You Cannot Be Serious (21 page)

That kind of thing was starting to happen more and more. Eventually, it almost seemed normal, even though it was nothing like normal. The challenge (when I thought about it) was to enjoy it for what it was worth, because I never knew if it would happen tomorrow….

But when you’re number one, you’re not thinking that much about tomorrow.

As for the outside world—what outside world? I was vaguely aware that the American hostages in Iran had been freed, that a woman had been appointed to the Supreme Court. When the air-traffic controllers went out on strike, that was kind of a big deal: It disrupted my travel a bit. After I won the ’81 U.S. Open, I was invited to the White House—and I didn’t want to go! It was on a day’s notice, the meeting was set for early in the morning; it all just felt too inconvenient.

My mother said, “You’ve been invited to meet the President and you’re thinking of not going? You’re going.” I went. It was the story of my life—I always had to be pushed. I was glad I did go, too: I had never met a President before, and I felt something very special about Ronald Reagan. He was funny; he seemed to have a way with people; he had a real presence about him. And—having said all that—he had absolutely no clue who I was!

Just after the 1981 U.S. Open, I started my own exhibition tour, “John McEnroe Tennis Over America”—on the same model as a rock show, or so we hoped. It had always been my fantasy to be a rock musician, and this was the closest I could get at that point! The plan was for me to play twenty cities a year, during off-weeks from the tour; every match would be an event—loud music, light show, break dancers, the works. And, oh yeah, there was tennis, too. Vilas was my main playing partner, but Vitas, Yannick Noah, and Mats Wilander came along from time to time.

One of the people who came up with the tour concept was Gary Swain, who eventually moved to the International Management Group (IMG) and became my tennis agent. Gary used to travel with me on this tour and took care of everything, from the venue to the accommodations. It was big-time show business: Lear jets and limos, the best hotel suites.

Prior to the tour, Gary asked me what kinds of things I wanted before, during, and after each match. One of the things I asked for was sawdust. I used to keep sawdust in the pocket of my tennis shorts during a match, to absorb the perspiration on my hand.

When we arrived at one of our first venues, Cobo Hall in Detroit, there was a can of sawdust at courtside. The match began, and Vilas held his serve. When we changed ends, I went over to the can of sawdust, looked at it, and knocked it over with my racket.

Gary came running over. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You call that sawdust?” I said. I was actually screaming at him: The sawdust was ground too fine! “This looks like rat poison! Can’t you get anything right?”

So Gary ran out and, twenty minutes later, came back with a fresh can of coarser sawdust…and twenty dollars less in his pocket: He’d had to pay a union employee to grind up a two-by-four.

This is what it was like to be number one.

Around that time, I went to Japan to play a couple of exhibitions in Osaka and Tokyo. On the bullet train to Tokyo with a few of the other players, I started drinking shots of Suntory whiskey. It was the fastest train in the world, the whiskey was potent, and I was twenty-two years old. When we pulled in to the station, I started to feel woozy. I turned to the dignified Japanese lady by my side—and immediately threw up all over her.

I was so sick that I had to be helped off the train by the tournament officials and taken to the hotel, where I slept it off. The next day, after my match (I was a lot more resilient in those days), I was astonished to see the lady of the previous day coming up to me. Before I could begin to stammer an apology, she bowed and apologized to
me,
presenting me with a gift! (Needless to say, it wasn’t a bottle of whiskey.)

This is also what it was like to be number one—and in Japan, where the niceties could make a Westerner’s head spin.

Number one.

I had agents to set up opportunities for me. I had people around who’d been hired to do this and that. My girlfriend was there to be a complement to me. I surrounded myself—the old story—with people I’d known before I was famous. I tried to find people who were sincere. I went by my gut; I felt I was a reasonably intelligent person who had gone to Stanford. I’d made some friends there whom I’d kept—Bill Maze, Matt Mitchell, Ken Margerum, and Renée Richards (no, not
that
one). Peter Rennert was still around, though that relationship grew increasingly complicated as Peter struggled on the pro tour. Peter Fleming and I were still winning doubles matches, but that friendship wasn’t getting any easier, either. I still had a few old friends from high school and earlier, like Doug Saputo and Andy Broderick. I also began spending a lot of time with my brother Mark. Now that he was at Stanford, the three-year age difference between us seemed negligible, and our closeness was strengthened by the fact that he didn’t have a jealous bone in his body. He was one of the very few people I could trust absolutely.

