Admitting it was hard to believe that it had been so long, he said the recollection of “the energy generated” by the nearly 100,000 strong crowd in the stadium as he and the Australian team entered for the opening ceremony was still vivid.
Hall also clearly recalls the moment while practising on an outside court ahead of the gold medal match when his coach Rich Berman noted the long queue of people waiting to get into the tennis centre.
“Just knowing it was going to be a full house and that I was about to go in a play the biggest match I’ve ever played,” he said.
Another strong memory is the feeling when his opponent Stevie Walsh’s ball landed out and he realised that he’d won, describing it as a thrilling mixture of “shock, disbelief and joy”.
“It was something I’d been dreaming of for seven years that had come true. So that memory is very, very real as well.”
After 15 years as a professional athlete and putting his body through “things the body shouldn’t go through”, he turned to pilates to stay fit when it came time to lay down his racket.
Now the 50-year-old is working on a book about his life covering growing up in a beach town and the accident when he was 16 which led to his legs being amputated, as well as his tennis career and the aftermath of his retirement from professional sport.
