You Cannot Be Serious (40 page)

And that’s precisely what he did, taking inspiration from my tirade and running off the next two sets, 6–2, 6–4, to win the biggest match of his career and seal our victory. I felt as if I had aged a month in a week—I wondered how long I could take all this prestige. Still, I felt I had made the little bit of difference that had put us over the top. During my TV interview after the match (with Patrick McEnroe), I dedicated the victory to Arthur Ashe, who had died on that very date seven years before.

Because our quarterfinal tie against the Czech Republic in April was at the Forum in Los Angeles, and because I strongly felt that our best players were needed in Davis Cup, I was able to convince (translation: butter up) Pete Sampras into playing. He made things a little more dramatic than I would have liked. He lost the first of his singles matches, and then—after Andre had once again won both of his singles—needed to beat Slava Dosedel if we were going to advance into the semifinals. Pete’s first service game was all I needed to see: his serve was really booming, and Dosedel looked intimidated.

Then, as Pete changed sides at 2–1 in the first set, already up a break, he appeared to have pulled a leg muscle. He actually looked as if he were going to throw in towel.

Before he could say anything, I took him aside. “Listen, Pete, you can’t quit,” I said. “You’ve got to keep playing—if you keep serving this big, you’ll be a hero, and you’ll be off the court in an hour and a half.” Somehow, Pete managed to play through the pain and do just that. He came off the court smiling.

The semifinal against Spain would’ve been very tough even if we’d had a full squad. In July, however, the day after Sampras won his seventh Wimbledon, he called me to say he was unfit to play the tie. That came on the heels of Andre Agassi’s call saying he had been in a car accident on the way home from the airport after his loss to Patrick Rafter at Wimbledon.
And
Michael Chang had turned me down two weeks earlier. That left me with my Zimbabwe hero Chris Woodruff; Todd Martin, who had been fighting injuries the whole year; Jan-Michael Gambill, who was not a clay-court player; and Vince Spadea, who had been in the top twenty, but had just lost twenty-one of his previous twenty-two matches.

The crowds in Santander were rough, the heat was unbearable, and we never had a chance. Things were so desperate that I even considered putting myself in the doubles—not that it would have helped. In the end, we gave it our best shot, but we were outclassed and outplayed, 5–0. Spain won the Davis Cup that year for the first time ever.

D
ESPITE THE FACT
that Vince Spadea was on his way to the hospital with severe dehydration and everyone else on the team was feeling pretty low, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I felt burned out and beaten up: Everything that could have gone wrong that week had gone wrong. And I wanted badly to see my kids.

I left Spain feeling severely conflicted. As a captain, I should have stayed with my team; as a father, I needed to be with my family. I flew to Paris and took the Concorde to New York the next morning. As soon I arrived, I drove to Massachusetts to see my boys at camp, then turned around and drove back to Manhattan the same night.

The next morning, I was on the road again, heading to Connecticut to see Ruby at her camp, when a report came over the radio: A Concorde had crashed on takeoff in Paris, killing all aboard. Once again, a terrible tragedy had thrown my tennis misadventures into sharp perspective. I became more determined than ever to appreciate how really fortunate I was.

M
Y PLAY
on the Seniors tour and my commentary work at the U.S. Open that year felt like a walk in the park after the intensity of Davis Cup. On the first Friday of the Open, I was broadcasting a night match for USA when somebody passed an envelope to me. Inside was a letter from Mr. Promoter himself, Donald Trump—his box was right next to the broadcast booth—offering me a million dollars to play either one of the Williams sisters at one of his hotels. I laughed. Earlier that week, a
New Yorker
profile of me, by Calvin Tomkins, had appeared, with a quote that was widely picked up and quickly fanned into a big brouhaha. Because the Williamses had been going around for a couple of years claiming they could beat ranked male players, Tomkins had asked me if I thought it was true. I’d responded that I felt
any
respectable male player, be it a top college competitor, a seniors player, or a professional, could beat them.

