You Cannot Be Serious (19 page)

The umpire was still hesitant. Then Vilas walked over to the split seam, reached down, and grabbed it. He’s a very strong guy. He picked up the edge of the carpet and pulled, until about thirty feet of it had come unglued. “Oh, look,” he called to the umpire. “The court is not playable. Come look at it now.”

They got their delay, and we were just steaming. We went to the locker room and sat for twenty-five minutes, with images in our heads of the two of them laughing about the whole thing.

Sure enough, when they came out again, they were a
team—
and not just any team, but a super-team, like Batman and Robin. The momentum of the match shifted completely, and they won the second set. The quality of the tennis throughout was amazing: Both teams were playing very sharply and aggressively, and every rally seemed to go five or six shots longer than anybody would have imagined.

Meanwhile, their captain, Carlos Junquet, kept jumping to his feet and questioning every call that went against Argentina. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went over to him and told him what I thought of his coaching style.

Clerc, by far the more hotheaded of the team, called over to say what he thought of me. I gave him some back.

“Be quiet, John,” Arthur called.

The crowd stamped harder, shouted louder, waved faster. We won the third set. We needed one more.

I was serving in the first game of the fourth set. Every time I went to the line to serve, Clerc or Vilas, whichever one was receiving, would walk off to the side, wipe off his racket, talk to the other guy for a moment. It was a delaying tactic, pure and simple, designed to throw off my rhythm. It didn’t work, though: I won my serve anyway.

As we were changing sides, Clerc was standing and talking to the umpire, complaining about something, and—I admit it; I was just sick of his gamesmanship—I trash-talked him. It happens more than you’d think in professional tennis (with the women, too, by the way): If you’re not passing each other in icy silence when you change sides, you’re muttering things at each other, sometimes even giving each other a little bump as you pass. You’re gladiators out there, after all. Even in Davis Cup.

This was a little louder than a mutter, though. And Clerc turned to me and lisped, in a mincing, effeminate voice, “You’re so nice, John.”

I went ballistic. I threw down my racket, got right up into his face, and started screaming at him. He was screaming at me. Everybody ran over to try and break it up: Peter, Vilas, Arthur, their captain, and the referee, a Dane named Kurt Nielsen. Arthur was really steamed at me now, so much so that—believe it or not—Peter literally had to hold him back as Arthur tried to push me away from Clerc. The crowd was on its feet, going crazy.

Finally, after a few minutes, we actually went back to playing tennis. At one point, when I made a loud remark, Arthur pointed at me and said, “You stop it. Just stop it and play.” I was impressed enough to shut up: I had never seen him like this before. However, on the next changeover, Arthur started to lecture us anyway. Peter interrupted him. “Come on—we’re all on the same
team
,” Peter said, impatiently. “Let’s just go back and beat these guys.”

Clerc and Vilas kept alternating their big ground strokes with topspin lobs—mixing it up, throwing us off. They took the fourth set, 6–4, and then the final set seesawed until they got a bead on my serve and broke me (Peter and I were always more vulnerable when he was at net). And then Vilas was serving at 7–6.

If he held, that would be the match, and probably the tie. Argentina would be ahead 2–1, with Tanner to play Vilas after I played Clerc the next day. I knew I could beat Clerc, but Roscoe over Vilas would’ve been an upset.

We broke Vilas at love.

Clerc was serving at 9–10, the twentieth game of the fifth set—the crowd was hoarse by this time—to try to even the score. His serve had been huge for the entire match: He had held twelve straight times. This was his thirteenth service game, though, and since there’s always something weird about big Davis Cup matches, it made a strange kind of sense that this game would be bad luck for him. When my lob over their heads at our ad kissed the corner lines and bounced out of reach, Peter and I threw up our arms, and the crowd jumped to its feet. The twenty-game set had been the longest fifth set in a Cup final since 1907.

The weirdness settled in even further after the match was over, when we remembered what Victor Amaya, our practice player, had said at the warmup that morning. All the rest of us had been convinced that Peter and I would just roll over Vilas and Clerc. But Vic had said, “I think you’ll win it 11–9 in the fifth.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, against Clerc, I was—practically—a perfect gentleman. Whatever nonsense we had had to air, we’d already aired it in the doubles: Our singles match was just tennis. Really good tennis. After we split the first two sets, I got down 1–3 in the third, then won five games in a row to take the set before going into the locker room for the break. I was determined to jump right on Clerc after the break and close out the match, but instead he jumped on me, surprising me with his aggressiveness and grabbing the fourth set, 6–3.

