You Cannot Be Serious (3 page)

Like me, André Agassi has seven Grand Slam titles altogether; but unlike me, he’s won all four of the majors, even if not in one calendar year. His place in history is secure.

Where does that leave me? I guess only time will tell.

I did win over $12 million in prize money overall, and, with the help of my dad and some other wise heads along the way, invested my winnings and endorsement proceeds intelligently and conservatively enough to be able to support my wife and children in great comfort. The endorsement money came slowly at first, because of my bad-boy image, but it built up fast once Madison Avenue, or Phil Knight, more specifically, learned how to market me. I still have significant endorsement deals today, especially with Nike.

Why, then, do I still feel driven?

A lot of it has to do with my tendency to see the glass as half-empty. I’m smart enough to know that there’s no sense thinking about what you didn’t do instead of what you did. You lose perspective if you compare yourself to people who are out of reach or who it’s inappropriate to compare yourself to.

But sometimes I do it anyway.

I’ll confess it: I feel I could have done more. There are nights when I can’t get to sleep for thinking about the Australian Opens I passed by when I was at the peak of my game and always felt I’d have another chance; the French Open that I had in the palm of my hand, then choked away.

I can practically hear you saying, “Come on, McEnroe! You’re rich, famous, and healthy; you have a loving family, a more-than-comfortable life. You’ve done amazing things and been to amazing places—things and places most people can barely dream of. Why not just relax and enjoy what you have?”

Here’s what I’d say back to you: I’m working on it, hard.

But at the same time—I’m a serve-and-volley player. My style is, as it’s always been, to move forward, always forward.

My standards for myself are, as they’ve always been, extraordinarily high.

Why should I change now?

2

W
HERE DID IT COME FROM
? That’s the question interviewers always work around to asking me.
How did you get that way?
And the first thing I tell them is, I’m a New Yorker. New Yorkers don’t hold anything back—sitting in traffic or just walking down the street, we lay it on the line, and we don’t whisper when we do it.

My dad’s like that. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but not the fancy Upper East Side—it was the patchwork of Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and Hungarian working-class enclaves known as Yorkville. His father, John Joseph McEnroe, immigrated here from Ireland in the early 1900s, and worked as a bank messenger and security guard. (He also made a little money on the side as a trombone player in Irish bands, so I come by my performing interest honestly. My actual musical talent, though—that’s another question.)

Coming from such a humble background, my dad did extremely well to be able to go to college at all, let alone work his way through night classes at Fordham Law School and wind up as a partner in one of the biggest law firms in New York.

But Dad has never forgotten his roots: He’s full of Irish music and humor; there’s nothing he likes better than to get together with friends and have a beer or two, and sing and tell jokes at the top of his lungs (unlike me: I can’t remember a joke to save my life). I still remember how boisterous my parents’ parties were when I was growing up—and how, the next morning, my dad would always be bright-eyed and full of energy, ready to go at the world again.

As those of you who watched tennis in the ’80s may recall, my mother was much quieter: My shyness, I think, comes from her. And some of my edge. My mom, Kay—born Katherine Tresham, the daughter of a Long Island deputy sheriff—tended to see the world in a somewhat harsher light than my father, who always seemed to have a smile and a kind word for everyone. My mom has never been as trusting of outsiders as my dad is; she could hold a grudge with the best of them. Unfortunately, I’m like her in those ways, too.

My parents met in New York City in the mid-’50s, when my father was home on vacation from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and my mother was working as a student nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. Typically enough, their relationship started at a bar one night, when a couple of my mother’s nurse friends ran into my dad and some buddies of his. Dad didn’t hit it off with any of those nurses, but they introduced him to a girl who turned out to be perfect for him. John and Kay got married while Dad was in the Air Force, and I was born on February 16, 1959, at Wiesbaden Air Force Base, in West Germany.

When my father got out of the service, we moved to an apartment in Flushing, Queens, home of La Guardia Airport and home-to-be of the New York Mets. Dad worked during the day as an assistant office manager at an advertising agency and attended Fordham Law by night. There’s a story that’s typical of my mother: When Dad finished his first year, he proudly told Mom that he was second in his class. “See, if you had worked harder, you could have been first,” she said. (The next year, he was.)

