You Cannot Be Serious (28 page)

The first night, in Minneapolis, we must have had fourteen or fifteen thousand people out to watch us play. It was an incredible crowd, and it was absolutely packed with Swedes. Essentially, I threw Bjorn a bone that night—there was no way he could lose in front of the Swedish crowd.

Soon, though, I found myself carrying him in every match. He was still in amazing shape; he was still one of the fastest humans on earth. However, he just could no longer hit a tennis ball the way he used to: His heart wasn’t in it.

One night we were having a drink, and I started waxing philosophical about losing the Open and being bumped from the number-one spot by Lendl. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be number two, I mused. There was a hell of a lot less pressure, and number two wasn’t exactly chopped liver! Maybe I should hang it up as number two and call it a good career, or—here was another idea—what about just regrouping for a while, then going for the gold again?

He interrupted me, shaking his head. “Number one is the only thing that matters, John,” he said. “You know it as well as I do. If you’re number two, you might as well be number three or four—you’re nobody.”

He motioned me closer, and lowered his voice, even though the music was blaring in the hotel bar. “You’ve got to go win the Australian!” Bjorn whispered, fervently. “If you win down there, then come back and win the Masters, it’ll put you back on top again.”

“Huh,” I said. I blinked, thought about it a moment.

“You’re going to be twenty-seven, John,” Borg said. “Getting on. Grab it while you can grab it.” He nodded slowly and solemnly, with absolute certainty. I was listening. I felt he was about the only person I could’ve discussed these things with who really knew what he was talking about. I decided then and there to go Down Under. He had convinced me I could still be number one.

T
HE
A
USTRALIAN OPEN
was horrendous: I never should have gone. I was way too burned-out to keep playing. I wasn’t mentally stable.

But I flew there anyway. With my twenty-two-year-old pregnant girlfriend close by my side. I had briefly entertained the idea of going alone to Melbourne—if I was really serious about winning this title, I needed as few distractions as possible—but I could tell right away that Tatum wasn’t having any of it. A pregnant woman, and especially a very young pregnant woman, wants to be with her mate. So I grew philosophical again. Maybe I should just relax, not worry so much about my results in the tournament. Number two in the world might be a disappointment, but no matter what Borg said, it still wasn’t bad.

A car picked us up at the Melbourne airport and took us to the hotel—where we walked into a lobby full of paparazzi. I was furious, but contained. I demanded to see the manager, and said, “Get rid of these people, now. Please—give me a break. I’ve just flown here from the United States, and I can’t deal with this.” I was burning inside, and exhausted from the flight.

When we got up to our room, however, I could tell right away that I didn’t like this hotel. It just didn’t feel right. If they had let those people into the lobby, then there wasn’t going to be any kind of control while we stayed there. I had to do something.

Tatum was upset. I said to her, “Listen, let me take care of this. I’ll go back down and talk to the manager.” She looked at me closely: She knew how I could get, and where it could go. I had cooled down, though. She trusted that I would go and handle the situation.

However, when I got back down to the lobby, one of the photographers was still there, and he immediately began taking my picture again.

I lost it. I grabbed the guy by the collar and pushed him over to a couch. “Listen, asshole,” I growled. I don’t know what I was going to do. I don’t know what he was going to do. As I held the paparazzo by the collar, I suddenly heard one of the bellmen say, “There’s another photographer coming.”

Clearly, it was a setup. One of them was supposed to provoke me, so the other one could photograph it. I immediately let go of the guy, but the picture that immediately went worldwide was of the photographer lying on the couch, and me standing there, my hands open, holding on to nothing. That provoked an interesting phone call from my father a couple of days later! “Hey, how’s it going down there? Uh-huh…”

It became a miserable ten days for me. I felt like such a jerk! When I went back up to the room, Tatum asked me how it had gone, and I had to tell her. “I thought you were going to take care of everything,” she said. I stammered something lame—and then, of course, she wouldn’t leave it alone: “That was really smart, wasn’t it?”

