You Cannot Be Serious (16 page)

I didn’t—in mixed!

The last mixed-doubles match I ever played (until the ’99 Wimbledon) was at the ’79 U.S. Open, with Stacy again. We played Stan and Anne Smith, and lost 3–6, 7–6, 3–6. I lost my serve twice, and nobody else lost his or hers the entire match. That was the ultimate embarrassment. I said, “That’s it; I’m never playing again. I can’t handle this.”

It wasn’t Stacy’s fault; it was mine. I was pretty match-tough, but that kind of pressure was beyond me.

As was the strain of maintaining a (mostly long-distance) relationship, at that age, amid the distractions and temptations of the road. I actually liked having a girlfriend. I also liked the idea of having my cake and eating it, too.

Then, at the 1980 French Open, I made a mistake that I later vowed I would never make again with anyone as long as I lived. I’d been building up a sense of guilt about having slept with a few other women during the time Stacy and I had been together—and I told her about it.

It was just a disaster. Stacy was very upset, of course: She didn’t feel we could go on. And I can’t say I blame her. It was so bad—so obviously the wrong thing for me to do. I believe now that if you’re committed to someone, it’s wrong to be with anyone else. Back then, I guess that was beyond my powers, so the lesson I learned for the time being was, if I was going to be jerk enough to cheat, at least don’t tell anyone about it. Learning not to cheat would take time.

That was one of the worst weeks of my life. I was seeded number two at the French, but I felt so bad about unloading this bomb on my girlfriend that I bombed on the court. I couldn’t think of anything else but what I’d just done, and I wound up losing to Paul McNamee in the round of 16.

I thought I loved Stacy. Was I
in
love? That’s a tougher question to answer. I don’t know if, at that age, you can really be
in
love, with all that that later entails. And quite frankly, at twenty-one, I had other worlds to conquer.

A
FTER PEOPLE TALK
about my temper, the main thing everybody always wants to discuss is my first Wimbledon final against Borg in 1980, the one with the fourth-set tiebreaker that went thirty-four points. It’s funny: People usually think I won that match, even though I lost it in the fifth. That’s OK with me. In fact, in a way it’s OK that I
didn’t
win that one.

Unfortunately, I almost always feel like a loser after I’m beaten in a tennis match. It’s a sad fact about tennis—and probably other sports as well—that when you lose your confidence in your game, you lose a bit of confidence in yourself as a person. It’s hard to overcome that feeling. You always have to fight the thought, “I’m a loser; I’m not the same person I was,” when, in fact, you may very well be a better person in certain ways.

Of course, there have been a fair number of times in my career when I not only lost a match that I probably shouldn’t have, but also acted like a complete jerk.

However, when you lose the final at Wimbledon 8–6 in the fifth set to Bjorn Borg, that’s different. I never acted like a jerk when I played Borg: I respected him too much; I respected the
occasion.
Whether I won or lost was always less important than that I got to be a part of history.

It was the first time I’d ever played Bjorn on grass, and I thought my game matched up perfectly against his on that surface. For one thing, I had beaten him in that final at Dallas in May, on a fast indoor carpet not totally dissimilar to grass. He had a habit of standing way back to receive; I knew I could get to net quickly on most of my serves and take command of the angles. Also, while Borg’s first serve was stronger than most people realize, he was never known as a volleyer, and his second serve could be a bit dicey.

From the beginning, everything went according to plan. Early on, in fact, I was amazed at how easily I was winning. To tell the truth, I think I actually let up a little bit—which was my first mistake. I’d won the first set 6–1, and I was up 5–4 in the second, very close to taking a two-sets-to-love lead, at which point I could have just kicked his behind—which is what I expected I was going to do. But my plan went off the rails.

Some of it was just bad luck. First, I had had to play Connors the day before—which, because it was the first time I’d played him at Wimbledon since our ’77 semifinal, was obviously an emotional match. To make matters worse, though, since I had spent the past year pushing Jimmy out of his number-two spot in the rankings, there was bad blood between us, and now it was showing itself in the form of some serious testiness.

