Success breeds success and the more you are around a healthy and thriving athletics team, the more the people who only think they can make semi-finals will be inspired to want to aim for finals and go for medals.
It's a big game tomorrow, obviously, quarter finals. I think that whenever you play the Russians you always get up for it, and tomorrow is going to be even that much bigger, the quarter finals.
Athletes like me, PT Usha, Anju Bobby Gerorge have reached finals in Olympics, and it's not easy to reach the finals. If Indians were genetically inferior then we wouldn't have reached even finals.
It was a tough year for me, '89, losing two Slam finals and losing another five finals. It wasn't until I won the Masters, or what's now called the ATP Finals, that things changed again. Suddenly I won seven tournaments in 1990 and became No. 1.
I dabbled a little bit in acting in high school, and then I forgot about it completely. And then at about 25 I went to a class. I don't think anybody in my family thought it was an intelligent choice. I don't think anybody thought I'd succeed, which is understandable. I think they were just happy that I was doing something.
Well, of course you question it, especially when you get to this point. I always look at it would I rather not make the playoffs or lose in The Finals? I don't know. I don't know. I've missed the playoffs twice. I lost in The Finals four times. I'm almost starting to be like I'd rather not even make the playoffs than to lose in The Finals. It would hurt a lot easier if I just didn't make the playoffs and I didn't have a shot at it.
I dabbled a little bit in acting in high school and then I forgot about it completely. And then at about twenty-five I went to a class. I don't think anybody in my family thought it was an intelligent choice. I don't think anybody thought I'd succeed, which is understandable. I think they were just happy that I was doing something.
I won three FA Cup finals, two League Cup finals, and played in one of United's two Champions League-winning finals. But I lost in a lot of finals, too: the FA Cup in 1995, 2005 and 2007, the League Cup in 2003, and the Champions League in 2009 and 2011.
'Reluctantly Healthy' is so completely different than what I do for a living. It's really what I wanted it to be, which is learning to be healthy.
But anybody who steps into the lane beside you is the biggest competition because they made it to the finals.
I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.
I get this call and they go, you know, 'Do you want to do the finals?' and I go, 'Yeah, I guess, I've never, never done the finals.' Especially for somebody who's done as many thousands of games as I have, it kind of takes you one step further.
You want to be challenging for titles and in semi-finals and finals. Everyone is excited by that.
A lot of teams who go on to win trophies lose in quarter-finals or semi-finals first.
I got to play in a crowd, play in Wimbledon finals, be the guy on a Davis Cup team for a while. Those are opportunities not a lot of people get. As much as I was disappointed and frustrated at times, I'm not sure that I ever felt sorry for myself or begrudged anybody any of their success.
You can change your body shape by permitting yourself to exercise and eat a healthy diet and so on - and we've heard miraculous stories of people who have lost hundreds of pounds, and they look like a completely different person - but that's not the norm for the average person, and a lot of times, people don't get that way in a healthy way.