You Cannot Be Serious (4 page)

I wouldn’t see any of it for a while. At nine, I put on my white shorts and shirt and started playing ELTA junior tournaments at clubs around the New York metropolitan area. My mother would almost always drive me. As my results improved, I became eligible to play in national tournaments. My dad would take vacation days from work, and Mom and Dad, or sometimes just Dad, would go with me to these events around the country. I still remember my first national 12-and-unders tournament in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga, Tennessee! To a kid from Douglaston, it might as well have been Mars.

I did pretty well in the tournaments. By the time I was eleven, I was number 18 in the country in the 12-and-unders. At twelve, I was number 7. I won matches, I got to the semis and even the finals—but I wouldn’t win a national title in singles until I was sixteen. I like to think that a lot of it had to do with my size. Maybe it’s lame of me (and maybe it’s part of what drives me), but I’ve never thought, at any level I’ve ever played, that my opponent was just better. If I lost, there was always a reason (they were bigger, they were from California, etc.).

But losing was the hardest thing to get used to. I was never very good at it. People always ask if I had a temper when I was a kid. There’s a famous story about Bjorn Borg: When he was nine or ten years old, he lost a point and threw his racket down, and his father wouldn’t let him play for six months. He never threw his racket again.

Maybe that should’ve happened to me! I didn’t throw my racket when I was a kid, though. I was ferocious on a tennis court, but when I lost a match, my usual reaction—until an embarrassingly late age—was to burst into tears. People used to say about me, once I shook hands after a losing match, “Here come the floods.”

If I ever got mad at anybody back then, it was myself. When I missed a shot, I would send out a wail that could be heard clear across a tennis club. I just hated playing anything less than the kind of tennis I knew I was capable of. But my temper would have to wait a few years. For one thing, there weren’t any umpires or linesmen in junior tennis—you called your own lines, which was obviously a tricky thing. A lot of kids cheated outright. I like to think I was fair—although even back then, I was notorious for claiming to be able to see the lines better than anybody. Still, I would even make calls against myself if I knew my opponent’s shot had gone out, but felt galled at the prospect of his questioning my call.

By the time I was twelve, the lessons I’d been taking weren’t doing much for me anymore. When my parents heard that a couple of kids from the Douglaston Club were going to a nearby place called the Port Washington Tennis Academy, they decided to check it out for me.

Port Washington was about a twenty-five-minute drive east from Douglaston, and Antonio Palafox was the head pro. Tony had played Davis Cup for Mexico, won the Wimbledon doubles title in 1963, and (very significantly, to me) was one of only two men who beat Rod Laver in 1962, the first year Laver won the Grand Slam. I remember going to meet Tony with my mom—I was so shy that I hid behind her legs.

I hit with Tony a little, and he let me in, but not in the most advanced group: The Academy took kids up to the age of eighteen, and—national ranking or not—I was only twelve, and a small twelve at that. Tony felt I had some work to do. There were a lot of strong players at Port Washington (including another talented twelve-year-old, a kid from Great Neck named Peter Rennert); I would have to establish myself.

There were three groups: The most advanced kids played from five
P.M
. to seven, the next-best came from seven to nine, and the weakest players came from nine to eleven. Tony started me out in the middle section.

My dad wasn’t thrilled about that: What was I doing in the middle when he’d been taking me to all these national tournaments? It didn’t sit well with his McEnroe pride. And Port Washington wasn’t cheap. Was it worth it for me? Did I stand a chance of making it into the top group?

In his law practice in Manhattan, Dad had met a young Wall Street guy named Chuck McKinley—and it just so happened that McKinley had been one of the best tennis players in the world back in the amateur days of the ’50s and ’60s. Dad asked McKinley to ask his old friend Tony Palafox if I was a real prospect. Tony took another look at me.

When he looked again, he saw a kid who played very much the way he had played when he’d been at the top of his game: fast feet, good hands, the ability to think a shot or two ahead, and a sense of the court in all its dimensions and angles.

