You Cannot Be Serious (20 page)

B
ORG HAD WON
the last two Masters; now that he was gone, there was a slight power vacuum at the top of the tour. I was officially number one, but the shock of Bjorn’s departure, combined with a huge playing schedule in 1981, had left me feeling tired and flat by the end of the year. Factor in a rough autumn for Connors—he and his wife, Patti, were in the process of separating (temporarily, as it would turn out)—and the conditions were ideal for the rise of Ivan Lendl.

Lendl had come a long way since my easy dismissal of him from the ’77 French juniors. Back then, he had just turned seventeen, still had a little baby fat on him, and wasn’t nearly as powerful and agile as he would later become.

Over the past four and a half years, though, he had lost the fat and turned into six feet two inches of sinew and muscle, the best-conditioned athlete on the tour (and he would become even fitter in years to come), with ferociously powerful serve and groundstrokes. With his size, fitness, and power, he was really an early prototype for the players on today’s men’s tour. Lendl rarely came to net on his serve, but—like most of the current guys—he had such a powerful serve that he could usually put himself into position to hit a big forehand and control the point. He was so strong and fit that he could beat almost anybody from the backcourt.

He was also a very strange guy, to put it charitably. His parents had both been top players in Czechoslovakia, his mother much higher-ranked than his father—she’d actually been number two there at one point. Legend had it that when Ivan was little, his mother used to leash him to a fence while she played.

It couldn’t have helped his personality. Whatever had happened to him as a kid, it had left him with an odd, harsh demeanor—kind of bullying and babyish at the same time—and a mean sense of humor: He would make merciless fun of lower-ranked players, who, because of tennis’s pecking order, often had to pretend they thought he was funny, even when the joke was at their expense.

Not me. For a long time, I was the one guy who seemed to have the solution to Lendl’s game. I beat him the first few times we played as professionals, and I never took any nonsense from him, on or off the court—quite the opposite: I almost enjoyed getting on his case at every available opportunity.

In November of ’79, for example, I played him in the finals of an exhibition in Milan—they used to have amazing exhibitions there: big crowds, big money (at least for the time). The house was packed for the final, the crowd was excited, and I wiped Lendl out in the first set, 6–1. Halfway through that set, I could see his shoulders slump—I could tell he’d given up, and now he was dogging it. He was just standing there, barely even trying.

That’s not good if you’re playing in an exhibition, especially one with a sizable crowd, so I got a little hot under the collar. I felt we were being well paid, and so the crowd should get its money’s worth. I said, “Listen, Ivan, you’re acting like a pussy. Get out there and start playing. You wimp!” He started whining: “You can’t talk like that to me! You can’t talk like that!” But I wouldn’t let up.

In the second set, he again played an abysmal game, putting virtually no effort into it. I gave it to him again, totally roasted him: “You’re a quitter, man.”

“Sergio!” he called—Sergio Palmieri, later my agent, used to be the tournament director there—“Sergio, you tell him to stop that! He can’t talk to me like that!” And I still wouldn’t let up.

I often wonder why I didn’t just let him make a complete ass of himself in that match. Because then, all of a sudden, Lendl started playing harder than I’d ever seen him play before. I’d gotten him so worked up that he wound up beating me!

Another example: A while later, we were at an indoor-clay exhibition in Barcelona: America versus Europe. The American team was Vince Van Patten, who was having a hot year; Andrés Gomez, who, as an Ecuadoran, somehow counted as American; and me. Lendl was one of the guys on the European team. It was basically just a fun occasion: You never had to take exhibitions as seriously as you did tournaments.

Predictably enough, I wound up facing Lendl in the final, and—this is how high I was riding at the time—I was sitting with Gomez and Van Patten before the match, and I said, “What score do you want me to beat him by?” We decided it was going to be 6–2, 6–2.

I went out on the court and everything was just perfect: I won the first set, 6–2. Meanwhile, Lendl was whining: “My arm hurts. I can’t play.” I told him, “Don’t play, then. Either play with some effort, or don’t play at all.” He kept saying, “One more game, one more game; if I don’t hold serve this time, I quit.”