However, I always had to fight to find my best self, to be aware of other people’s feelings—and the devil’s bargain of it is, the players who are more aware of others struggle more. Boris Becker was like that, too. We would have brilliant moments on the court, and total meltdowns. There was just too much going on inside.

I even had to struggle to act human with my mother. Every now and then, she would break down: “You treat me so badly! Why can’t you treat me the way you treat your friends?” And I’d say, “Because you’re my mother!” Then she’d start crying and I’d realize how asinine I was being. “Because you’re my mother, I can treat you like dirt”—that’s basically what I was saying.

You come full circle when you have kids yourself. When my kids give it to me, I realize,
God almighty, what an ass I was.
It’s embarrassing. I really was pretty much of a jerk. Believe it or not, I’m a lot better now.

I
N MARCH OF
’82, I sprained my ankle badly at a tournament in Brussels. It happened on the last shot of a practice session—I ran wide for a forehand I probably shouldn’t have run for, and there was a chair there I hadn’t seen, and that was that.

I had to default in the quarterfinals, and my ankle wasn’t really right for a long time. Inevitably, when you’re young and macho and you have a place in the rankings to hold on to, you come back sooner than you should from an injury, and you play slightly hurt, and so you have one more excuse to offer when things don’t go right.

Not much went right that spring. Five weeks after the injury, I lost to Lendl in the finals of the WCT, in Dallas; in May, I lost to Eddie Dibbs in the semis of a clay-court tournament at Forest Hills; and then the next month (after skipping the French), I lost to Connors in the final on the grass at Queen’s. It wasn’t a good sign….

I was determined to behave myself at Wimbledon that year, and I did, in my fashion. There were a few disputed calls, a couple of balls whacked in anger, and a stupid locker-room shouting match with a player named Steve Denton, but compared with the previous year, Wimbledon ’82 was a cakewalk. It was all tennis. I had a feeling the London tabloid reporters were chewing their cheeks in frustration—I didn’t give them anything!

My ankle, though, still wasn’t 100 percent, and I was in a strange state of mind, a kind of continued mourning for Borg. There was something especially pointed about his absence here, of all places—it felt almost eerie. However, I was fortunate enough to have a relatively easy draw: I didn’t lose a single set until the quarterfinals, against Johan Kriek, and even then it was only one. Tim Mayotte, fresh out of my alma mater, Stanford, had a great tournament to get to the semis, but he essentially conceded the match to me (sometimes the intimidation factor really does work in your favor) before he stepped on the court.

Then came Jimmy.

Connors was never intimidated by anyone—at least he never looked that way—and he was in the midst of an amazing year. From the jump, we played a very aggressive final, nothing like either of my last two against Borg, where the play had been more consistently fine, but also more subdued. Every match I ever played against Jimmy was like a prizefight. At Wimbledon that day, I was ahead two sets to one, we went to a tiebreaker in the fourth, and then I was three points from winning the match. Yet somehow, I just couldn’t dig deep enough to pull it out—maybe Jimmy was just hungrier. In retrospect, I should’ve said to myself, “Don’t let it get to a fifth set—stop him here or you’re finished.”

But I didn’t stop him, and when we went to the fifth, I think my body language showed what I was really feeling: Between my ankle and my state of mind, I had done well just getting this far in the tournament. And that was as far as I went in the longest final in Wimbledon history. Connors pulled off an amazing feat—he won his second Wimbledon championship eight years after his first—and I would have to wait another twelve months before I could prove I wasn’t a flash in the pan.

To top off my lousy Wimbledon, Peter and I lost the doubles final to Peter McNamara and Paul McNamee.

