‘It somehow happened that in the mid-80s tennis won my heart. On the one hand, tennis is a sport where you have an opponent, but unlike in other sports of the kind, you don’t harm each other. Although injuries also happen in tennis just like in other sports. I must say I liked it at once. First, it increases competitiveness, and second, it’s an outdoor game. Also, tennis is a sport with constant communication, with the possibility of joining a circle of certain people, where you can make many useful contacts.
I started playing lawn tennis back in 1986, before it became a trend. Even now, when I have some problems with my joints, I still sometimes take a racket and play doubles tennis, and I really enjoy it. It’s nice that muscles ‘remember’ everything, and on occasion you can play with friends, even if you haven’t played for a long time.
My largest collection of trophy cups is, of course, a tennis one. No matter what competitions I participated in, I always took second or third place. I still often participate in amateur lawn tennis competitions.
I even have a cup for first place, which I received at an international competition in Turkey. I played against a German, and back then, as it seems to me, amazing things happened. We started playing, I couldn’t do anything right that day, but what was happening to that German guy was inexplicable. When he fought for the semifinals, he was playing like a top-level sportsman, but when he played with me, he did it really bad. That time I took first place in an international competition.’