That was another time I wished I had been with a team. With a team, you wouldn’t be exposed to those things so early in a trip, when you’re so fatigued. You’d have other people around you, to deflect, to protect. I was always out there all by myself—I never liked entourages. It was just Tatum and me.

That entire Australian Open was a succession of matches I was trying to lose—and I couldn’t lose! In the third round, I played a Nigerian named Nduka Odizor. In the first game I served, he was hitting unbelievable returns—he broke me without any apparent effort. As far as I was concerned, I was out of there. I was as far away from it as I’ve ever been on a court. Then, the next game, he served two double-faults, missed a volley on top of the net, and handed it back to me. The next game, he was hitting screaming winners by me again. This went on for at least six games, then finally I thought, “I can’t lose to this guy. I cannot do this, even if I want to.”

It went on. In the round of 16, I played Henri Leconte, who was always a character and a crazy guy to play, and I got behind, one set to two and 1–4, two service breaks against me. I was totally down and out, but somehow I got back to 6–6. Then I got down 1–5 in the tiebreaker, and I won that! Poor Henri was so freaked out that I rolled over him in the fifth set.

In the quarterfinals, I faced Slobodan Zivojinovic, of Yugoslavia. Bobo was six-foot-six and 200 pounds, with a serve to match: In June, he had upset Wilander in the first round at Wimbledon. “Fine,” I thought. “Here’s my ticket out of here.” Of course, I immediately went up two sets to one—and wound up losing love–6 in the fifth. By the end of that match, in my time-honored fashion, I had taken the crowd from cheering me to booing me, as I gave them finger-salutes.

So that was the end of my great Australian campaign of 1985. The beginning and the end were absolutely abysmal. The middle wasn’t a whole lot better. It finally made me realize, “I need to pull myself together and get some time off, because I’m heading off the deep end.” And that was the moment I chose to go to the Masters and lose to Brad Gilbert for the only time in my career.

10

I
WAS STANDING ON THE SIDELINE
of the playoff game between the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears, at Soldier Field in Chicago. My Chicago Bears buddies Kenny Margerum and Gary Fencik had set me up with a sideline pass. It was so cold, I felt as though I was about to get frostbite: seventeen degrees below zero. I vividly remember thinking, “Thank God I’m a tennis player.”

Unfortunately, my momentary feeling of euphoria didn’t last.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’ve had a number of nemeses in my tennis life (including, all too often, myself). However, nobody got to me the way Brad Gilbert did.

I played him fourteen times, and the one time I lost to him was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I looked up to the heavens and thought, “Someone is telling me something here. Because if I can lose to Brad Gilbert, something is seriously wrong. I’ve got to take a look at myself. I’ve got to reevaluate not only my career but my life.”

What was it about him? It mostly boiled down to this: I’ve never seen anybody as negative on a tennis court. Eeyore had nothing on Brad—he had a black cloud over his head from the moment he walked out there, and he never seemed satisfied until he got you feeling pretty gloomy, too. It almost seemed to be his game plan. He’d look like he was going to commit hara-kiri in the warmup. Then he did a running commentary while he played, berating himself on every single point (as if people cared), and justifying every mistake he made: “I can’t believe I hit that backhand down the line instead of crosscourt.” “Why didn’t I hit a drop-volley there?” “Why didn’t I hit my first serve wide instead of going up the middle?”

As an opponent, you’d hear everything he said, because he’d say it loud enough for the people in the stands to catch every word. It would get under your skin and infect you.

The other part of it, though, was: He could play. He was a better athlete than people realized. He was a pusher—his second serve was a melon, his volleying was fairly shaky, but he got everything back. He’d push the ball, you’d come to net, then he’d try to pass you. The style of play reflected his personality: He’d bring you down, and suck your energy dry. You’d never lose to him if you were playing up to your level, but you had to guard against falling into that whirlpool.

It didn’t always work. I saw top-ranked players just melt before my eyes. A perfect example is when Gilbert beat Becker at the 1987 U.S. Open. By the end of that match, Boris couldn’t beat his way out of a paper bag, and it looked like he was ready to jump off the Empire State Building.