Port Washington wasn’t all just tennis. A player spent a lot of time on the court, but he also hung around a fair amount between coaching and matches. There was a lounge on the second floor, with windows that looked down on the courts: I remember staring in awe at Port Washington’s star, a blond sixteen-year-old named Vitas Gerulaitis (more about him later)—but you could only spend so much time watching tennis. There was no TV, and the owner, Hy Zausner, wouldn’t allow cards on the premises, so we’d amuse ourselves by playing chess. We’d have marathon games, some of them lasting an hour or more. I was never a great player, but I was pretty good: I liked the strategic element of the game, planning ahead a move or two

Tony saw me thinking that way on the court—and getting everything back—and so he became my tennis teacher. He took me under his wing. I still play very much the way he taught me, taking every ball on the rise with a short backswing; moving forward, always forward, whenever possible.

Tony felt that the court wasn’t utilized enough. If you watched the old guys play on tape, he said, it looked like they were just standing there and hitting the ball back to each other. Didn’t they realize the idea was to hit the ball
away
from the other guy? Maybe it just wasn’t considered proper in those stuffy old days of tennis.

Not that players like Bill Tilden, Don Budge, and Jack Kramer, or any of the other trailblazers, weren’t great champions in their own right, but the more Tony showed me, the more straight-ahead their strategy seemed to me. I began to look at the court differently—as a mathematical equation, almost. The angles were everything. It wasn’t about just hitting a slice and approaching the net. Sometimes you should slice it deep, but sometimes you could come in and slice it off the court
—use the angles.

A
FTER
I’
D BEEN
at Port Washington for a couple of months, an amazing thing happened: Harry Hopman showed up. Harry was a walking legend of tennis, the great old Aussie coach who’d turned Laver, Roy Emerson, Ken Rosewall, and Lew Hoad, among many others, from raw boys into stars, in the process winning sixteen Davis Cups for Australia between 1939 and 1969. However, once the Open era began in 1968, Hop had a much harder time recruiting young talent, and in 1970, he and the Australian Tennis Federation parted ways. To my eternal benefit: The following year, Mr. H. became tennis director at Port Washington.

Harry Hopman left technique to others; he was only interested in you if you already knew how to play the game. From that foundation, he went to work on your mind and body. His players were famous for two things: never giving up, and being fitter than anybody. The two went hand in hand, he felt. You’d hear about the old days in Australia—the ten-mile runs, the calisthenics, the two-on-one drills. Harry would just work his players to the bone, and they reaped the benefits. By the time he got to Port Washington, however, maybe he’d mellowed with age, because he treated me differently.

I guess he saw something in me right away. He used to bring us in and give us the jumping jacks and double knee-jumps and all the rest of it, which most of the time I would do, but basically, I hated calisthenics and stretching. To me, that wasn’t what I was there for. I always wanted to get to the tennis court. Because I was running around all the time anyway, I wasn’t out of shape, so whenever I didn’t show up for the calisthenics, Harry would just smile and say, “Oh, McEnroe’s hiding in the bathroom.”

It meant a huge amount to me that he had coached Rod Laver. Laver was the first guy I saw who did everything—hit topspin and slice on both forehand and backhand, served with different spins. He utilized every possible shot, all the angles. I used to have a poster of him on the back of my bedroom door. The fact that he was a lefty like me was a big deal, and that massive Popeye forearm of his just seemed so cool—bizarre, but very cool. I remember trying to figure out how I could make my arm like that.

Just like Laver, I used the same grip on every shot: forehand, backhand, serve, and volley (I still do—slightly toward the forehand from a Continental grip. I don’t think anyone else does it now.) The wristiness of his strokes was supposedly what had built up his forearm, but no matter how hard I tried to play like Laver, no matter how many times I squeezed my wrist-builder, my left arm stayed the same size as my right. No muscles. I swear, I think I’m the only number-one player in history whose two arms are the same size.

