You Cannot Be Serious (10 page)

Mary totally lost it. I remember changing sides at 9–8 and saying, “Hey, Mary, are you okay?” and her saying, “Yeah, I’m okay”—with tears streaming down her face. I felt like killing the guy.

And we lost. Mary was so shaken that she could barely serve the next game, and that was that. It was sickening to me that Ralston had done such a thing: That was the beginning of the end for me and mixed doubles, right there. Thank you, Dennis!

M
Y FRIEND
Doug Saputo met me when I got back from Wimbledon. We went back to my house, sneaked a beer from the fridge, went up to my room, and listened to Joan Jett…. It was the same thing Doug and I had done dozens of times, but now it felt completely different. Maybe Doug was different, maybe I was: I couldn’t tell.

It was strange—at first, after my return, I felt like the same person I’d always been. I could still shoot hoops in the driveway or play Ping-Pong in the garage with my buddies, could still hang out with them in my parents’ kitchen, drinking milk and eating Mister Salty pretzels. But from the moment I got back, the people I had grown up with wouldn’t let me feel the same, or so I thought. Suddenly I was Somebody, while they were still nobodies, just the way I’d always been. Part of me had enjoyed being anonymous, but part of me had wanted—badly—to go on and become a star. Now there was no turning back.

My friends weren’t quite sure how to handle it, and neither was I.

I
COULDN’T WAIT
to call Stacy. I’d just experienced the greatest moment of my life, and I wanted to share it with her. I phoned and said, “Stacy, I got to the semifinals at Wimbledon”…and then she said, “My father died a couple of days ago.”

I felt numb. She had kept from me how sick he was—maybe she’d still held out hope that her pop would pull through. Now I understood why she’d had to leave Paris early. I felt so bad—here I was on an incredible high, and her life was a total disaster. There’s no way to really share anything at a moment like that. There’s nothing to say, except “I’m really sorry.” It put things in perspective in a hurry.

4

T
HAT SUMMER
after my first Wimbledon, I played twelve out of thirteen weeks—all professional tournaments, even though I was still an amateur. Including my trip to Europe, that meant more than four solid months of playing. I’d never done that before. I did fairly well—I didn’t knock ’em dead, but I won a few rounds here and there against stiff competition, and by the time I entered college, I had gotten my ranking up to 21. I lost 7–5 in the third to Connors at a tournament in Boston, the week before the U.S. Open—I was starting to feel that maybe, just maybe, he was conquerable.

One of the best things about that summer was that I got to spend a lot of time with Peter Fleming. Back at Port Washington, when we’d played two-hour chess matches in between tennis, Peter had been like the big brother I’d never had. Now that I was eighteen and he was twenty-two, though, the age difference seemed negligible: Our similarities were more striking. We were both big sports fans, we both liked the same kind of music and a lot of the same bands: Pink Floyd, Foreigner, the Stones. We’d both had strict suburban upbringings, with parents who were deeply ambitious for us. And—I remembered this from Port Washington—we had very similar senses of humor. He’d called me “Junior” then, and that was what he called me now. It had a slightly different spin, now that I had come up in the world, but it still felt affectionate.

Peter and I played three of the same tournaments that summer, in Newport, Rhode Island; Cincinnati; and Boston; and during those three separate weeks, we hung out together almost every night, just drinking beers and talking. Having a real friend took away the loneliness of the tour. The idea of doubles hadn’t come up yet. We were each partnering with other guys then: I was trying things out with the South African Bernie Mitton, among others, and Peter seemed to be pretty much paired up with Gene Mayer.

Talking about what makes a good doubles team is like trying to talk about what makes a good marriage: There’s a lot that seems obvious, but the intangibles play a big role. In both cases, chemistry is everything. In doubles, if the chemistry’s not there, the mistakes your partner is bound to make (just because everybody makes mistakes in tennis, even at the top level) get on your nerves more and more. And vice versa. As partners on a tennis court, you both have to be able to roll with the punches.