I’m sure Gilbert won a lot of matches by bending the emotional rules. Some people feed off negativity. For a long time, that was something I did myself. I couldn’t appreciate when things were going well; I was always expecting the next bad thing to come, and I was constantly getting on myself in order not to let it happen. It’s hard. When you’re involved in a one-on-one game, it’s very difficult to completely convince yourself that if you let down for an instant, the other guy isn’t going to take advantage of it. I don’t care who you are—you’re going to get into situations that make you question yourself.

Perhaps there was something about Gilbert that made me look into myself and think, “Oh my God, can I possibly be that unbearable?”

I know I could be frustrating to play, but I’d always justify it by thinking that my style of play was attractive to watch; I also believe that people elevated their games when they played me. Counterpunching is a different mentality. Wilander and Borg were brilliant at it, always willing to wait for you to do something, then say, “I can do it better than you.”

I preferred to take the initiative. Take the ball on the rise. Lay it out and just see if the person could handle it. I took it to people, which I think is more exciting—win or lose. Obviously, I always preferred to win.

However, 1985, after starting so well, had turned into a long year of defeats, culminating in the disastrous trip to Australia. Tatum was pregnant, and I felt exhausted and unsettled. Going into the Masters, I figured, “Well, maybe I can at least end the year on a good note.”

My first-round match against Gilbert began well enough: I took the first set, 7–5. Then things began to deteriorate. Slowly and irreversibly, I let Gilbert’s negativity get under my skin. It was almost as if he had become a kind of distorting mirror, reflecting my worst image of myself. By the time I’d lost the second set, 4–6, I simply didn’t want to be there anymore.

The very lowest point came at the beginning of the third set, when I saw some people in the stands cheering for Gilbert. They weren’t doing anything wrong, just encouraging him, but something in me snapped, and I actually heard myself mutter an ethnic slur. No one heard it but me. And I thought, “You have now officially gone over the edge.”

That was diametrically the opposite of how I had been brought up, of everything I believed in. It wasn’t me. But it had come out of my mouth. It was pathetic enough that I was losing to Gilbert, but this was a new low.

I completely fell apart, and lost the set, 1–6. I walked off the court, left the Garden, and drove uptown to my place on East 90th Street, which I was renting to my friend Ahmad Rashad at the time. I walked in and said, “Ahmad, that’s it; I’ve had it. I’m not playing anymore. I can’t handle it.” And that was the last tournament I played for six months.

T
ATUM AND
I
SPENT
the first few weeks after the Masters traveling around the country to a few exhibitions I’d promised to play. I didn’t enjoy them very much, but the money was good, and once they were over, they were over. Then we went back to the beach house in Malibu.

For a while, I didn’t do much more than decompress—watching the waves, marveling at Tatum’s growing belly, going to parties. One of my favorite places to spend time was a private club called On the Rocks, owned by my friend Lou Adler. Located on the floor above the Roxy Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, it had only fifty members or so, and it was a place where I could really let down my guard. It was also the site of the only surprise party ever thrown for me, given by Tatum in honor of my twenty-seventh birthday. More and more, I was spending time with the same A-list cast of characters. I had grown into my role, become comfortable with it: I was a star, they were stars. We were all stars together.

At the same time, it was beginning to occur to me that I wasn’t doing very much training. My body certainly felt better for a while, but then I began to miss the movement. I played a bit of tennis, and could feel the usual aches and pains start to return. All the while, I couldn’t help sneaking peeks at TV and the sports section, to see what was happening on the tennis tour. I was still plugged in to the tennis grapevine: Some people, I was told, were starting to say, “McEnroe’s finished; he’s going to retire.” It was very strange—not completely painful, but not quite pleasurable, either—to think about the caravan rattling on without me. I wondered:
Should I go back? And if I do go back, when would be the right time?

If I did return to the tour, I knew I had to do something different. I was approaching thirty, that outer boundary for tennis players. I thought of last September’s Open, and how Lendl had outlasted me in the final. Until that point, I had joked about training—but afterward I wasn’t smiling. Did I need to train more myself?