You Cannot Be Serious (13 page)

In tennis, what you have to worry about is the fans.

You may not remember Bob Hewitt, the South African doubles player, but—before I came along—he used to be known as the guy with the worst temper in tennis. He was also one of the best doubles players in the world for a while.

After Hewitt and Frew McMillan beat Peter Fleming and me in that ’78 Wimbledon doubles final, Peter and I weren’t able to hook up for a few weeks. He had just met, and was falling in love with, Jennifer Hudson, the English girl he would eventually marry. As a result, I was playing with a number of different partners, and when McMillan decided to take a week off, Hewitt asked me to play with him at a tournament at the Longwood Cricket Club, in Boston.

We were in a quarterfinal match against Victor Pecci and Balazs Taroczy, and Hewitt was in top—or maybe I should say bottom—form. He was going off about every call, yelling and screaming at everyone in sight; there was no way I could have gotten a word in edgewise, even if I’d wanted to. I was getting more and more worked up—at the time Hewitt was the number-one doubles player, and I was the young buck, so I’d wanted to make a good showing. I began to choke.

We lost the match 7–9 in the third, and after the match, one woman in the stands kept clapping, slowly—clapping and clapping. I was really distraught. But she wouldn’t stop clapping, for what felt like hours.

All during this match, the whole time Hewitt was going bananas, I’d simply stood there. Now, though, I lost it. I went over to the woman, spat in front of her, and told her in no uncertain terms what I thought of what she was doing. She said, “You can’t do that to me.” Then her husband—a middle-aged man (probably around the age I am now)—stood up to defend his wife.

The guy sucker-punched me, right in the stomach. I was so agitated that I barely felt it. I grabbed him by the neck—I was ready to nail him! People were starting to gather around and say, “Break it up, break it up.” And I hesitated—because suddenly it occurred to me that if I hit this character I’d get suspended.

Our match had been on an outside court. A TV crew had been covering the singles match on the main court, so after they heard about this commotion, they went and interviewed Hewitt. And the first thing he said was, “McEnroe was in a fight, and I had nothing to do with it.” As if! And of course my parents were watching.

They called: “John, are you okay?” I said, “Look, I’m fine; some old jerk threw a punch at me.” Of course, I had to worm my way out of the whole thing, and—I guess because I hadn’t really done anything other than spitting in front of this woman—I was off the hook. But it was ugly.

So maybe that was the passing of the torch from Hewitt to me.

I’m half-joking.

Connors always had the ability to turn his anger on and off, which amazed me. I was a one-way street—mad, madder, and maddest. There must have been thousands of times, in tense situations, when a joke was on the tip of my tongue, and instead of saying something funny, I’d just let loose.

Then I’d think, “What the hell did I do that for?” To this day I don’t know. It had something to do with the fear that I’d lose my edge if I joked around in a match. But there was no
proof
that that would happen, and Connors was living proof that you could defuse a situation with humor.

The way I was brought up, you were supposed to be very serious, totally concentrated. To put humor into a big tennis match felt like being a phony, I guess. It would mean I wasn’t a true competitor, a real athlete. It smacked of professional wrestling.

Meanwhile, the irony is that you
can
joke in tight competitive situations (not to mention the fact that pro wrestling is
huge
—those guys are laughing all the way to the bank).

I’m deeply envious of that. In fact, my biggest regret, by far—even more than losing the ’84 French Open—is never having been able to turn the other cheek, throw a one-liner, to keep things loose. I should have had more fun doing what I was doing. Ultimately, I think it harks back to my not enjoying competitive tennis that much. To being afraid to lose.

It’s an amazing feeling to get to the Wimbledon final and walk out on the court to play Bjorn Borg. That’s the ultimate. But the buildup to get there was never pleasant. First round, second round; playing guys you should beat. The pressure of everyone’s expectations—especially my own—was enormous.

Maybe that’s why Borg and I never had a problem, on or off the court: He understood. He thought I was a little crazy, but it didn’t seem to bother him. The way I saw it, he even went out of his way to show me respect.

