Sunrise with Seamonsters (36 page)

I felt mingled anxiety and relief when McEnroe appeared in the room. What now? But he looked quite different. His hair dripped, he seemed apologetic and ill-at-ease, he sounded youthfully adenoidal. "His interviews are disjointed and thin," one reporter wrote in a recent profile. McEnroe is in fact rather shy, but his shyness is so obvious—unfeigned and unexpected—it amounts to charm. His suspiciousness makes him appear slow-witted: he squints at questions and tugs his hair and studies his shoes. An athlete can easily deceive an onlooker into thinking that physical grace implies verbal eloquence. How can such a nimble person be so flat-footed in conversation? How can one so violent in play be so meek in an interview? I had been worried that I would end up writing yet another version of Beauty and the Beast, or else be reduced to screaming impotently, "Look, Junior, show some respect—I'm old enough to be your father!"

It surprised me, therefore, that McEnroe, who is regarded as America's answer to Nasty, The Howling Rumanian (and even Nasty has said, "He's worse than Connors and me put together"), can be quite nice, and when he does not have a tennis racket in his hand, loses his demonic sense of malignancy and becomes the sort of sweet freckled-faced chap a lady might like to take on her lap—that is, if he didn't weigh so much.

Off the court he looks another person altogether, a bit callow and dreamy, lugging a valise full of sweaty tennis clothes, and carrying six wooden rackets and a plastic racket-cover which, when unzipped, is revealed to contain wads of paper, tickets, coins, a large wrist-watch and a number of crumpled $ 20 bills. I had had a brief glimpse of this side of his personality. Just after his match finished, I watched him signing
autographs for a group of adoring ten-year-olds. McEnroe signed without a qualm, exchanged a few words, and left them happy. He did not, as I suppose some of the tots had been led to expect, bite their noses off. It seems a small thing, this favor to tiny sports fans performed with a kindly grace, but I believe it is the key to his character. He is at ease with anyone his own age or younger; he is suspicious and almost resentful—and certainly disbelieving—of anyone older. He does not travel with his mother, as Connors did for so long; he has no coach on hand to guide him through the tournaments. "I don't need a guy traveling with me to buy tickets and do my laundry," he says. He is, in asserting this lonesome independence, rather unprotected; he feels exposed, and consequently, when a match finishes, he slopes off into the night and disappears. His views of older people, whom he sees as ignorant gawpers, or mockers, or snipers, has given him a sense of distrust. He is not unusual among tennis players in finding court officials myopic, but is rare in seeing them as treacherous. "There are some umpires who deliberately try to make me look bad," he told me, speaking softly, eyes down. "And a lot of people come to watch me lose. And there are some players—hey, I'm not mentioning any names—some players who try to get the crowd against me. See, I don't have the greatest reputation, do I? People expect me to behave bad."

I said that at Wimbledon two years ago the crowd was rooting for him when he played against Connors.

"They didn't know me then," said McEnroe, with a wan smile. "Now they do."

I could not understand his combative attitude towards spectators. Wasn't it better if they cheered you?

"Sure, it's better if the crowd is on your side. I want them on my side, but I don't know how to do it. I play Borg and the crowd goes bananas for him. Why? Because he doesn't change his expression? I don't know. The crowd's funny—they want you to talk to them, I guess. But I don't make jokes. So they yell things at me, they say stupid things, pop flashbulbs, clap at the wrong time, walk around, make noise."

I had got nowhere in discussing
The Deer Hunter
with him (he had seen it in Rotterdam the previous week; the film had shocked him, but "I couldn't really relate to the war—I was too young"), but he became animated on the subject of spectators. He described a fantasy he sometimes has where an unruly crowd is concerned. As soon as the match is over, McEnroe sees himself stepping forward. "Stay where you are," he says in this imagining, as the crowd begins to rise. "I'd like to talk to you about some of the things you've just done. You were too noisy. You were laughing in the wrong places. You clapped at a double fault. That's rude!"

"But not all spectators are rude," I said. "They say the Wimbledon spectators are the most knowledgeable in the world".

