You Cannot Be Serious (2 page)

It’s hard to describe what it was like to be in my shoes for the fifteen years I spent on the men’s tennis tour. It was a pretty wild ride.

It didn’t hurt that I happened to come along at exactly the right point in history. For a decade, from the mid ’70s to the mid ’80s, professional tennis went through a boom the likes of which it had never enjoyed before, or have since. The money in the game was unprecedented, as was the electricity. Starting with Bjorn Borg, tennis players became more than just sports stars. Back then, even rock musicians aspired to be touring tennis pros. (Of course,
we
all aspired to be rock musicians.)

Borg was three years older, but had turned pro at a younger age than I did, and there never seemed to be anything especially boyish about him—even if he did spend his spare time reading comic books. He was remote, soulful, self-contained: The less he showed of himself, the more the girls screamed.

From the start, when I came out of nowhere to reach the semifinals of Wimbledon at the age of eighteen, I was a bad boy in the public’s eyes. (I read somewhere that when Thomas Hulce was studying for his role as Mozart in
Amadeus,
he looked at videotapes of me acting up on the tennis court.)

My friends on the tour called me Junior. (My dad is John Patrick McEnroe, Senior.) To the public, I was Super-Brat, McBrat, McNasty—all those snide nicknames—or just plain Johnny Mac, everybody’s naughty brother or son or cousin or neighbor, the guy people loved to hate, or (maybe) hated to love. Tennis players had had tantrums before, had yelled at umpires before—Pancho Gonzalez, Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors—but no one had done it quite the way I did.

People had an incredible reaction to me right from the start. Maybe my rages stirred up something that they’d had to bury or swallow as kids. I don’t know. Whatever it was, the public really sat up and took notice.

Most people dream about being famous, but as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. There were times when I would have loved to get away from my high visibility. I tried. Once I took a vacation trip to Fiji, thinking that surely, out there in the vast reaches of the South Pacific, I could become an anonymous American citizen for a few days. What I hadn’t realized was that 90 percent of the tourists who went to Fiji were Australians—the world’s biggest tennis fans. G’day, Mac!

To this day, I often feel as if my name is written across my forehead. It’s hard to walk down a street anywhere (and especially in my beloved Manhattan, where walking down the street is one of my favorite occupations) without being spotted, and called out to, as if the person knew me in the fifth grade.

Most of the time, the experience is positive. Sure, I could live without being asked for my autograph in the middle of dinner. And the fact is, I don’t really like to give autographs to anyone over eleven or twelve years old: What can my chicken-scrawl mean to anybody who’s not a kid—besides money on the sports memorabilia market? (But don’t get me started on that.) And my signature isn’t worth that much.

But having someone come up and say, “Hey, John McEnroe, you’re the greatest tennis player that ever lived!” is not exactly difficult to swallow. Or, “Hey, tennis isn’t the same since you’ve been gone!” Or “That Davis Cup victory in ninety-two was amazing!” Or “I really appreciate your making that stand on South Africa.” (Back in 1980, someone offered me a million dollars—an unbelievable amount at the time—to play a one-day exhibition against Bjorn Borg in Sun City. I turned it down—it didn’t feel right—little knowing how many friends I would win in the process.)

I don’t get tired of such compliments. I feel proud of having earned them. And—I admit it—there’s a part of me that’s addicted to the attention.

It’s one reason—I’ll also admit this—that I’m writing this book. It’s not just to get attention, but to do some serious thinking about how much attention I actually need, and why I need it (as you’ve probably figured out by now, that title on the cover is really half-joking and half-serious). I truly do wonder sometimes: Will I be totally forgotten at some point? Will I end up walking around wishing for what I don’t have anymore? People always seem to want what they can’t have, which seems a rather pathetic part of human nature to me. Will I be the guy going around saying, “Hey, remember me?”

I hope not.

At worst, I know people have seen me as a kind of caricature: a spoiled, loudmouthed, ill-tempered crybaby. I don’t deny I’ve acted that way a lot (though I’ve almost always instantly regretted it). However, I sometimes worry that as I get older, that caricature is getting more deeply etched—that maybe it’s all I’ll get to leave to posterity.

