You Cannot Be Serious (41 page)

Deep down, however, I didn’t think he had a chance in the world.

Goran and I had a long history. We’d first played in the early nineties, as his career was beginning and mine was ending. That giant lefty serve of his, which started in a strange crouch and finished with an explosion, was the centerpiece of his game, and there wasn’t much I or anyone else could do with it when he was on. His groundstrokes and volley were strong but inconsistent. The big Croatian was one of the few players with a winning record against me.

But I liked him. He was my kind of guy—funny, outspoken, hot-headed, and a little flaky around the edges. A typical left-hander, perhaps. His personality was like his groundstrokes: here one day, there the next. We played doubles together at Wimbledon in 1991, and for reasons I never understood, we were up a set and a break, and then he seemed to check out mentally, and we ended up losing.

I felt that we were friends, but there was something elusive about him. The two times I played Seniors events in Croatia, where he was an idol, I was disappointed that we couldn’t get together. Goran had said he would show me around Zagreb—but he never called.

Still, I kept rooting for him. In the midst of all the blandness that overtook the sport in the ’90s, Goran was a breath of fresh air: a player with the potential for greatness, who brought drama to the court every time he played. Too often, though, the drama turned to farce or tragedy, as he frittered away chance after chance. I felt horrible for him at Wimbledon in 1998, when, as the fourteenth seed, he blew his biggest—and, I thought, his last—opportunity for a title there in his five-set loss to Sampras in the final.

And now in 2001, he was back again, in a scenario almost too strange to be true. Either from a certain sentimentality about his past here, or a hardheaded appreciation of his entertainment value (or both), the All-England Club had wild-carded Goran into the tournament at number 125 in the world. They would live to regret it.

He had proceeded to plow his way through the draw, beating red-hot Andy Roddick in the third round, Greg Rusedski in the fourth, and Safin in the quarters. Then—with the Wimbledon Tournament Committee kicking itself around the block, I’m sure—he dispatched the last English hope, Tim Henman, in a three-day, rain-delayed semifinal marathon. Ivanisevic’s 2001 Wimbledon had a look of crazy destiny about it.

In the press conference after his victory over Henman, however, still stinging from my remarks during the Safin match (which by this point, I had forgotten), Goran let me have it.

“John McEnroe was my idol,” he said. “He was the player I really liked to watch but, as a person, I don’t think too much about him. He says I only have one shot. That makes me a genius or that makes the other guys very bad…. [He] gives everybody shit. Who cares about John McEnroe now?…He’s an idiot.”

I felt rattled. This had been an especially intense Wimbledon fortnight for me. My old friend Richard Weisman had taken Patty, Ruby, and Emily on a camera safari in Botswana, and I felt excited for them, but also vaguely nervous about their being so far away. The two little girls were with me in London, and between my broadcast responsibilities and my responsibilities as a father, I was feeling ragged.

It didn’t help that I had been trying for days to reach Patty by cell phone but hadn’t been able to get through. You can reach practically anyplace by cell phone these days, but apparently the Botswana bush was pushing it. Worse still, I had left the safari brochure back in New York, and I didn’t even know which outfit they were traveling with. I felt embarrassed and worried. Part of me felt sure they were all okay, but my imagination was starting to work overtime.

And in the middle of it all, I had to work, hard. This was a good thing. It was interesting to try to do the same job two slightly different ways. Of course, there are no commercials on BBC, which means you can talk during the changeovers: This alters the rhythm of the broadcast, and allows for a more natural, conversational style, with silences when appropriate.

American television, as we know, is a little more skittish about dead air, although you don’t want to talk too much during a tennis match, either. The trick on American TV is finding just the right balance. I like to have fun, say what’s on my mind, work the edges. When a streaker ran across the court at Wimbledon in 1996, Dick Enberg frantically signaled me not to acknowledge it. Me? “We’ve got to see that replay from all the angles,” I told the audience.