So once again, it all came down to the fifth.

I must say that even if my fitness has occasionally been suspect, I think my overall record in five-set matches is up there with practically anybody’s. The fifth set is for all the marbles, and while I’ve been known to choke under certain conditions, I would never have accomplished what I did if I hadn’t been able to lift my game for the big points, the big games, the big sets. What changed for me in the fifth set that day was my serve. It had been good for the first four sets, but now I felt I could win service points at will. When I broke Clerc at love in the fourth game of the fifth, I knew the match was mine. I was running on fumes and adrenaline, but I knew the match was mine. When Clerc hit that last volley in the fourth game long, I jumped a foot in the air and pumped my fist; the crowd jumped to its feet, yelling, “U–S–A! U–S–A!”

That gave me goosebumps. I couldn’t squander the rare opportunity of having an entire arena full of people all on my side, and I knew I wouldn’t let my country down. Every time you change sides at a Davis Cup final, the cup itself is sitting there on a table, staring you in the face. I wanted it.

I served five rockets in the last game. On the first, I butchered an easy volley, but I didn’t make that mistake again. Clerc barely got his racket on my last serve. I leaped in the air, let out a victory cry, then jumped the net to shake Clerc’s hand. I threw myself into Arthur’s arms, and then Bill Norris’s. I turned to the crowd and stuck both my index fingers into the air. It was impossible to hear. Then I hugged every guy on the team.

I was a hero: a very strange sensation for me, let me tell you.

It was Sunday, December 13, 1981. It had been a long year, and an amazing one. I had won Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and three points in the Davis Cup final. The last American to do that was Don Budge, in 1937.

I was on top of the mountain. Where would I go now?

7

T
RUE STORY
: in late 1980, I played an exhibition with Borg, Connors, and Vitas in a beautiful hall in Frankfurt. In the semifinals, Vitas was playing Borg, Bjorn missed a passing shot, and—thinking the crowd would be making a lot of noise—he said, “Shit!” At the instant he said it, though, it happened that the hall was relatively quiet, and everybody in the place heard him! Vitas’s mouth dropped open, and then he fell down on his knees and started bowing to Borg, as the crowd gave Bjorn a standing ovation.

It was so conspicuous when Borg reacted that once; I felt just as conspicuous whenever I made a sound in a match against him. The contrast was glaring when I played him, much more so than with the other players, most of whom reacted on some level. Later on, even Sampras questioned calls!
Wilander,
for God’s sake, questioned calls and occasionally got angry. Lendl was never considered a bad actor, and he got peeved plenty.

How could a guy not change his facial expression more than three or four times over the twelve years of his career?

I think what was happening at that Frankfurt exhibition was that Bjorn was finally starting to relax. It could also be that he had already made a very important decision.

In the fall after the ’81 U.S. Open, several of us played a set of exhibitions in Australia. Vitas, Bjorn, and I were in a room, having a beer before a press conference, and Bjorn said to us, “I’m quitting tennis.”

We barely even responded to it. In fact, Vitas and I laughed. “Are you joking?” I said. “What the hell are you going to do? You’re twenty-five!” But Bjorn was dead serious. All he would say was, “No, no, no, I’m not playing anymore.” Vitas and I just sat there, dumbfounded. Then we walked down to the press conference, and Borg promptly told the reporters how excited he was to be playing next year! I remember thinking, he would’ve made a great politician. He certainly had me confused.

There was some speculation about Borg at the time, because he hadn’t signed the ATP commitment for the coming year—each year, at the U.S. Open, we had to make a schedule for the entire next year and sign a form saying what tournaments we were going to play. Borg didn’t want to sign his commitment form in September of ’81. He felt that, emotionally, he wasn’t in a position to do it.

He was told that if he didn’t sign the form, he would have to play the qualifiers for every event in the coming year. Along with everyone at the top of the game, I felt that this was a slap in the face to one of our greatest champions, but the ATP said, “We’ve got to go by the rules.”