The highlight of my first U.S. Open was my third-round match against fourth-seeded Eddie Dibbs. During the first game, we heard a commotion in the stands, and a couple of minutes later, the umpire informed us that a spectator had been shot. Shot! Eddie jumped up. “I’m out of here,” he said. I wasn’t far behind. We waited on the side for a while, and eventually someone told us that the message had been garbled and, in reality, the spectator was in
shock.

We went back out to play, and I won a tight match, 6–4 in the third—only to find out later that the original message had been right. Someone had, indeed, been shot: a stray bullet had come from outside the stadium and hit a spectator’s leg!

In the round of 16, Manuel Orantes, the 1975 champion and a brilliant clay-court player, beat me in straight sets. In fact, he gave me an absolute clay-court lesson.
Maybe,
I thought,
those hard courts at Stanford would be good for me.

In the doubles, Bernie Mitton and I lost a tough match in the second round. Meanwhile, Peter and Gene Mayer had decided that despite a lot of good results, their doubles chemistry just wasn’t there and so, having established over the summer that we were very much on the same wavelength, Peter and I decided to give doubles a go.

We didn’t get off to a blazing start. In our first tournament together, in September at the Los Angeles Open, we lost early to Marty Riessen and Roscoe Tanner. I felt pretty let down. After the match, though, Peter said to me, “Were you feeling OK out there? I was really tired for some reason.”

“I can’t believe you said that,” I told him. “I felt tired, too, but I was so embarrassed to be tired in a doubles match.” And we figured out then and there what had been the problem: the L.A. smog.

It may sound like a small thing, but the point is that in doubles, small things are what make or break you. Communication doesn’t just happen on the court—you really have to be able to open up to each other (or wear a gas mask!).

The following week, in San Francisco, we did a little better—and learned another lesson. In a semifinal match against Fred McNair and Sherwood Stewart, we got a bad call on a crucial point in the final set. It was one of those points that matches can hang on, and it had wrongfully gone against us; Peter and I went to the umpire and proceeded to have a joint meltdown. We got so upset that that was effectively the end of the match—we just couldn’t play worth a damn afterward.

Peter had always had a temper, especially when he played singles, and mine was just starting to come out of the bottle at that point. However, what Peter learned that day, he later told me, was that he couldn’t let it go anymore, not in doubles. You can’t have two loose cannons out there at the same time: Someone has to be the emotional anchor, and that day Peter realized that it was going to have to be him.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
instructive incident in San Francisco that September: I was playing Cliff Richey, one of the circuit’s great characters of the ’60s and ’70s, a former Davis Cup stalwart. Cliff was a truly fine tennis player, and he was also never the least bit shy about telling anyone, anytime, exactly what was on his mind. Because an earlier match had run long, we didn’t begin playing until about eleven-thirty
P.M
., and by the time we got to the third set, at around one-thirty
A.M
., there were maybe fifty fans left in the 10,000-seat Cow Palace.

I won’t lie to you—I was doing a lot of bitching and moaning about line calls during the match. I know that won’t come as a huge shock, but the fact is, I’d really never done much of it before, especially during my junior career. There was just something about the incessant grind of the summer that was starting to wear me down. I also think I was feeling the pressure of performing, solo, on the pro circuit.

Now, there was a rule in the pros that said you could question calls, and I was beginning to feel out the possibilities of that a little bit, but frankly, I was probably over the edge that night. Cliff Richey certainly thought so. After I’d gone off one more time, he stopped play, put his hands on his hips, and proceeded to address the fifty people in the stands.

“I’ve been a professional tennis player for ten years, I’ve been the number-one player in the United States, and I refuse to sit back and not say anything about what this kid is doing out here,” he said—and then went on for five minutes more about what a disgrace I was, to the game.

I ended up winning the match, but I was incredibly embarrassed—as I should have been. I was totally spent, and showing the strain: I needed to go to college and take a break from the tour. I had learned a lesson that night, but it was a lesson I would periodically forget over the coming years, whenever fatigue got to me.