The second or third time we ever played, in New Orleans in early 1979, it was 5–all in the third set, and I was getting all worked up and nutty, and Bjorn motioned me to the net. I thought, “Oh, God, what’s he going to do? Is he going to tell me I’m the biggest jerk of all time?” And he just put his arm around my shoulder and said, “It’s okay. Just relax.” This was at 5–all in the third set! But he was amused by the whole thing. “It’s okay,” he told me. “It’s a great match.”

It made me feel really special. He didn’t look at what I was doing as something I’d done to affect him. It was just my own nuttiness.

Plus—and maybe this was the main point—he was still number one.

5

W
HAT I ALWAYS REMEMBER FIRST
about Vitas is his hair—long and blond like Borg’s, only Vitas never wore a headband. He was clearly imitating Borg, but I never thought any less of him for that, because, first, it was a cool look if you could bring it off (and Vitas could really bring it off), and second, Vitas was a much stronger personality. It was funny—people mistook him for Borg all the time, but he kind of got a kick out of it. It certainly never hurt his social life.

I first became aware of Vitas soon after I first started playing at Port Washington: I would stand in the lounge and gaze down at the courts, watching him run around with those little bunny steps of his. Harry Hopman always spoke admiringly about Vitas’s work ethic, and it was true: He was always practicing, and he could run all day. There were a lot of strong players at Port Washington, but in terms of drive, talent, and charisma, Vitas was clearly the star. Even early on, when people used to joke, “Vitas Gerulaitis—what is that, a disease?” it looked as though he was going to be tremendously famous.

I admired him like crazy, but he wouldn’t give me the time of day when I was fourteen or fifteen, and why should he? He was already Broadway Vitas, going out with the likes of Cheryl Tiegs! Why should he pay attention to some boring fifteen-year-old? He brushed me off, which naturally only made him seem more magnetic.

Even when he was a junior, you’d hear the myths: He had been with this woman, had played that tournament under the influence of such-and-such a drug. I wondered how the hell he thought he could get away with burning his candle at both ends. At the same time, though, you didn’t see him dogging it on the court. He had incredible amounts of energy.

I first made it onto Vitas’s radar screen when I was seventeen, and we played a charity match at the Felt Forum, in Madison Square Garden. A man named Richard Weisman helped put the match together: It was the first time I met Richard, who was to become an important figure in my life. The match was one of those bouts between the up-and-comer and the established superstar. There were no upsets that night—the superstar won—but at least Vitas would speak to me now.

In the next couple of years, as I started to build my own career, I watched with continuing admiration as he rose to number three in the world. I had few doubts about my tennis abilities, but in lifestyle we were worlds apart. He had a mansion in King’s Point and a glamorous life in Manhattan; I would come back from my travels with bags of dirty tennis clothes for my mom to wash, then settle back into my old room in Douglaston. Vitas drove a creamy-yellow Rolls-Royce that matched his hair, with a license plate that said
VITAS G
. I was still driving my trusty flame-orange Pinto. Some evenings, my old friend Doug Saputo and I would get into the Pinto, or Doug’s blue Mercury Comet, and follow Vitas’s Rolls into town, to Studio 54 or Xenon or Heartbreak—wherever he was going. We’d promise our parents we’d be home by one-thirty.

For Doug and me, it was like a field trip. It was the height of disco, an incredible scene—blasting music and blazing lights; designer jeans and designer drugs. (That
music,
though—it was awful! Even as I gaped around, with the Bee Gees, Gloria Gaynor, and Donna Summer blasting in my ears, I missed my favorites: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Stones). Superstars were everywhere, and a strange man in a white wig, named Andy Warhol, took pictures of everybody. I remember his handshake—it felt like a dead fish. He was always around, and at some point—even at parties!—he’d take out his camera. It felt like an incredible invasion of privacy to me.

But Vitas loved it. He was always in the center of it all, with beautiful women draped all over him. He was funny, he was charming, he was the life of the party—he just couldn’t sit still—he could talk with anybody about anything; he had an incredibly positive vibe about him. At the same time, to really get to know Vitas was extremely difficult. Women were crazy about him, and he was always just a little cool with them, which seemed to get them even more excited.