It felt obvious to me that this organization wasn’t looking out for the best interests of the game. It was like something you’d find in a Communist country. I thought it was scandalous that they would do this to their number-one person. If anything, I felt their attitude should have been: “Look, this guy is burnt out; he needs a break. Let’s give him the time he needs—let him take two, three, four months away from the game, and whenever he’s ready to come back, let him do what he wants.”

As a result of all this, everyone was asking Bjorn, “What are you going to do next year?” I just assumed that his saying he was quitting was a negotiating ploy, or that he needed some time off, or that he was mad he had lost his number-one ranking and hadn’t won the Open—any number of things. I didn’t think he really meant it.

Then I realized he was serious.

That was when people started saying to me, “You drove him out of the game.” People said Borg realized he couldn’t beat me in the U.S. Open or Wimbledon, that my style of play was too much for him. And so that was it, he quit.

Here’s the thing, though: At that point, he had defeated Connors something like ten times in a row; he had beaten him in the semis of the Open that year. At the very worst, he was a clear number two. You never knew what could happen in major events. I could lose, and Bjorn wind up playing someone besides me in the finals, maybe Jimmy. I could get injured. A lot of things could happen. To walk away so quickly when he was still so close to number one seemed crazy.

I do think I had something to do with it—he might have thought,
I can’t be number one, so forget it.
But, amazingly enough, I also think that he had other things on his mind besides me.

Here’s what I speculate: Borg was on the verge of being overwhelmed. He was also the first guy who could afford to quit. He’d started so young; at age twenty-five, he’d already traveled the circuit extensively for ten years. His life had become so regimented, and the superstitions so ingrained, that for the five years he won Wimbledon, he’d stay at the same hotel, practice at the same time and place—all day. Every day, he’d eat the same meals, get a massage at the same time.

So when he saw what Vitas was doing, which was the other extreme—the staying up all night, the partying, the women—when Bjorn experienced it on a small scale at the exhibitions, just enough to give him a taste of what he had been missing…well, that was that.

Bjorn is like Jekyll and Hyde. A couple of years ago, when I was playing an exhibition with him in Stockholm, he said to me, “I’m two people.” And he is. He’s the world’s greatest guy, and then he’s completely out of his mind. I’m crazy to begin with—somewhat crazy and somewhat normal. Bjorn goes
way
to the extremes.

After he made the rash decision to say, “Forget it, I don’t need this anymore,” I think he found he’d dug himself into a hole and he couldn’t get out of it. He’s got so much pride, it would simply have been too hard for him to admit he was wrong and come back.

The only thing I can even begin to compare the impact of his decision to is the NBA, when Magic Johnson and Larry Bird came in to the league in the early ’80s and sparked a renaissance. Eventually, the Lakers and the Celtics were the two best teams. Magic had great players around him, Kareem and James Worthy and Michael Cooper; Bird had Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish.

Now, imagine, right at the peak of this renaissance, if the entire Laker team had retired!

Borg’s leaving tennis was like that: a huge blow for the sport, and for me personally. It was unbelievable: The matches between us had become really exciting, and even though Jimmy had slipped a bit (or so I thought), he was still certainly a major threat—and now, suddenly, Borg was gone. It took the wind out of my sails: I had a very tough time motivating myself and getting back on track. It took me a couple of years to start improving again.

As I’ve said, I’d always felt that I would deal with being number one when I got there—I wasn’t going to worry about it before it happened. I hadn’t realized what it entailed, however; it was far more than I’d imagined. The weight of people’s expectations felt huge. It was very difficult to get comfortable.

First of all, I was amazed at how differently people treated me now. I’d thought number two was a pretty big deal! But number one was a very strange place indeed—the peak of the mountain, those icy winds blowing around my head. I was alienated from my competitors, and I had an even tougher time with my friends. I was less trusting in all relationships, because I felt, more than ever before, that everybody was out to get something from me. The sheer volume of attention was unbelievable—no-body who hasn’t been there can begin to understand it. I was unable to relax into it, unable simply to focus on the work of playing tennis. A line from a letter sent to me by my old high-school friend Melissa Franklin kept ringing in my ears: “You always seem slightly distressed.” I knew she was right, and I kept wondering why.