F
ROM
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
, it was just down the pike to Stanford, the next and last stop on my summer-of-’77 tour. It had been a long ride, and a successful one; the paradox of that summer, though, was that I’d been playing enough to make inroads into the big time, but it also felt like just too much. By the time I got to Stanford at the end of September, I didn’t even want to look at a tennis court.

Coach Gould was great, though. At the first team meeting, he said, “I know some of you guys have played a lot, and you just come back when you’re ready.” And so I didn’t go to practice from October 1 to December 13, and Dick never said a word about it. The only reason I even went to that December practice was to get ready for a tournament in the Bahamas that my friend Gene Scott was running!

I only spent one year at Stanford, but going there was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. It allowed me to be around intelligent people, and it forced me to be responsible. Now I really was a team player, exactly the way I’d always wanted to be: I had to try to blend in, not just be a star. At the same time, since I was number one on the team, the pressure was on me to win all my matches.

The atmosphere couldn’t have been more supportive, however. My close friend from Port Washington, Peter Rennert, was there, and the other members of the squad—Jim Hodges, Bill Maze, Matt Mitchell, John Rast, and Perry Wright, among others—were great guys, too. Bill, a senior and the number-two player, was my doubles partner at Stanford that year, and he also became a friend.

I’ll freely admit that academics weren’t my forte. My first mistake was in taking the guidance of my advisor, who recommended such courses as anthropology, economics, and calculus. By the time the first semester was well under way, I was already struggling. I said to myself, “I’ve got to find out what the athletes take,” so I asked a couple of football players, and a few of the veterans on the tennis team, and second semester was a big improvement. I tried to take “Parapsychology and Psychic Phenomena” seriously, but I couldn’t. In “Sleep, Narcolepsy, and Politics,” I was actually able to get an A by playing a charity tennis exhibition. The most memorable was my exposition course: The teacher walked in, stared at us wordlessly for fifteen minutes—it felt like an eternity—and finally said, “I’ll bet you’re wondering what the requirements for this course are. There’s no midterm, no final exam, and there are no papers. Now we’re ready to begin the class.”

This was more like it!

Meanwhile, there were recreational activities—another important part of college life. There were parties; there were road trips. One of them was with my new friend Doug Simon, to his grandfather’s house in Carbon Beach in Malibu—just three houses north of the beach house I would buy seven years later. Doug’s grandfather was Norton Simon, the great art collector, and his place was magnificent—full of Picassos and Matisses, among others; and the view of the Pacific was just as impressive. It was my second look at great art, and at Malibu, and both began to get their hooks in me. I’ll never forget my first trip with the Stanford tennis team, to Madison, Wisconsin, in February of ’78. Bill Maze’s birthday came on that trip, and a bunch of us drove out to a bar to try to find Bill, so we could all celebrate. It was like a scene from a movie—we drove up, and suddenly Bill was being thrown out of the bar because he’d thrown a beer in the bouncer’s face, and everybody from the bar was running after him. We shouted, “Hey, Willie!” and he dove into the car….

We all stayed up pretty late that first night. There were sleds in the dorm where we were staying, and an incredible sledding hill outside, and a big party going on. We were drinking and doing a few other things, both outdoors and indoors, and not being especially quiet about it! Finally, Dick Gould came in—it had to have been three or four in the morning, and our match was set for eleven
A
.
M
.—and said, “Hey, guys, can you keep it down?” And walked out. That was it.

Could Dick possibly not have not noticed that the room was—shall we say—pungent? Maybe he’d noticed, maybe he hadn’t. I just remember thinking, “I’ve got to play my heart out for this guy.” This was my kind of coach.

We won that match in Madison, as we won all the rest of our meets in that undefeated year for Stanford. The most thrilling of all was a weekend away match in April, against an extremely tough UCLA team. The stands were packed; people were literally standing in the trees to get a good view. All the matches during that meet, including my victory over Eliot Teltscher (after being down match point), were well-played and close: It was just an exciting event to be part of, one that made me glad to be a member of the team, and that reaffirmed my decision to spend a year in college.