At that point, my relationship with Connors was the exact opposite of my relationship with Borg—there was little respect for the man or the occasion of playing him. Like two club fighters, we trash-talked each other on the changeovers: Jimmy called me a baby, and I told him what he could kiss. It was exciting, in a perverse way, but it also turned out to be a very draining four-set win.

As if that weren’t enough, because of a rain delay earlier, I had had to play the doubles semifinal right after my match with Connors!

Borg, however, had played his singles semi on Friday, so he got to spend his Saturday resting.

Borg never played doubles. Connors stopped playing them very early in his career, and Lendl rarely played them—but I loved playing doubles, for two reasons: First, I liked being part of a team. Second, it kept me sharp for singles, and I preferred it to practicing. Most of the time at Wimbledon, the scheduling worked to my advantage—I could play singles one day, doubles the next. But looking back, I do wonder whether pulling out of the doubles semifinal that year at Wimbledon would have given me the extra energy to win that fifth set against Borg. Still, I know now—and knew then—that I could never have done that to Peter, my friend and partner. It just wasn’t my style.

That final was when I saw for the first time how Bjorn’s incredible athletic ability and physical fitness could cost me.

At 5–4 in that second set, I got a little tight—maybe at the thought of the match coming too easily—and he got his serve going, which let him come back and win the set 7–5. At that point, something in me deflated. I felt I should have been up two sets to love, and the fact that I wasn’t opened the gates to mental and physical fatigue, and I lost the third set, 3–6.

Then he broke my serve once in the fourth set, and suddenly I was serving at 3–5. It felt like a nightmare—it had all happened so quickly. Here I’d honestly thought I was going to win 6–1, 6–4, 6–3; now, all of a sudden, I was almost out of the match.

Which was when something magical happened. I held my serve; saved a couple of match points, then on Borg’s serve, I got my fight back. By the time we got to the tiebreaker, I was back to feeling I could win the match.

Greatness is a judgment that’s bestowed long after the fact, but I can tell you that while I was in that tiebreaker, I knew something special was going on. In those days, there was still a standing-room section at Wimbledon finals (great seats if you’re willing to stand on line for three days), and the crowd was very excited: very vociferous, and then dramatically hushed at other moments. Somehow—maybe because I’d saved those match points earlier—I could sense that even the people who didn’t want me to win the match wanted me to win the tiebreaker.

They just didn’t want this match to
end.

And the match
itself
didn’t seem to want to end. The tiebreaker kept going back and forth, back and forth, both of us hitting a lot of winners, neither of us able to put it away. I had been feeling tired, but now the crowd pumped me up so much that I forgot about it.

I don’t know why it stands out in my mind after so many years, but I hit one running forehand—a winner down the line, as it turned out—and ended up practically in the crowd when I stopped, and Centre Court at Wimbledon is pretty wide. I could feel the excitement coming off those people in waves—to the extent that I actually had to make an effort not to get too excited myself. The further we got into that tiebreaker, though, the less I could hold it in.

And then when I finally won it, 18–16, I knew I’d won the match.
Knew
it.

I thought Bjorn would be utterly deflated after losing that tiebreaker—but whatever he had inside him was beyond anything I could imagine. He was not only undiscouraged, but physically, he was still going strong.

I wondered how this could even be possible. I had forgotten my fatigue during the tiebreaker, but now I was beginning to remember it. Borg served the first game of the fifth set, and I hit a couple of good returns to go up 30–love—and then he started coming up with big first serves. As fatigued as I was, I wasn’t making him work hard enough on his serve.

I lost that first game, then held, and then we went into a pattern in which he was holding serve at love or 15 every time. I kept saying to myself,
Oh, my God, I’ve got to break him now.

It never happened. When I saw how completely unperturbed he seemed about that fourth-set loss, and how he just kept getting stronger in the fifth—something in me wilted. He seemed totally fresh, and I was drained.

I was amazed. He had won four Wimbledons in a row! I kept thinking,
Come on, isn’t enough enough?
As the last set wore on, it became a war of attrition, which was exactly what I hadn’t wanted to happen: I just didn’t have enough gas left in the tank. Finally, I was barely hanging on: I couldn’t even win points on his serve.