"Who says?" demanded McEnroe, hunching his shoulders and assuming that I would say Fred Perry. "Who told you that?"

"My wife," I said.

"Your wife!" he cried, then quietly conceded that this might be true. "But they don't have too many sports over there, do they? Only tennis and soccer and, whats-it—cricket."

Soccer is one of McEnroe's passions. He played it all the way through school ("It was considered a sissy sport, but it gave me a lot of satisfaction to play on the team"). More revealing is his plain love for the way the British play football. "The England team really knows how to do it," he said, speaking of his admiration for the aggressive attacking style which is a counterpart of his own in tennis. "The Dutch and the Germans just kick the ball to each other—it's so dull it's like chess."

Because he regards dullness in sport as the greatest vice, he despises the poker-faced play of someone like Stan Smith. "If every guy were like Smith tennis would stink—it'd be boring. People criticise Nastase, but Nasty's done more for the game than any one man. He's made it lively and now more people are interested in it."

I suggested that losing one's temper destroyed one's concentration—it certainly seemed so in the case of Nastase who, after blowing his top, usually went on to lose the match. McEnroe denied this was so: "Anger doesn't necessarily affect your concentration." He went on to say that if there was a bad call a player was obliged to make a fuss; but he admitted that it seldom did much good to complain, since officials were so stubborn and unwilling to admit their mistakes. (A man who knows McEnroe's game well told me, "He's almost always right when he questions a call—he's got sharp eyes.") He loathes opponents who accept disputed points. This happened while he was playing Peter Fleming in Jamaica, and he swore at him throughout the match until finally Fleming screamed back, "What do you think I am, Junior, the Salvation Army?"

But it wasn't right, said McEnroe. His innocent sense of fair play is not confined to tennis. "These people who recognise me—I go into a restaurant and they give me the best table, or they do things for me that they wouldn't do for anyone else—that's not fair." This struck me as an honorable attitude in one so young, but his youth has something to do with it. It surprises him, he says, that he has found so much deceit and dishonesty since he started to play tennis professionally; he is only calm and talkative when the atmosphere is sympathetic, and he cannot bear to be scrutinized or judged.

In this sense he could not be more American. He insists he plays for pleasure, but he is intensely competitive (and withdraws and falls silent
when the talk is of anything but sports or rock music), obsessed with winning, more tenacious in play than any tennis player I have ever seen—he throws himself on impossible shots, often risking a fracture as he somersaults into the scoreboard, knocking numbers all over the floor. He has been playing tennis in a serious way since he was twelve and beating older opponents at the Douglaston Club in New York. Little else matters to him.

Challenged on this, he says, "I've learned more about life in a year of pro tennis than I would have in four years of college. Now I can see through people a lot quicker"—and he goes on to describe the phonies he's met and their dreary deceptions.

His father has been quoted as saying that his famous son ("but I don't feel famous—I get nervous when I meet real sports stars") is living in an unreal world. McEnroe laughed at this. "My father's in an unreal world. He's my manager! He's learned a lot, too—suddenly I'm earning more than he is. He figures I was going to earn maybe a hundred thousand or so—was he surprised! There's about six people in his law firm working on my accounts—taxes, all that stuff. He says, 'Hey this is getting serious' or 'I'm concerned that you're playing too much.'

"But I take time off—weeks sometimes, when I'm tired and can't stand the sight of a racket. There are lots of players who practise more than me—six hours a day. That's not my style. Or those long flights—one day in Tokyo, the next day in Stockholm or Miami, playing on two or three hours' sleep. I hate that. Gullikson won Jo'burg and then for about two months he was walking around like a Zombie. Not me, man. If I'm playing in London on Monday I try to arrive on Saturday."

The next day in San Jose he had two matches, the singles and doubles finals, both of which he won. A night in San Francisco and then he went to Las Vegas to compete in an exhibition tournament at Caesar's Palace. On his way to Las Vegas he passed through San Francisco Airport. I happened to be there, waiting for my own flight. I did not recognise his face, but identified him because he was carrying six tennis rackets under one arm and an enormous radio-cassette player in the other. He loped through the lobby alone, and no one else saw the mild, anonymous-looking youth anymore than, in another dimension, anyone had assumed that Jekyll could be anything but a nice-natured doctor who was away most evenings.