I worry when the best my own agent can seem to do for me is say, “Hey, are you interested in playing Anna Kournikova?” Am I really that much of a caricature that the best gig I can get now is playing Kournikova? Is that what it’s come down to for me at forty-three years old? Is that what it’s come down to for tennis? I think it shows how many problems there are for the game when the main topic of conversation at the 2000 U.S. Open seemed to be my comments about Venus Williams and whether I was going to play her. (And when I brought up the subject in the first place, in the course of being profiled for the
New Yorker,
was it just a way of promoting myself? I’m still not sure.)

I’ll tell you right here and now, though, that I have a lot of other fish to fry besides playing Anna Kournikova or Venus Williams—and I know the same is true for them.

I feel there has to be some real seriousness in my life—in all our lives—since September 11th. It’s as if we finally have to face the reality that we’ve been avoiding for a long time. Those beliefs we all depended on—“Buy any technology stock, it’s going to go through the roof”; “No one would ever do anything to the United States of America”—have been shattered. I certainly hope something good will come out of all that’s happened—that the new reality is one we can live with.

At forty-three, I’m a father of six. I don’t want to be a caricature anymore—in some ways, I feel I’ve hidden behind that for a long time, or at the very least, I’ve gotten by without having to be particularly mature.

See, part of the magic of playing tennis for a living is that it lets you act like a kid for as long as you can keep going. Now, some of you will say, and I agree, that it’s good to keep that kid in you, but every kid has to grow up sometime, or else wind up a case of arrested development.

I always considered myself more well-rounded than most tennis players: I read, I thought, I looked at the outside world. But I always looked at it from a distance. It was hard to get away from the feeling that everything revolved around my own closed little universe, one I ventured outside of just to get perks—to get good seats at a concert, or meet people I would never have known if I weren’t a famous tennis player. And I didn’t venture out of it a great deal. In a lot of ways, I was really oblivious to the outside world. And let me tell you: Once you get away from the real world, it’s very difficult to make that transition back into it. Look at all the ex-celebrities who wind up sick or angry or burned-out. Or dead.

There was a time—I’ll admit it—when my head was so big it barely fit through the door. Having kids, I hope, changed all that for me. Having kids brings you down to earth right away, unless you let other people raise them, which I was never about to do.

Imagine that: Johnny Mac a forty-three-year-old father of six! When I first stepped out onto the world’s stage, I was a chubby-faced eighteen-year-old with a mop of curly brown hair and a red headband. Today I’m a lean-faced man with thin graying hair, lines in my cheeks, a small silver hoop in my left earlobe, and a roses-and-thorns tattoo on my right shoulder. I can change a diaper, calm a tantrum, dry tears, make breakfast.

I’m still in good shape. I play tennis almost every day and work out on a stationary bike or jump rope when I can’t find the time or want to mix things up. My vision is still sharp enough (around 20/15), and my reflexes quick enough, that on a given day, I can give anyone on the men’s tour a run for his money for a set or two. My standards—as you may remember—are rather high on a tennis court, and I put enough work into my game so that I don’t disgust myself out there. Until recently, I actually considered going back to playing Davis Cup doubles again, after a break of nearly a decade. But you’ll have to ask my brother Patrick about that now.

On the other hand, I’m not kidding myself. No one knows his own body like a professional athlete, and I fully realize that the machine God gave me is nowhere near as flexible as it used to be, that I’ve lost the inevitable step or two along the way. As somebody who thinks almost obsessively in numerical terms (when I was a little boy I used to amaze my parents’ friends by multiplying and dividing large numbers in my head), I’d say, objectively speaking, that I’m about 60 percent of the tennis player I was in my prime.

Which is not too shabby. But then again, I’m not really a tennis player anymore.

S
O WHAT AM
I?