We were still in Flushing when my brother Mark was born in February of 1962, but then, shortly before Dad’s graduation, we made the big move to the suburbs, way out east to Douglaston, Queens—first to another apartment, and then to a two-story saltbox house at 241–10 Rushmore Avenue.

Douglaston was a typical New York–area bedroom suburb: nice, safe, clean; nothing fancy. The houses were small, square prewar Cape Cods and Colonials; there were a lot of young families like us, with a station wagon in the driveway, a barbecue grill on the back patio. Kids rode their bikes, played football and stickball in the street and at Memorial Field, played basketball in the driveway. It was
Leave It to Beaver,
Queens style.

I even had a paper route when I was ten and eleven, delivering
Newsday
and the
New York Times
on my bike. It was brutal work: I made about a buck-fifty to two bucks a week, and people didn’t exactly throw around the tips—it was four cents from one person, exact change for $1.86 from someone else.

I was seven and a half when my baby brother, Patrick, was born: I took vague notice of the fact and then went on about my business, which, from the time I could stand up and walk, was mainly one thing: sports, sports, and more sports. If it had a ball, I played it—and was good at it. A story my dad likes to tell: When I was four, we were playing in Central Park one day. He was pitching a Wiffle ball to me, and I was whacking some pretty good line drives with my yellow Wiffle bat. An older lady walked up and said, “Excuse me, is that a little boy, or a midget in disguise?”

For a long time, I didn’t get much bigger than that—“Runt” was what the big kids at Memorial Field used to call me. But I was good enough that they let me play anyway. Team sports like basketball, football, and baseball were my favorites. In softball games, I learned to hit from both sides of the plate, because of the peculiar configuration of the field at P.S. 98. Soccer came a little later. I always enjoyed the camaraderie of a team. I remember long summer evenings playing stickball out on Rushmore with my good friends Andy Keane, John Martin, and Doug Saputo, evenings that seemed like they’d last forever.

The McEnroe males were a sports-obsessed group, and we were vocal about it, whether we were rooting or playing. We were vocal about everything. We all loved each other, but we were definitely a family of yellers when I was growing up, my father leading the way, blowing off steam or just making friendly noise. We didn’t hold back in our household.

At the same time, my parents had a serious and demanding side. They expected achievement.

One day, I fell off my bike. I told my mom, “My arm hurts.” She was an operating-room nurse at the time, and she knew about hurt arms. She felt the arm, thought it was just a bruise, and said, “Go back to the tennis court.” Three weeks later, it was still hurting, and I was still complaining. Finally my mom took me to the doctor. I had a fractured left arm.

And on moral matters, there were no gray areas: Everything was black and white, either right or wrong, period. They always drummed it into me: “Tell the truth. Be honest at any cost.”

My mom and dad knew that education was the ticket to moving up in the world. The public schools in Douglaston were part of the reason a lot of young families moved there from the city, but in my parents’ eyes, public school wasn’t good enough for the McEnroe boys. I started off at St. Anastasia, a Catholic school not far from our house, but when I was in first grade (as Mom tells the story), one of the teachers said, “You should really get him out—he’s much too bright.” And so my parents sent me—on partial scholarship, but at no small financial sacrifice—to Buckley Country Day School, a twenty-five-minute bus ride away in Roslyn, Long Island.

My mom and dad were strivers in every way; they fully bought into the American Dream. It was a restless dream for them, and a big part of it was about where you lived. We lived in four different places during my Douglaston years: the apartment, then three different houses. Once—I swear—we moved next door. Better house, my mom said. But damn, there was less of a yard to play football in!

In the summer of 1967, we made a short move that was significant in more ways than one: a mile north, over Northern Boulevard and the Long Island Railroad tracks from Douglaston to Douglaston Manor.