Goran’s tirade was the last thing I needed at that point. By the day before the Ivanisevic–Patrick Rafter final—which, because of rain delays, had been pushed back to Monday for only the second time since my 1980 final against Borg—I was in a very bad way. I had been unable to reach Patty for a week, and I spent that night doing a lot of tossing and turning (and crying) instead of sleeping.

I had to wake up at five-thirty the next morning to get Anna and Ava and their nanny ready to catch their plane. By the time the car came to take me to the matches, I was staggering—and my mental state wasn’t helped by seeing the newspapers, which were still full of the McEnroe– Ivanisevic battle. The car dropped me off at the customary spot, a parking lot near Court 14 at Wimbledon. When I got out, I heard something unlike anything I had ever heard before at the tournament—it turned out to be the happy sound of ten thousand predominantly Australian and Croatian young people chanting their respective national anthems, all at once. These were kids who a week before would never have dreamed of attending a final at the All England Club, but here they were on a Monday morning, amped and ready to go.

The second I walked into the NBC area, my producer, John McGuinness, said, “Are you OK? You look horrible.” Then he told me that, by the way, the BBC wanted to do an interview on-court with me immediately.

When I walked out to talk with BBC anchorwoman Sue Barker, the Centre Court crowd let out a roar at the sight of me. Suddenly, I felt good for the first time in days.

However, my worry and fatigue caught right back up with me as soon as I got to the booth, and I was struggling. My commentary comes from my gut, and that day I didn’t have anything. During a break just after the first set, I reflexively picked up my cell phone and, for the umpteenth time, tried to call Patty.

And I reached her. In Johannesburg Airport.

A tremendous weight lifted from my shoulders. I was struggling not to weep, telling her how worried I’d been.

“Aren’t you silly, John,” she said. “It’s a
safari.
We were in
Botswana.
You can’t just chat on the cell phone whenever you feel like it.”

The burden had been lifted. I happily went back to work, but I didn’t have to do much talking after that: The energy of the crowd was so spectacular that I was able to let the match speak for itself.

Goran threw himself to the grass and looked up to heaven when he won the fifth set and his first Wimbledon. I knew exactly how he felt.

I flew back to New York that night with a smile on my face the whole way. Patty flew back from Johannesburg the next afternoon. The moment she walked in the door, my eyes filled with tears: I had never loved her so much.

This, I thought, was what it was all about.

A
FEW MONTHS AGO
, I was in my den, watching TV with my daughter Anna, when the phone rang. Anna jumped at the sound of the phone. I picked it up. The voice on the other end was instantly familiar: “John. Jimmy Connors.”

I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy for months, since he’d walked out of another Seniors tournament, in Stanford. We were supposed to have played in the final the next day, but Jimmy’d said he had hurt his back. It was the latest of several tournaments he’d pulled out of that year. I think his real reason for withdrawing was that he was annoyed that, since he’d sold it to IMG, the tour had gone from a twelve-man single-elimination format to an eight-man round-robin; it was essentially so that the sponsors and the promoters could squeeze at least three matches out of us.

Maybe, too, he didn’t want to play me—I’d beaten him pretty badly the last few times. But now, on the phone, that was all forgotten: He sounded excited. He had a promoter, he said, who was ready to back a doubles match: Sampras and Agassi against the two of us.

I said, “Are you serious?”

Jimmy said, “You can cover three-quarters of the court, and I figure I can return and hold my own and do as well as Agassi, and I know you’re a better doubles player than Sampras. Would you be interested in talking to this guy sometime?”

Now here’s the amazing part. I said, “OK. I’ll talk to him.” What I should have said was, “Forget about it, Jimmy! Hang it up, man!” But there’s still an allure, even to me. I thought, “This guy still believes he’s better than anybody!” Part of it is, we
are
better—in a way. We’re old codgers who could barely beat the local pro sometimes, but we still have these egos. Jimmy’s amazing. I thought he was going to say, “Let’s play the Williams sisters!”

It’s very strange. You reach these highs at a young age, then part of you keeps searching forever to re-create them. Say you’re Borg, and you’re on the Swedish Tourism Board, and you’re hanging around with the president of Sweden, trying to figure out how to encourage people to visit the country. Is that going to give you the rush of winning Wimbledon? Is playing the Seniors tour? So how do you get that rush again?