This was at 6–2, 1–0. I broke him. He said, “I’ll play
two
more games.” Now it was 3–0. I said, “Yeah? Now what?” People were starting to boo him, because he was basically dogging it. Then it got to 5–0: It was 6–2, 5–0, and Gomez and Van Patten thought I was Superman, because I was doing exactly what I’d claimed I would do, right on the money. I was winking at them.

But then it got tricky, because Lendl held his serve—still trying his song-and-dance about his arm—to make it 5–1. Now
I
was serving. if I won my serve, it’d be 6–2, 6–1—not the right score! I got to 40–30 in the game—it was 6–2, 5–1, match point. What should I do?

Unfortunately, I decided to throw the game, so I could win the match as predicted, 6–2, 6–2.

It was not a good decision. I lost my serve, then I blew the next game, with Lendl serving at 2–5. I thought, “Damn! I screwed it up,” but at least I was still serving at 5–3. I made the effort—then I lost
that
game. I had another match point at 5–4, and blew that, too. Suddenly, Lendl’s arm wasn’t hurting him anymore.

He won the second set, 7–5.

I lost it. Totally snapped. By the third set, the crowd was booing
me,
and throwing things, and I was putting first serves into the stands, making rude gestures. Of course I wound up losing the match—I didn’t win another game. When I walked off the court, Van Patten and Gomez didn’t know what to say.

The cat was now officially out of the bag. Lendl could beat me.

Maybe because of his background, Ivan was always going into strange sulks and weird head trips. Sometimes the victim was his opponent; for a long time, it was just as often himself. For quite a while, he had a reputation for choking away big matches.

Once he decided to work on his mind, body, and game, however, he started cutting a wide swath through professional tennis. As much as I may have disliked him, I have to give Lendl credit: Nobody in the sport has ever worked as hard as he did. Some people have natural talent, which in our sport, I divide into two categories, athletic ability and tennis skill. Ivan wasn’t the most talented player, but his dedication—physical and mental—was incredible, second to none.

He was very stiff—almost robotic—but he learned how to hit a reasonable crosscourt backhand return and a really reasonable volley, based largely on his ability to physically intimidate the other guy by getting into position and then swinging away. And he did it all through sheer rehearsal.

Some people don’t want to rehearse; they just want to perform. Other people want to practice a hundred times first. I’m in the former group: I’ve always felt that if I practiced too much, I’d get stale, that the thrill of hitting tennis shots would go flat. Practice has always felt like a chore to me. Sometimes I’ll say, “God, I’m looking forward to practicing”—and then within a couple of minutes, I’m bored. Then I want to play games or sets, to make it more interesting.

I did spend a lot more time practicing than most people thought I did, however, and a lot more time
thinking
about tennis. That may sound like a cop-out, but it’s not. I’ve always thought constantly about the game, almost the way chess players think about chess. Tony Palafox drilled it into me:
Be ready for the next shot. Know what you’re going to do next.

As a result, because of my talent, my mental preparation, and a reasonable state of conditioning, I always figured that for two hours it was going to be a real pain in the behind to play me—and that 90 to 95 percent of the time, my matches weren’t going to last more than two hours. When they went longer, I became much more vulnerable, because I wasn’t in the amazing physical condition of a Borg or a Lendl; even then, my ability, my intensity, and my desire would always take me a long way. I’m a fighter. I’m going to hang in there and win a lot of my matches.

I call tennis “the lazy man’s game” now. Guys rely on giant serves and huge groundstrokes, but little thought, strategy, or passion goes into it—or so it seems. That’s largely why no one truly dominates the sport now. There’s loads of talent out there—just look at players such as Lleyton Hewitt, Gustavo Kuerten, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, and Marat Safin. But does anybody have the fire of Connors, the dedication of Lendl, or the physical presence of Borg? Not that I’m aware of, at least not yet.

Through some difficult times, Lendl turned himself into an incredibly tough player, mentally as well as physically. He just said, “I’m going to do it until I get it right, and I’m going to keep doing it and doing it, for hours and hours and years and years.” You have to credit that type of perseverance: Very few people can stick with it that long. And very few people have great natural ability. Everyone else—and this is true of most players these days—is in the middle: On a given day, a guy is a world-beater, then the next day he’s just not there.

