But I'm ready for what's next after rugby. Being able to not just say that, but to truly feel it, is a privilege. Ultimately, getting to leave your sport on your own terms is all you can really hope for as an athlete.

No, I think they were two totally different careers, because when I was acting, I was always impersonating different people, so it was never me—it was never myself. When I started to sing, I suddenly felt naked. I mean, I knew that was going to happen, because that’s the reason why I couldn’t do it before—when I was a teenager, I just couldn’t play in front of anyone at all—it was impossible, my hands started to shake, my voice was gone, and I was so self-conscious of what people would think about what I was doing. Because I didn’t know how to play songs that anybody knew—all I knew how to play were my own songs, and so I had this feeling of having my own chords and my own things that weren’t—I was afraid of being judged as doing nonsense music. But then maybe what the acting did to me was that I got more courage to do what I really wanted to do, even though I had all these fears that were still inside me.

The task of finally making a decision to hang up my racquet felt a lot more difficult than winning seven matches in a row in the Australian heat. It took me several agonizing months to finally come to the decision that my chronic injuries will never again let me be the tennis player that I can be. Walking away from the sport, effective immediately, is the right decision for me and my family.

Well, I ran out of gas. You know, I got to be what, 93 at that time, or something like that. And it just – same reason I gave up teaching. I teach – I was – I taught every year from when I was 21 till 88 or 89, and there just came a period when your body said different things to you, and you should turn it over to somebody, just like I did at Berkshire.

I want to be able to express, I want to be able to communicate, and I want to be able to understand what it is I’m doing, and I want the people whose language it is to understand what I’m doing.

I went to the opera practically every night. I went to something practically every night, just learning and seeing and absorbing, and what I noticed is that there were singers that were only sort of slightly older than I whose voices sounded as though they were many decades older than that, and didn’t sound pretty, and I needed to understand what was happening. I mean there were singers that were 28 or 30 years old or something, and I would speak to them afterwards to say, “Was your voice tired tonight? Tell me what’s happening,” because I didn’t understand it. Their voices should have sounded fresh and blooming and wonderful, but instead they sounded different, and it was because they were singing a different opera every night, and singing whatever was offered, and I didn’t understand and needed to understand — because no one was telling me these things — why they just didn’t say no. Why didn’t they just say, “Oh no, I don’t think I should.”