Obviously any time Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic win, people think of you, because of your longtime rivalry with both players and because of curiosity about how everyone will finish relative to one another in terms of history. Are you thinking of you when they play? Are you paying specific attention?

I mean obviously you’re aware when they’re in the finals or you’re aware when Rafa comes back or you’re aware when Novak breaks another record. It’s all good, you know? But I will not set my schedule aside, like, well, This match I have to see. But obviously I’ve followed it and I love to see that especially Novak’s been going from strength to strength. It keeps on going. And Rafa obviously, I felt sad for him that he has not been able to play nearly as much or at all to what he wanted to do. I hope that he can do what he wants to do in the summer, because even though I have a good feeling for him, I know he pulled out of Indian Wells and Doha and all that stuff, but I still am very hopeful that he can get back on the train and ride it.

These are guys that you were sharing a court with for years. And then you turn on the TV and they’re still on the court and you’re not. Does that feeling have a name? Does it feel like anything?

It feels good. When I retired in London at the press conference next to Andy [Murray], Novak, Rafa, and [Björn] Borg and everybody who was there, I said, “It’s fitting for me to be the first to go.” I had the time without them on tour when I came on tour and now it’s their time to have a moment on tour without me. So it would’ve felt wrong for me if Murray, who almost retired with his hip, or Rafa with his knees, we didn’t know how long he was going to play. So I’m happy I was the first to go. And actually I wish that they can go on for as long as I did.

Does the competitor inside of you also feel that way?

Oh, that one is gone.

Really?

Yeah, totally. Completely. Because I’m proud and happy about what I achieved; and I will never forget when I broke Sampras’s record, he was cool about it. Or as cool as you can be. And I’ll never forget that. And I think you also take a different role when you retire. You end up being very, I dunno, content in your position, and you also are supportive of the game as a whole. So if things are achieved, I see it in the sphere of: Okay, well, we’re competing not within the tennis-level sphere, but actually we’re competing in the sports sphere, putting tennis on the map on a bigger scale. We’re fighting for eyeballs with Netflix or Amazon, or whatever it is.

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Are there younger players that you like to watch, or anyone you see with similarities to you?

I mean, obviously we are missing the one-hander situation. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but for the first time in history –

There’s not a player with a one-handed backhand in the top 10, currently.

That’s a dagger right there.

I wondered how you felt about that.

I felt that one. That one was personal. I didn’t like that. But at the same time, how do you say, it makes the one-handers – Sampras, Rod Laver, me – it makes us special as well that we’ve carried the torch, or the flag or whatever, for as long as we did. So I love seeing players with one-handers like Stan [Wawrinka] and [Richard] Gasquet and [Stefanos] Tsitsipas. Dominic Thiem has a wonderful one. Grigor [Dimitrov], good friend. So I love that. And then I like to see characters, and I like to see explosive athletic players. What we get more and more nowadays is that I wish that sometimes we had a little bit more variety, and also back and forth coming to the net a little bit more, not just side to side. We’ll see where the game will go. But obviously the problem is when you have a lot of similar players playing against each other, a lot of the points end up being played in a similar fashion. And my goal on the tour was always – playing every point in a similar way against my opponent is what he wants. What he doesn’t want is if I mix it up and have variety. So for me, seeing two guys play against each other and have 20 same points back to back to back, come on. It can be very interesting. It’s like an arm wrestle. But I like to say, “Let’s not enter the arm wrestle. Let’s enter another game.”