I missed Wimbledon in 1998, and it felt seriously weird. My schedule dictated that I was always in London in June, so it was odd to be in Munich watching it on television. I watched the final in Gstaad as I prepared for the tournament there. I couldn’t articulate it yet, but something was still left undone, and I couldn’t just pretend that it wasn’t important. So at the end of 1998, I spoke to my team and we decided that we’d announce I’d play Wimbledon once more in 1999 but that would be the last tournament – after that, it would be complete retirement as a player. It was the right decision, and it was a relief. I felt I owed it to myself, to my fans, and to the sport to say a proper goodbye.

By early April, things were going well. I reached the final in Hong Kong where it took Agassi to stop me, and I won a round in Monte Carlo. But then at the end of April I was playing football – my hitting partner tackled me, and I broke my ankle so badly that it looked like I’d be out for two months. My injury specialist Hans-Wilhelm Müller Wohlfahrt said ‘Listen Boris, you’re not going to make it to Wimbledon.’ I told him ‘Sorry, but I must. There’s absolutely no way I’m not playing Wimbledon now.’ Well he knows me, and he knew he had to try, so we agreed to do what I could.

It meant I couldn’t play any matches up to the grass court season. I tried at Queen’s and won a match against Petr Korda, but I was still in pain. Then in the practice week before Wimbledon I hit with Sampras and I had to stop because it hurt me so badly. I went back to Munich and said to Müller Wohlfahrt ‘Listen, whatever you have by way of painkillers or needles, give me the strongest within the legal limits.’ So I had a cortisone injection. I hardly ever took painkillers or other drugs, I fully respected that tennis is an Olympic sport and I wanted to stay clean. But I wanted the maximum of what was allowed. Müller Wohlfahrt warned me about the after-effects, but I told him there would be no after-effects because after Wimbledon I would stop playing and would then have surgery on the ankle again.

I turned up at Wimbledon hopelessly short of match practice and not knowing if my ankle would hold up, but willing to give it a try. I had a pretty tough draw, but the first round was supposed to be easy. I had a British wildcard Miles Maclagan in the first round, out on No. 2 Court, the scene of so many of my best wins. And there I was: two sets down. I won the third, but he had three match points in the fourth set. If he’d taken one of those match points, my life might have been very different, but I came through it and won fairly easily in the fifth set. I had played terribly. I moved really badly because I hadn’t played much before, so I told myself that I just had to accept it.

And yet, it was the same story – I had come through the difficult match and suddenly the wind was in my sails. My second round match was a juicy one for the German media, because I came up against Nicolas Kiefer. He’d been in my Mercedes junior squad, he was the new German No. 1, and the German press was saying I had no chance because I’d barely got through the first round. But even in the twilight of my career I felt I was better than most players on grass, and I beat him in straight sets. Nobody could believe it – including me! But clearly the Maclagan match had got the rust out of my system, and I had the last laugh.

I then played Lleyton Hewitt, a future No. 1 and a very good grass court player, but not the finished article at that time. Again everyone was saying there’s no way I’d beat him. It was a featured Saturday match, and I thought to myself ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be in the second week of Wimbledon!’ I beat him in straight sets.

That set me up for a fourth round match against Pat Rafter, who had won the last two US Opens and was at the top of his form. We were supposed to play on Monday, but there was rain on Sunday and Monday, which gave me time to think ‘What if… what if?’ To be honest I had too much time to think, and the devil in me came out. Having won three matches I was supposed to lose, I was starting to allow myself to wonder just how far I might go. So in a way I’m grateful to Rafter for having taught me a nice grass court lesson.

He beat me 6-3, 6-2, 6-3, and it was so comprehensive that in the middle of the match I felt ‘Yes, it’s the right time to move on. I don’t have it any more. It’s Centre Court, it’s Rafter, one of the best players in the world, probably the best volleyer. It’s a good way to finish.’ I had a nice standing ovation, he walked out first to leave me with the chance to wave to the crowd for the last time, I had a long press conference, and I had a long session with the German media. It was a proper goodbye – the way I always envisioned going out.

What happened that night, the day of my defeat to Rafter, has been well documented, and it doesn’t help anyone for me to repeat the facts here, except to say that, thanks to a combination of bizarre circumstances, I ended up having a brief affair with a woman I met at a restaurant in London. Her name was Angela Ermakova, and nine months later our daughter Anna was born.

It hastened the end of my marriage to Barbara. That might have happened anyway as we were having our problems, but while the media had a field day with the story, I gained a daughter, a wonderful young woman I have loved from the day she was born and continue to love now. Of course I was embarrassed and very sad about how it happened, and about the way it broke up my family. It left Anna’s mother and me having to set about being parents without any relationship of our own to fall back on. But there are many people who can never have a child, so I really appreciate all my four children. Anna is my only daughter, so while that night in the restaurant was not exactly a model of family planning, I cannot look back on it as a terrible mistake.

It has been hard for Anna. Too much has been said in public about her, she’s now 15, and she deserves her peace and privacy. I’m now at a place with her and her mother that’s very comfortable, peaceful and family-like. They live about half-an-hour from my home in another district of London. I don’t see Anna as much as I’d like, but her mother and I are working on becoming a normal separated family, which hasn’t been easy considering our starting point. We’ve had our battles, we come from different family backgrounds, we have different values and we have different views about education, but I respect very much the fact that she is my daughter’s mother. None of us is perfect, I’m certainly not, but the bottom line is that she and I have both matured, and she is very different today than she was 10–15 years ago. Anna is very well educated, she’s a good student in a school that stretches her, she’s a healthy, young, teenage girl, and that’s largely the result of her mother’s upbringing. I think we’ve both become smarter about what we say and do, more so than in the past. Obviously the whole situation was very emotional, and we both said things and did things that in retrospect we perhaps shouldn’t have done, but all three of us are moving on in peace and harmony.