and the remainder of the year easier.

The happiest day of my life – up to that point – came in the summer of 1993. We found out that Barbara was pregnant. Getting past the third month was also a bit of a relief, because I had the German tennis press on my back, wanting to know why my form wasn’t good. I was still fifth or seventh in the rankings, but they’d been used to me being a regular in the top four, and it hadn’t worked out with Günter Bresnik. Thus, just before the US Open, I sat down with the German media and said, ‘Let me tell you my friends, I’m delighted to announce that my girlfriend and wife-to-be is pregnant with my first child, so that is far more important than any tennis match, and now you know the reason why my form isn’t what it was a couple of years ago.’ They all clapped and finally understood why I was in this limbo.

I wasn’t going to miss the birth of my first child, so with the baby due in late January, I skipped the Australian Open. The morning Noah was born, I was shuffling between the delivery room and a lounge next door with a television which was showing the Australian Open night session. Due to the delivery taking a couple of hours, I was going back and forth, watching the match between Michael Stich and MaliVai Washington. I remember saying to myself, ‘My brother has to win this match for me’. By ‘my brother’ I didn’t mean Michael, my brother was MaliVai, because I felt very close to the race. It was not against Michael, I didn’t want him to lose, but after all the angst and anguish Barbara and I had gone through in the previous two years with racially motivated comments, I really felt that supporting the black guy was supporting ‘my brother’. And he did win.

A few hours later, my son Noah was born. Apart from the joy of becoming a father, I felt my tormented soul had been laid to rest with Noah’s birth. Everything felt right – I was a father, I felt refreshed and rejuvenated, and even the result of the Stich-Washington match had gone the right way. I was still young, I was only 26, but when you’ve won your first Slam at 17, those first 10 years are really long. Noah’s birth gave me a kick-start about re-engaging with my first love: playing tennis. I remember going out to the courts the next day and I practised more than I’d practised in a while, and I was able to sustain that level. With my private life going well, and my hunger for tennis back, I felt 1994 would be a lot better.

And it would need to be. Within a few days of Noah’s birth, Sampras had won the Australian Open, which meant he had won the last three Grand Slam titles and was the runaway world No. 1, with Agassi, Stich, Courier and Ivanišević his closest challengers. I had a lot of ground to make up.

There was a little incident in my third round match at Wimbledon in 1994 that leads me on to what I see as a big problem in today’s tennis.

I was playing Javier Frana on No. 1 Court, and after one set I asked to go to the bathroom and have a bit of treatment on my back. I felt that my back was blocked a little bit, and I wanted my physio to unblock it. If I hadn’t needed the bathroom, I could have been treated on court, but I went to the locker room, and my physio treated my back quickly. He did it in front of everybody, on the floor next to the toilet – there was nothing secret about it, and a line umpire was there watching me. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do that. I wasn’t aware of all the rules, so I was fined. If it had been an ATP trainer, that would have been OK, but the fact that it was my own personal trainer treating me in the locker room meant I was fined.

I have no complaints about the fine – I didn’t know the rules well enough, I’d broken them, so it’s right that I should have some punishment. But I wasn’t trying to steal an advantage. At that time, the rules were written so that if you had an injury, you could have it treated, but if you were simply in less good condition than your opponent, then the rules wouldn’t save you. They do now.

Under today’s rules, if someone is tired or feels like he’s about to start cramping, he can take a timeout and get treated. To me, that is wrong. It also doesn’t look good, because nobody sees the injury. A big part of trying to win a long match is to try and outlast your opponent, perhaps by making him tired so you can play better in the fourth and fifth sets. That element is totally taken away if the opponent can say ‘I think my leg is hurting’ even though you see nothing. He then takes a timeout that takes away his opponent’s momentum – they can cool down, recharge their batteries, and it’s almost like the match starts again. That’s totally against the whole concept of one against one, and I get furious as both a commentator and a coach if one guy has the other on the ropes and then the one on the ropes can simply take a timeout. That’s just wrong.

I’m not saying there should be no treatment mid-match, and of course I don’t want anyone to make an injury worse by playing on when they should stop or have some strapping. If someone twists an ankle or falls down and is in pain, then yes, get a doctor out there. But if you’re not injured, if your shoulders are just a bit tight, you shouldn’t get any treatment. People will say I’m encouraging those who have cramp or who are on the ropes to act as if they have an injury – well if someone can act so well that they look injured when they’re not, then I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. But umpires should be given the chance to make a judgement and either say, ‘You’re clearly injured, I’ll call the trainer for you’ or ‘I see no injury, play on’.

Of course you get borderline cases. Take the 2014 Australian Open final, for example. Rafael Nadal had hurt his back in practice; he played the first set apparently with full fitness, but then called the trainer in the second set. The result was that his opponent, Stan Wawrinka, lost his rhythm and Nadal won the third set. As it was a Grand Slam final, you want there to be a contest, you don’t want Nadal to withdraw injured and leave the tournament with no final, and I’m not saying he broke any rules. But the rules allowed him to say ‘I’m down, I’m not feeling good, let me stop the match.’ And that cannot be good for the integrity of tennis.

If today’s rules were applied in my day, you can be sure we’d have made maximum use of them. You can guarantee that with McEnroe, Connors, Lendl, myself and 25 others, when we were down a set and a break we’d have definitely called a timeout and got the doctor to treat us for 10 minutes. I’m not in favour of going back to the rules in my playing days. They changed the rules because of one high-profile case of cramping where the player was in agony and couldn’t get any help, and I accept that didn’t look good. So the rules shouldn’t be quite as strict as they were in my day – if a player is seriously cramping or having a serious injury, then of course they should have treatment. But it’s a very soft rule that can be used – and is being abused – to break the opponent’s rhythm. I think it is an incorrect rule change that should be partially reversed.