I may have been short, but I wasn’t short on self-confidence. After I’d been working for a few months at Port Washington, one of the pros set up a challenge match between me and a newly arrived sixteen-year-old from New Jersey named Peter Fleming. Peter must’ve been at least a foot taller than I was at that point, well on his way to his full height of six-foot-five. There’s also a huge difference in strength and maturity between a twelve-year-old and a sixteen-year-old. I knew Peter thought I was an insect, beneath contempt, and he confirmed it when he offered me a handicap: He’d give me an advantage of 4–0, 30–love a set before we even walked out onto the court.

I beat him five sets in a row. Never get an insect mad! It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Tony Palafox was a very laid-back guy, so while our playing styles were alike, my intensity was something new to him. I had energy and desire—the willingness to do what it takes—and part of that, I was starting to realize, was the willingness to set myself apart from other people. It was one of the first lessons I learned in tournament tennis: The better you get, the more you get put on some kind of pedestal. And as my British readers would say, the more people look to take the piss out of you.

I saw early on that there were a lot of great advantages to winning, but there was also one big disadvantage: Once you’re on that pedestal, you’re alone.

T
HE FUNNY THING IS
, if you’d asked me when I was twelve what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would’ve said, “A pro basketball player.”

I loved basketball, and I was good at it (though whether I could ever have become another John Stockton is another question). It was the same with soccer, football, and baseball: I always enjoyed being part of a team. I loved the camaraderie. It’s what I loved about Davis Cup. It’s what made doubles so important to me. If you’re on a team, and you’re angry or upset at something that happened in a game, you have people to share it with. It’s the same thing when you win.

If you’re not at your peak, you can hide it so much easier in a team sport. In basketball, you can play decent defense or set a pick; you can do a lot of little things to help out that aren’t related to scoring. It’s the same with soccer. As long as you have a lot of energy, run up and down the field, and keep your head in the game, it doesn’t matter if you kick the ball with your toe instead of the side of your foot. I remember scoring a couple of goals that way back in school—it’s not the way you’re taught how to do it, but I did it anyway, the field was full of people, and no one was watching my form. No one cared; I was part of the team.

On a tennis court, you’re out there all alone. People ask why I get so angry: This is a big part of it. I’m out there on the line, by myself, fighting to the death in front of people who are eating cheese sandwiches, checking their watches, and chatting with their friends about the stock market.

To be honest, sometimes, when I look back, I don’t know how any of this ever happened to me. Sometimes I think I was pushed into something I didn’t really want to do. My parents saw that I was good at it and better all the time; they nudged me, and I went along. I was a good boy, an obedient boy. (For example, throughout my junior-high and early high-school years, I was terrified about trying any type of drug, at a time when a lot of my friends were experimenting with marijuana and other substances. In retrospect, staying away from drugs during those years probably kept my motivation sharp.)

Tennis, obviously, turned out to be an incredible thing for me, an amazing roller-coaster ride, and a lot more good came out of it than bad, but the truth is that I didn’t really want to pursue it until it just pursued me. Many athletes seem truly to love to play their sport. I don’t think I ever felt that way about tennis. I looked forward to the practice and preparation, but the match itself was a constant battle for me, against two people: the other guy and myself.

Once my professional career began, I certainly enjoyed the
consequences
of playing—the adulation, the feeling of contentment at being a professional athlete and then reaching the peak of my profession, the money that came from it.

I guess I would correlate my story to those you hear about kids learning to play the piano. Every now and then, someone says, “I just loved to play six hours a day.” But mostly they say, “God, my parents forced me to play, they forced me to take these lessons; but I’m sure glad they made me do it.”

Look at almost any of the great players. Would they have succeeded anyway if they hadn’t been pushed? That’s the unanswerable question. Would Agassi have been a great champion if he hadn’t been pushed by his father? Would Monica Seles, if her father hadn’t quit his job and pushed her? It’s difficult to say.

I had dinner with Richard Williams during the 2000 French Open (yes, we do speak to each other!), and he told me, “Kids have no idea what they want to do most of the time.” Which is true. I had no idea I wanted to be a tennis player when I grew up. Richard’s attitude about Venus and Serena was “Look, I picked something great for them, something that’ll give them a tremendous living and a tremendous life. It’s crazy to think that they were capable of making that decision when they were young. So of course I pushed them, but they needed to be pushed.”