Here was the next step in the controversy—a million dollars! I thought, “That’s a good start.” Patty and I had a good chuckle about the whole thing when I got home. Still, the idea gathered further momentum after Trump phoned the
New York Times
and an article about the potential match appeared that Sunday. A few days later, the Williamses came to their senses and put out a statement that they didn’t want to play against “an old man.”

Once again, I felt severely conflicting emotions: In one way, I had no interest whatever in playing against women. I’d always thought that men’s and women’s tennis were simply apples and oranges. I didn’t consider myself a hustler like Jimmy Connors or Bobby Riggs. On the other hand, I still had my masculine pride, and my tennis pride. I didn’t appreciate the Williamses’ lack of respect for the men’s game, and toward me in particular. And I knew that, if push should ever come to shove, I would have no problem whatsoever in beating Venus or Serena.

But I still think it’s apples and oranges.

A few years before, I had gotten into a not-dissimilar flap with my old friend Mary Carillo, who had become a tennis commentator back in the ’80s. In the early ’90s, I told a reporter that I thought men were more qualified than women to call men’s matches. The comment was picked up by
USA Today,
and soon the whole thing snowballed, making Mary and me appear to be adversaries when in fact we were old friends, and making me look like a sexist Neanderthal into the bargain.

The essence of what I’d said then was that I felt women were less able than men to understand what went on inside a male competitor’s head—and vice versa, when it came to male commentators and female players! I also felt that anybody who did tennis analysis should have competed at the same level as the players being analyzed—and since Mary, in particular, had never advanced very far in her singles career, I didn’t think it made sense for her to be telling the public about the inside of a top-ten male player’s singles game.

You’ll be glad to know that I’ve evolved since then—and my daughters are the reason why. Watching my girls grow up gave me a new appreciation for female athletics, and for the opportunities that trailblazers like Billie Jean King opened up for all girls and women. I’ve also come to understand that televised tennis is really entertainment, and that tennis broadcasting must be entertaining. Mary is a good example of someone who never starred, but whose effervescent personality and incisive wit add energy to a broadcast. Tennis needs all the energy it can get.

I must admit, though, that—personalities aside—I haven’t always been so happy about working three to a booth. In case you haven’t noticed, I like to talk! It would take an incident on Super Saturday of the 2000 Open to prove me wrong once again.

Mary, Dick Enberg, and I were in the CBS booth, broadcasting the Pete Sampras–Lleyton Hewitt semifinal, when someone passed me a note. It said—to my amazement—that President Clinton was in a nearby box and wanted to talk with me.

If I had been working alone with Dick or Mary, I simply wouldn’t have been able to go. Now, however, I was. I left—gathering Patty, Kevin, and Anna along the way—and went to sit with the President for an educational half-hour. After a little while, one of the CBS cameras picked me up, and somebody noticed that, quite uncharacteristically, I was doing a lot of listening and no talking. A clock was started, and I was timed—on the air—saying absolutely nothing for eight solid minutes: a new record!

I was very impressed with President Clinton (which is more than I can say for Anna, who was bored to tears). He was much more knowledgeable about tennis than I would ever have imagined, and he just generally knew so much about so many things that it was fun to talk with (or even listen to) him.

After a little while, to my disbelief, somebody handed me a note. I was pretty sure my producer, Bob Mansbach, wanted me back in the booth. Somehow I just couldn’t imagine saying, “Excuse me, Mr. President….” I didn’t open it. Five minutes later, though, someone handed the President a note—perhaps a little more pressing than mine—and while he read his, I felt obliged to read mine. It was just what I’d suspected. “Mr. President, could you please fire my producer?” I said. “He says he wants me back in the booth now.” We both had a good laugh over that.

When I got back, Mary and Dick were delightfully jealous—and I was delighted to tease them. “What did he
say
?” they kept asking. “Sorry—I can’t reveal that,” I told them.