And then we were shaking hands at the net. I knew I could beat Borg. But Wimbledon still belonged to him.

I
HAD WON THE
U.S. O
PEN
the year before, but I had won it without having to play Connors or Borg. In 1980, I would have to play them both (not to mention Ivan Lendl).

I still consider the ’80 Open the best physical achievement in my career. In the quarterfinals, on Thursday night, I beat Lendl 7–5 in the fourth set; the next morning, Peter and I played the doubles final against Stan Smith and Bob Lutz, which we lost in a tough five-setter. I really felt we should’ve won that match—but I couldn’t feel too broken up about losing it, since it felt like kind of a last hurrah for the great doubles team of Smith and Lutz (whom we’d beaten in the final the previous year). I had particular respect for Stan, because of his dedication to Davis Cup.

On Saturday, I played Connors in a wild semifinal. After I’d won the first set 6–4 and gone up 5–3 in the second, I got a little tight and Jimmy went on an unbelievable tear, working up the crowd in his inimitable fashion, boosting his own energy in the process, and winning the next eleven games in a row. After taking the second set 7–5 and the third, 6–0, he was now up 2–0 in the fourth, and I was, frankly, feeling a bit embarrassed.

At that point, I received a gift from a crowd that had been on Jimmy’s side: Now, since they wanted to see more tennis, they started to cheer me on. And suddenly the strange chemistry of tennis matches altered—now Jimmy got tight, I raised my game, won the fourth, 6–3, and went up 5–3 in the final set.

Then Jimmy got the crowd back.

Our seesaw battle sawed once more, and we wound up in a fifth-set tiebreaker, both of us (I’m sure) feeling that this match was going to be horrendous for whoever lost. I know I felt I was going to tear my hair out if I didn’t win.

I should mention that I’ve always liked the tiebreak rule: It makes for more drama, because the crowd knows the match is going to end, and so do the players. And in the final set, that knowledge—that the end was in sight—helped me. In a tiebreaker, the rule of thumb is that the stronger server has the edge, and I knew that was me. I knew that if I could just get a couple of good serves in, I could win.

Which was just what I did.

Then on Sunday, still depleted, I got into another one of my classic battles against Borg (who hadn’t had to play doubles, or Connors). The fast court favored me, but after I’d gone up 7–6, 6–1, Bjorn, once again capitalizing on my fatigue and his superior conditioning, started inching his way back into the match. I’m positive he had our Wimbledon match in mind—I know I did. He must have been thinking that I would wilt again, and the king of five-setters would once more prevail. (Bjorn did much better in five-setters, overall, than he did in three-setters, simply because he was so much fitter than almost anyone else.)

Not so fast.

I’m sure that after I lost the third and fourth sets, the crowd thought Borg would ride his momentum to take the fifth set and his first U.S. Open title. Strangely enough, though, that very expectation (the crowd is always a critical component in a big match) helped me relax, and pump myself up. I had lost a match I should have won at Wimbledon; I didn’t want to do that again.

I had come this far, I thought; I
could
stick with it and win this match. I had a surprise in store for my hometown crowd. Getting off to a good start in the fifth set helped me to grab a second wind, a last shot of adrenaline. In the end, one break of Bjorn’s serve was all I needed.

When we shook hands, I could see that he was devastated. He had started out the year by winning the Masters, his first-ever major title in New York: This was supposed to have been the other bookend. I sensed he felt I had finally gotten the upper hand on him.

A
FTER THE OPEN
that year, it was clear that the rivalry between Borg and me had become a hot sports story, like those boxing matchups that promoters are always fanning into flames. The story seemed to have plenty of dramatic elements: the champion versus the young contender. The Swede versus the American. The cool, withdrawn one against the hot and stormy one. That fourth-set tiebreaker we’d played at Wimbledon had begun to take on mythic overtones, and as great as it had been, in my private moments I sometimes wondered if the sportswriters and commentators weren’t being a little…poetic about it. That’s the funny thing about tennis points, and games: They may be awe-inspiring at the moment, but then—except for the videotape, which really tells only a little bit of the story—the moment is gone. They’re like poetry written on water.