Just as the name sounds, Douglaston Manor was the right side of the tracks, a step up in the world, and our new house at 252 Beverly Road was also just down the block from a place called the Douglaston Club, which my parents had joined while we still lived on Rushmore.

The Douglaston Club wasn’t fancy—just a clubhouse, a pool, and five tennis courts—but it was nice, and it meant something to an upwardly mobile young family. Tennis meant something, too. In those days, it was still very much a country-club game that you played in white clothes, exactly the kind of game a young lawyer for a white-shoe Manhattan law firm ought to be playing. And since Dad knew I loved any game that involved a ball, we both started playing it at the same time. Both of my brothers also began tennis in those early Douglaston Club years: Mark at age five, and little Patrick at three, when he used a two-handed backhand because it was the only way he could lift the racket!

I started taking group lessons with the club pro, a high-school teacher named Dan Dwyer. The family legend—there might even be some truth to it!—is that at the age of eight, when I’d only been playing for about two weeks, I entered the Douglaston Club’s 12-and-under tournament and got to the semifinals with three other boys, all of them twelve. I lost, but a few weeks later, in another tournament, I was with the same three guys, and this time I won. At a club banquet, Dan Dwyer gave me a special award—a five-dollar gift certificate at the pro shop—saying, “I’m predicting we’re going to see John at Forest Hills someday.”

After Dwyer left the club, he was replaced by a nice old guy named George Seewagen, whose son Butch actually played on the circuit for a couple of years. I also took some lessons with Warren McGoldrick, a history teacher at Buckley.

Because I was so small for my age, I wasn’t getting a huge amount of power out of my wooden racket. I was fast on my feet, though, and my vision was good enough that I saw the ball very early: I seemed to have an instinct for where my opponent was going to hit his next shot. Between my fast feet and my sharp eyes, I got almost every ball back. I learned very early on that you don’t have to overpower the ball to win tennis matches—if you get everything back, you’re going to beat just about everybody.

But there was something else, too. From an early age I had good hand-eye coordination, and as soon as I picked up a tennis racket, there was another dimension: In a way I can’t totally explain, I could feel the ball through the strings. From the beginning, I was fascinated by all the different ways you could hit a tennis ball—flat, topspin, slice. I loved the way a topspin lob would sail over my opponent’s head, dive down just inside the baseline, then go bouncing out of his reach. I loved to take my racket back for a hard forehand or backhand, and then, at the very last millisecond, feather the ball just over the net for an angled drop-shot that would leave the other guy flat-footed and open-mouthed. I hit thousands of practice balls at the Douglaston Club backboard, testing all the possibilities (and sending quite a few balls into the backyard of Dick Lynch, a former defensive back for the New York Giants, who lived right behind the wall).

My parents were both intense in their own ways, and I guess they transmitted that to me through the genes. As the oldest son of two intensely striving people, I felt right away that a lot was expected of me. In 1969, my fifth-grade teacher wrote to my parents: “Johnny is a gifted child with a tremendous urge to do better work than any of his classmates.” I had a rage not just to succeed, but to compete and win—whether it was tennis, Ping-Pong, or a Latin test at school, I had to come out on top, or I felt crushed. I was one of the best students at Buckley—my mom and dad didn’t disapprove—and now my parents saw a way that I could stand out in sports, too. On George Seewagen’s recommendation, they enrolled me in the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association when I was nine.

“Lawn tennis” is what they called it back then, when the three or four major tournaments—Wimbledon, the Australian, and Forest Hills—were still played on grass. It sounds fancy and exclusive, and it was. But things were changing fast. The year I joined the ELTA was 1968, a very significant moment for the game, Year One in the history of open tennis. Ever since the sport had been invented, the four Grand Slam tournaments had been closed to professionals. Amateurism (also known as shamateurism) was a typical bit of hypocrisy in a game that prided itself on its genteel trappings and looked down on anyone who didn’t fit in: The top players all made money (though nothing like what they would make later), but the money was under the table. The world changed in a lot of ways in the 1960s, and in the tennis world, the big change in 1968 was that for the first time ever, professionals could now play in the same tournaments with amateurs. The money began to flow in.