It was a slightly different story with me and women. As I mentioned, I had some hiccups getting started with girls. My shyness tended to get misinterpreted, the way shyness always does. My growing confidence in the tennis world sometimes came across as cockiness, and the tricky thing about cockiness is that, while it’s an absolute survival mechanism for a tournament tennis player, it can backfire once you get off the court. It can also impress other people—women among them—for the wrong reasons. So, between my shyness and my audacity, most people tended to overlook my real self. My serious girlfriends knew me (there were really only a few of them, and never more than one at a time). But I didn’t always want that kind of intimacy.

B
Y EARLY
1979, quite a bit had changed. I’d won the Masters; I was number four in the world to Vitas’s number three (behind Borg and Connors, two players he would never surpass). I was no longer a blip on his screen; I was the jet coming up fast behind him.

Women were starting to look at me in a different way, and I’ll confess: I didn’t mind it a bit. This wasn’t like Junior Davis Cup, when I’d had to carry around six rackets to try to get people to notice me. Suddenly I was on TV, in newspapers and magazines. I was beginning to make real money for the first time in my life—one of the first things I did with my tournament earnings, and the proceeds from an endorsement deal my dad had hammered out with Sergio Tacchini just as I was about to turn pro in the summer of 1978, was to trade in the orange Pinto for a snappy blue two-seat Mercedes convertible.

Now at least I wouldn’t have to look like a jerk when I followed Vitas to Xenon.

In fact, though, following Vitas—in any sense—was less and less what I had in mind.

It was getting increasingly more complicated living at home. I was twenty and becoming financially independent; it was time to jump out of the nest and fly. In mid-1979, I bought my first apartment, on the Upper East Side. My new co-op cost $350,000—big money in the late ’70s. I was pretty impressed with myself! Now when I came back from my travels, I was living the life of a well-to-do young Manhattan bachelor, hanging around with my friends at restaurants like George Martin’s, Oren & Aretzky’s, Herlihy’s. That stretch of the Upper East Side was a lively scene in those days. There were a lot of women around, and many of them were models (or said they were); most were a couple of years older than I was, and they liked the fact that I was just twenty. My shyness was starting to wear off.

I was the kingpin of my little group: Doug Saputo, Peter Rennert, Peter Fleming, another Jersey tennis player named Fritz Buehning. In a certain way, we were the team I’d always wanted to belong to. At the same time, though, I was clearly the star, which felt good, but complicated, too.

We were all just kids, really. We fancied ourselves rock-’n’-roll, anti-establishment: We’d wear T-shirts and jean jackets everywhere—even into fancy restaurants—and (I wince to remember) act like idiots a lot of the time. I’d settled into a role: the outsider, the kid from Queens. A rebel. When I first started playing at the U.S. Open and the Masters, I was more interested in hanging out with the parking attendants and towel guys than with the big shots in the stands.

But then hanging out began to get a lot more interesting.

I was starting to run into Richard Weisman, the man who’d set up that first charity match between Vitas and myself, more and more. Richard, then in his late thirties, was quite an interesting fellow. He always had a box at Wimbledon, courtside seats at the Garden and the Open. He collected art, and he gave amazing parties at his place at the UN Plaza, at 49th and First.

But what Richard really collected was people, and so, since I was a freshly minted celebrity, I became one of the people he collected. Richard seemed to know absolutely everybody who was anybody in New York. He was a modern-day Gatsby, a guy who knew Steve Rubell and Peter Beard and Cheryl Tiegs and Warhol, who could get any of them to drop everything and come over. He’d call me up and say, “Listen, I’m having this party Saturday, and Mick Jagger is coming, and the governor of New York, and Jacqueline Bisset and Jackie Stewart, the race-car driver”—he’d list seven or eight totally (seemingly) disconnected people. I’d get off the phone and say, “There’s no way all these people are coming to this party.” And every single one of them would be there.

Richard’s art collection was incredible. Initially, I thought a lot of the stuff was ridiculous, especially the Roy Lichtensteins, which simply weren’t to my taste—but then I was pretty impressed when Richard wound up selling them for a huge amount of money. As I learned more about art, I learned more about the aesthetic and financial significance of what he had.