The tradition in England of ghost stories at Christmas is much older than Dickens. "It is evident enough that no one who writes now can use the Pagan deities and mythology," Dr. Johnson said in 1780. "The only machinery, therefore, seems that of ministering spirits, the ghosts of the departed, witches and fairies." Although Dickens is the most celebrated exponent of the machinery of ministering spirits and ghostly epiphanies at Christmas, there was no better practitioner of the English ghost story than Montague Rhodes James. His stories are more eerie than Dickens's, dustier than L. P. Hartley's, less harshly suburban than Elizabeth Bowen's, and though lacking the narrative gracility of his namesake Henry's, are much scarier for their persuasive antiquarian detail.

People die horribly in M. R. James's stories; their bones are found in marshy woods, finely spun with cobwebs or in ghoulish coitus—two skeletons embracing; their hearts are knifed out and diabolically used; they are murdered and burnt and visited by dark creatures from the distant past. Perhaps this is not so odd. Mr James was himself an antiquary, a translator of the New Testament Apocrypha, passionately interested in paleography and for many years Provost of Eton, where he had any number of pupils and colleagues to sit at his feet. The lovable and learned old bachelor is a natural teller of ghost stories. But the curious thing is that, nearly always, M. R. James used Christmas as the occasion for giving his devotees the creeps with these strong tales. Indeed, he called the most hair-raising of them his "Christmas productions."

The fireside, the indoor life which winter demands, the somberness and good cheer which combine to become something like hysteria—these matter. So does the dark, the penetrating blackness that makes the English December a month almost without daylight, filling the afternoon with a clammy graveyard gloom—everyone hurrying through the wet streets with his head down, and homeward-bound schoolchildren looking blank-faced and lost. In the countryside, the trees drip like leaking wounds in the darkness, and owls squeeze out hoots from where they creepily roost; in the city, the housefronts stare through the trachoma of torn curtains across deserted parks, and moisture blackens
every brick with a look of decay, giving the once-solid city some of the atmosphere of a hugely haunted ruin. It is the perfect weather, the perfect setting, for ghost stories, and it does not seem unusual to me that it has produced so many in England.

But why such stories as "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"—or, for that matter, the one that begins with the ghost of Jacob Marley—at
Christmas
? I think, to understand this, one has to understand the English dislike of piety and church ceremony, the distrust of Catholic liturgy and the low esteem in which most English hold Catholicism. I say "dislike" and "distrust", but uneasiness is its true source, and I should say that in the English character is a kind of protesting residue of paganism. It is a revolt against sanctimony—Christmas pulls one way, pagan skepticism the other, and the result is frequently a blend of the pious and the supernatural, a species of half-belief that is persuasive because it is frightening: fear is the oldest excuse for reverence. And so the Christmas catharsis of the ghost story, that half-belief made into fiction, God in the shape of a bogeyman with a face of crumpled linen, making his annual visitation to an imperfect world. And because Christmas celebrates birth, we are nagged by its opposite, that things end; the ghost story celebrates the experience of death. In Dickens, the haunted man gets a reprieve; in M. R. James, he gets the chop. But Christmas is the only holiday that is specifically associated with a fictional genre, and though the English have contrived a characteristic way of expressing it, the tradition has a shadowy charm, and it is, ultimately, easy to see why it has caught on in other places.

Two Christmases ago, I decided to write such a story for my children. Their requirements were fairly undemanding. They wanted to appear in the story themselves; it had to have snow in it, and a ghost. I wrote it easily, but afterward they suggested with a certain diffidence that it wasn't right—the ending was sad. The old man disappeared—where was he? What happened to him? Was he all right? They said, in so many words, that the lugubrious inconclusiveness of it would keep them awake. So I cobbled together a new ending, and the next night they were satisfied. This I published last year as "A Christmas Card." Interested readers may notice in it a piece of plot I cannibalized from M. R. James's story, "The Mezzotint."