As much as I hate to give Lendl credit, he became a great champion. And in a way, he has me to thank for it, I think. I goaded him into it.

B
ETWEEN OCTOBER
of 1981 and February of 1982, Lendl won forty-four matches in a row, mowing down everyone in his path, including me. He was running, bicycling, doing calisthenics, and practicing, practicing, practicing. I was doing what I’d always done—playing tennis, period. That was enough to allow me to compete at the highest levels, and to win almost all the time, but it wasn’t enough to push me through to a new peak.

I kept thinking that maybe Bjorn would change his mind and come back. Meanwhile, I was drifting a little bit….

In February of 1982, Stacy and I finally broke up definitively. She told me that we were either going to get married or stop seeing each other. I was just turning twenty-three, however, and I certainly didn’t feel old enough to get married. I’m not sure she did, either, or could ever trust me again, so we both went on to lead our lives—with some regrets on both sides, I’m sure, but probably a little bit of relief, too.

Spring brought a new relationship. Stella Hall was a model in New York, a dark-haired, willowy North Carolinian, and both Doug Saputo and Peter Rennert had been very interested in her for a while. I’d been interested, too, but had always felt funny about even seeming to move in on a close friend’s girlfriend.

When it became clear, though, that nothing was developing between either Doug or Peter and Stella, I let her know about my interest. And Stella said she felt the same about me.

Stacy and I had broken up, not out of a lack of affection or physical attraction, but because of distance and my need to sow my oats. There were a lot of pluses to being involved with a tennis player—another player understood perfectly that you had to practice and rest, and that you didn’t always want someone around when you were doing either—but there were minuses, too. A natural competitiveness can crop up between any couple, for instance, and it’s only aggravated when you’re both playing the same sport.

However, distance was most of it. There were only so many occasions when Stacy and I could play in the same event, or in the same city at the same time. More and more, we had to rely on phone calls and letters, which didn’t work for either of us. If I was going to be committed to just one girl, I wanted her to be with me, and since my job required a lot of travel, that meant she had to travel with me. If it ran counter to her needs…well, I wasn’t thinking about anyone else’s needs at that point.

Nobody will be surprised to hear that number one in the world requires major-league ego. You need ego to get there, and ego to stay there. I had never been short on that quality, but when I was a kid, I’d never felt that there was a lot to be cocky about. I wasn’t particularly successful with girls, and the sport I was most successful in wasn’t one that generated a lot of attention in high school.

As I moved to the top of pro tennis, though, cockiness became a survival mechanism. I don’t care who you are, Borg or Sampras or Michael Chang—you can’t exist at the top without it. Self-confidence is a must, and so is selfishness. Tennis is an individual sport, and athletes in individual sports—whether they’re figure skaters, boxers, gymnasts, or sprinters—are self-involved by nature. Star tennis players all like to think they’re much more well-rounded than they are. We’re not well-rounded. Nothing in the game asks you to be, or helps you to be.

In addition, because of the success of tennis in the ’80s, the star system was like nothing anybody has seen since. Everything was about
you,
about whether or not you won, and for four years, I was the biggest winner in the game. People around me were constantly saying, “Did you eat at the right time? Did you get everything you need? Is everything okay? We’ll pay you this, we’ll do that, we’ll kiss your behind.” You only have to do what you want; your reaction to anything else is, “Get the hell out of here.”

For a long time, I’ll admit I didn’t mind it a bit. Would you?

After I beat Borg at Wimbledon, I went to see the rock musician Joe Walsh at the Forum in L.A. Backstage before the show, Joe said, “I hear you play guitar. Do you want to come out and play?” I’m not a good guitar player now, but at that point I could play just a couple of chords—I mean, I was
bad.
I told him, “No, no thanks, I’ll just enjoy the show,” and I sat on the side of the stage.

For his encore, Joe sang his classic, “Rocky Mountain Way,” and in the part where the song says, “Bases are loaded and Casey’s at bat…time to change the batter,” he changed it to, “Bases are loaded, Borg’s at bat…” It was a subtle little thing, but I felt like a million bucks.