S
OON AFTER THE
U.S. O
PEN
, Andre Agassi called me and said I shouldn’t count on him for 2001. I knew Pete Sampras was a question mark at best. And so, when I met in September with Arlen Kantarian, the Chief Executive for Professional Tennis of the USTA, I suggested we go with youth in the coming year, mentioning the rising stars Mardie Fish, Andy Roddick, Taylor Dent, and James Blake. I told Kantarian I thought that for Davis Cup to become relevant to Americans and American players, it badly needed to be both more fan-friendly and more player-friendly. I said I believed strongly that unless significant changes were made in the format and scheduling, we should pull out of Cup play the following year. I also threw into the mix that I was very serious about wanting to start a national tennis academy to develop American youth. Kantarian nodded mechanically and told me my ideas were good, and I never heard from him again. For the next couple of months, I didn’t even want to think about Davis Cup.

In November, I met with incoming USTA president Merv Heller and Judy Levering, presumably to discuss the next year’s Davis Cup. It was there that I announced to them that after months of soul-searching, I had decided to resign my post. They offered no resistance.

It was a down note to leave on. Finally, though, the frustrations had been too great, and I really hadn’t enjoyed myself. Life is too short to do things—especially big, important things—that you don’t enjoy. I wanted to spend more time with my wife and six children, rather than banging my head against the wall. My dad the lawyer had helped me write my three-year contract with a provision for assessing my performance and my feelings about Davis Cup each year, and a potential out if I felt either was not up to par. I believed I had done my best that first year; I had been happy to donate my entire salary to my foundation. Now, however, the negatives were outweighing the positives. As much as I cherished Davis Cup, I had discovered the one role in it that I wasn’t cut out for. It was time to go.

A lot of people, in the press and tennis, took potshots at me for quitting. Ultimately, though, I felt our Cup chances would be better served with someone other than me in the captain’s chair.

And what a replacement they found.

On December 13, 2000, the United States Tennis Association named Patrick McEnroe as the thirty-eighth Davis Cup captain. Captain Patrick! Of all the ironies…my mind was a welter of emotions. But mostly, I was proud.

I
F SOMEBODY HAD
told me back when the All England Club was refusing me a membership that I would one day find myself playing Bjorn Borg in Buckingham Palace, I would have said, “Yeah, and I’ll probably wind up playing Seniors tennis and doing commentary on women’s tournaments, too.”

Nevertheless—despite Pat Cash’s statement that the only way I would ever get into Buckingham Palace would be by climbing the fence—on the middle Sunday of Wimbledon in 2000, I rode through the palace gates and up to a hard court in the middle of the magnificent grounds, where Bjorn and I proceeded to play a pleasantly relaxed charity exhibition in front of a small group of invited guests that included Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. The person I really missed that day was Princess Diana, who had been so kind to me on the few occasions when we had met, expressing sympathy for my difficulties with the press at the end of my marriage—at a time when I knew it was a hundred times worse for her.

Stuffy old England—after all this time, I was getting to like it quite a lot.

W
IMBLEDON
, 2001. I was still sweating from my cardiovascular workout when I stepped into the BBC late-night-show studio to discuss the quarterfinal match between Goran Ivanisevic and Marat Safin. I had often arrived at the last moment before, but tonight, as I sat in front of the cameras, I suddenly found myself distracted by the fact that I was perspiring so heavily. Uncustomarily, I cut short my interview with John Inverdale, dismissing the match. Goran had been hitting his usual colossal serves, I said, and Marat was trying to push the ball back from the baseline, like a clay-court player on grass. I felt the match had seemed tailor-made for Goran to win, and that Safin appeared less than confident about his chances, perhaps satisfied with a quarterfinal result. It had been boring to watch, and I said so.

For years, BBC had been asking me to work for them during the Wimbledon fortnight, and in 2000, NBC had finally agreed that I could broadcast for both networks, as long as I made NBC my priority. So far, my work for BBC had gone even better than expected. My producer, Dave Gordon, had encouraged me to be myself, sensing that the British public was ready for a change in attitude. His guess had been right: The reaction in England had been overwhelmingly positive.

This was my first slip-up.

I felt slightly uneasy after I left the studio, but then I forgot about it. After Goran’s third-round win over Andy Roddick, I went into the locker room and told him how happy I was for him. “You can do it!” I told him, in an unconscious echo of the very words my dad used to say to me.