I saved my greatest tennis in ’82 for the Davis Cup. Just a week after that heartbreaking final against Connors, in our quarterfinal tie against Sweden in St. Louis, I achieved one of my proudest wins, in a six-hour and-thirty-two-minute marathon with Mats Wilander. It’s still the longest men’s tennis match in history. Then, over Thanksgiving week in Grenoble, on a slow indoor red-clay court the French had built specifically to try to thwart me, I beat Yannick Noah in an epic five-setter that helped us clinch a 4–1 victory and our second Cup championship in a row.

Playing for my country, and with a team, helped raise my spirits, and my game, to the optimum. When I was on my own, it was another story.

W
HEN YOU’RE OUT THERE
all by yourself, you tend to place a lot of blame on a lot of other people. If you play a poor match, you’re busy trying to come up with excuses. Even when I was younger, I never felt the guys were just too good for me: If I lost, there was always a reason. I wasn’t tall enough yet, I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t play enough. There are always any number of things…. The bottom line is, it’s very difficult to be out there by yourself.

It’s also difficult to look in the mirror and say, “You know something? It was me.”

I wasn’t handling number one very well; it felt sort of empty. Whose fault was that? In fact, in some ways, you could argue that Connors was really number one in ’82. He won Wimbledon, and he broke my three-year streak at the Open, where Lendl beat me in the semis and Jimmy beat Lendl in the final. (And all that time, Jimmy was separated from his wife—which, somehow, actually seemed to fuel him. Incredible!)

At the Open that year, instead of feeling I could win for the fourth time in a row, I actually remember thinking, “Wow, three in a row is amazing.” Deep down—on a level I never would have discussed with anyone at the time—it felt alienating to have to go in for the kill at each and every tournament. Tennis really is single combat, and it’s exhausting to be a gladiator. You pay a heavy price to be on top, and just at that moment, it wasn’t one I was willing to pay.

And when that’s the case, someone who is willing to do just a little bit more will always slip by.

The fact is that the moment I reached the top—the place for which I’d theoretically been aiming since the moment I turned pro—everything started spiraling slowly but surely downward, and kept going that way for the next couple of years. I held on to number one, but just barely, without really winning the big matches as often as I should have.

After the ’82 Open, I went on the kind of streak that number-ones are supposed to have, winning twenty-six straight matches going into the finals of the Masters in January—where Lendl cleaned my clock once more, beating me for the seventh straight time and winning his fifty-ninth (!) straight indoor match in the process. I couldn’t even come close to breaking his serve at that point.

The one light moment of the tournament came during my semifinal match against Guillermo Vilas: During a changeover, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, John.” I ignored him, and ignored him again when he tapped me once more. Finally, extremely annoyed, I turned to find myself face to face with Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, who had come specifically to see me. My excitement helped me cruise through to an easy 6–3, 6–3 victory.

Later that month, I went to Philadelphia to play in the big indoor tournament they used to have there (one of a number of major American events that went by the boards after tennis’s boom years). I was seeded first, and Lendl was seeded second, in a pretty strong field. One night, during the early rounds, I got a phone call from Don Budge.

Budge, of course, was one of tennis’s all-time greats, and the last American to have won the Grand Slam, in 1938. He was also a hell of a nice guy, and a number of times over the course of my career, he made it a point to call me with advice or congratulations. He loved to give advice if you were willing to listen, and I was always more than willing. I knew the suggestions would be good, and it gave me a warm feeling to have this connection with the history of tennis, and to sense how much my respect for Don’s great achievements pleased him.

An important aside: I think one of the big problems with tennis today is the failure of its current stars to acknowledge the game’s history. If you think I’m going to single out the Williams sisters, you’re right—but only because they’ve done so much, and come so tantalizingly close to transforming the entire game. What’s held them back from making that final step is their us-against-the-world mentality: Look at the difference between the Williamses and Tiger Woods, who really has transformed golf, not just through his athletic genius but by his embrace of the game’s tradition; how gracefully he gravitates to great old champions like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. (Don’t worry, Venus and Serena: I’m not saying you should be nicer to me!)