For one thing, I’ve been a tennis commentator for the last ten years, with enough pride in my work to feel that I’m at the top of my profession. This didn’t just happen by itself. As you know, I’ve always had a certain facility for speaking my mind, but commentating demanded that I focus my thoughts, speak in complete sentences, and learn when silence was more valuable than talk. In short, it was (and still is) hard work. And so I had to learn the ropes.

Fortunately—as in my tennis career—I had great teachers. I’ve always been happier as a team player than as a solo performer, and my work with great broadcasters like Dick Enberg and Ted Robinson (and producers like Gordon Beck and John McGuinness, who gave me the freedom to be myself) has been a joy and an education to me. I believe that the joy comes through on television and over the radio—that my commentary has allowed people to see a different part of me, a far more lighthearted and self-deprecating side than I ever allowed myself to show on the tennis court.

I’ve done a lot of growing up over the past quarter-century. On the other hand, like most people—maybe even more than most people—I’m still a work in progress. Anyone who’s seen me play on the Seniors Tour knows that even if my temper has lost a step or two, I can still get pretty far out there. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to—for one thing, because I don’t play nearly as much as I used to—but now even a little bit feels like way too much (and the fact that people
expect
me to go too far doesn’t make matters any easier).

I’m trying to work it out. One of the things I’m striving to come to terms with is the deep-down part of me that isn’t completely willing to give up my anger. After all, I feel certain that it’s part of what drove me to the top, and though I may not be at the top of my game anymore, that fire in my belly is still hot. Where would I be if I let it go out?

And what exactly do I need it for now?

P
RIDE IS A FUNNY THING
. While throughout my playing career, I had a lot to be proud of—and much to regret—I was never one to dwell on things. After all, I’m a serve-and-volley player: my whole game was, and still is, based on moving forward, always forward, then making the winning shot.

But once your career is over you’re in a funny place if you’ve done reasonably well as a professional athlete, namely: Where do you go from here?

During my whole career, I basically went from one thing to another: The next thing always just came around the corner. Make no mistake, I had goals along the way—to win the NCAA’s, to win Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the Davis Cup; to try to emulate my hero, Rod Laver—and I achieved a lot of them. In the last few years, however, I’ve given a lot of hard thought to who I was, who I am, and who I want to become.

I’m very proud of my tennis career. I won 77 singles tournaments and 77 doubles—154 tournament titles in all, more than any pro ever to play the game. My singles record puts me in third place, all-time, after Connors and Ivan Lendl, and in doubles titles I’m second only to Tom Okker, who won 78.

Think about how few great players had significant records in both singles and doubles. Not Borg (he almost never played doubles), nor Connors, nor Lendl. Think about how few American stars of the modern era have played Davis Cup. One of my very proudest achievements is having helped resuscitate the Cup in this country, starting in the late ’70s, a time when the other top Americans—especially James Scott Connors—weren’t especially interested in wasting their energy on playing for practically nothing when there was so much money to be had in tournaments and exhibitions.

Call me corny, but I’ve always been extraordinarily proud of representing my country: There’s simply no thrill in tennis quite like it. You may remember the pictures of me running around the court with an American flag after our dramatic victory over Switzerland in my last Davis Cup tie in the final year of my career, 1992. (A meeting between countries in Davis Cup is called a “tie.”) In all, I played for the cup in thirty ties over twelve years, winning forty-one singles matches and fifty-nine overall.

The main point, though, I’d like to think, is not the number of matches I won, but the five cups I helped gain for the U.S.A.

I guess you could say that history, and whatever part I’ve been able to play in it, has always felt extremely important to me. My idol, Rod Laver, has a rock-solid claim to being one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and for a very good reason: He achieved (not once but twice!) the colossally difficult feat of winning all four major titles—the French Open, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open—in a single calendar year.

I was never able to do it. I won three Wimbledons and four U.S. Opens, but never a French or Australian Open.

Pete Sampras has won thirteen Grand Slam titles, and even though the French Open has eluded him, he’s won seven Wimbledons, four U.S. Opens, and two Australians—an unbelievable, maybe unbeatable, record.