That’s why bad things happen with athletes more often than with other people. They can’t reach that high anymore, so they have to get it artificially, or, if they don’t succeed, feel empty. My life feels good—and better all the time—but as good as it gets, sometimes it’s hard to forget those tremendous victories….

That’s when I have to remind myself that I really had no one to share those victories with. That’s when I remember how cold the top of the mountain was.

L
ATE
F
EBRUARY
2002, the middle of a weekday night: I was startled out of an unusually deep sleep by the sound of my youngest child crying. Patty was away, and so there was no choice: I had to get up and go to Ava, who had wet her bed and was half-asleep and hysterical. I changed her sheets, put on a fresh blanket, and got her a bottle to calm her down. She fell back to sleep in a couple of minutes—at which point, of course, I was wide awake.

I spent a bad couple of hours tossing and turning, worrying about everything. I had recently come back from California, where I’d completed shooting the thirteenth episode of my ABC TV show,
The Chair.
The show was a kind of curveball in my life: The idea had only come up just after Christmas, and less than two months later, I found myself the star of a prime-time broadcast, kind of a cross between a game show and a reality program.

But I ran into the real reality at home. I returned from the Coast just in time to celebrate my forty-third birthday, yet I felt burned out from making four trips to Los Angeles in six weeks, and my household and I had to do some readjusting to each other. I wanted to drive out to our weekend house on Long Island for my birthday, but my plan met with a less-than-enthusiastic response from my teenagers. “It’s boring there, Dad,” Ruby and the boys said. They wanted to go to their friends’ houses on sleepover dates.

Meanwhile, Patty was once again exhausted from bearing the brunt of the childcare, and feeling farther away than ever from the million-selling artist she’d been before we met. Somehow, she also felt guilty about not having arranged a party for me—but mad that I had made her feel guilty (and never given her a birthday party)! It was all well and good for me to run around being a star, she told me, but now she needed some time to herself. She decided to go to a spa for a few days, for some decompression and pampering.

As I rolled restlessly in the bed that felt too big without her, I wondered: Was I selfish? A narcissist?
Still?
As a young and single tennis player, the center of my own world, I used to go to sleep at two
A
.
M
. and wake up at eleven, with nothing to think about but my practice, my meals, my match, and how I’d entertain myself afterward. As a young husband home from the road, I’d informed Tatum that I was available from seven in the morning until midnight, but that if anything arose between midnight and seven
A
.
M
., it was her problem. I needed my sleep. With Patty, I had hired nannies so I wouldn’t have to get up in the night if she couldn’t.

Now I was finding out what it really meant to be a parent: waking in the middle of the night to comfort children, grappling with my own demons—and then trying to find energy during the day to handle the rest of my life. Had I been too tough on Tatum? Was I too self-involved for Patty? Was my perfectionism driving my family crazy? Were my kids doing OK? Would I ever learn to relax? Why was I running off to do a game show instead of sticking around to attend to the real (and thankless and overwhelming) job of taking care of our children—a job that Patty had given up her own career for?

Finally, I forgot about sleep and went to my den, where I looked out the windows at the city, my city, as the sky grew light over Central Park. This was another mountaintop, I realized, one I’d had to struggle to reach—unlike the one I’d ascended so long ago, by the grace of my gifts, with such apparent ease.

I’d had an unsuccessful marriage; I’d been humbled in ways other than the gradual, inevitable deterioration of my career. I’d worked, harder than I’d ever worked before, at making a new marriage, at being a father. At long last, I’d actually begun to find myself. With any luck, I had a lot of future left in me.

It’s funny: I took on the television show because I worried I was in danger of taking myself too seriously. Now I was worrying that it was pulling me away from the more important things in life. It seemed so hard to find a middle ground.

Still, I felt optimistic as I looked out at the city. The possibilities seemed limitless. Art, tennis, television…I thought again that someday I might even wind up in politics. Stranger things have happened. Hey, if Jesse Ventura could become governor of Minnesota, who knows how far I might go?