You Cannot Be Serious (18 page)

After the match, I was fined $750 for the obscenity, and the same amount for an unsportsmanlike comment about the umpire, and I was threatened with an additional $10,000 fine, and possible suspension from the tournament, if I engaged in any further “aggravated behavior.” And I want you to understand: I felt terrible. I’ve felt awful virtually every time I’ve had one of my on-court meltdowns, with the exception of a few occasions when I really believed I needed to let someone have it. But those really are the exceptions. I’ve apologized a number of times afterward to umpires and players.

And to anyone out there who felt they deserved an apology but didn’t get one: I apologize now.

The London tabloids went wild after that match:
THE SHAME OF JOHN MCENROE
;
DISGRACE OF SUPER BRAT
, read the huge black headlines. One paper quoted a psychologist at a local hospital, who called me a classic example of a “hysterical extrovert.”

A hysterical extrovert! I’ll take the former—with an asterisk—but I’m not so sure about the latter.

Stacy, who was playing in the women’s draw, was rattled, and rattled even further when a crowd of reporters and photographers followed her to her practice session the next morning. (It didn’t help that, while she had been my girlfriend publicly, and the press was treating her as such now, our relationship was sputtering to a close.) She lost her match that afternoon, and flew back to the States.

I bit my tongue—more or less—for the next four rounds. I told my dad, though, that if I won this year, and if the tournament officials and English press continued to fire away at me like this, I wasn’t coming back.

I
T SEEMS TO HAPPEN
pretty regularly at Wimbledon that some unseeded phenom will streak through the tournament, knocking off a big name or two, and reach the final rounds. Sometimes it’s even a young qualifier! Besides me, there was the even more amazing example of Boris Becker in 1985.

It happened in 1981, too, not with a qualifier or a young up-and-comer, but with a twenty-eight-year-old Aussie named Rod Frawley. He was a good grass-court player, but when I met him in the semifinals, he was also unseeded in the tournament (and number 110 in the world). The whole scenario drove me nuts.

I was champing at the bit to get to Borg, who I felt certain was going to beat Connors in the other semi. I was also incredibly anxious—never my finest state. Here, in the person of one Rod Frawley, was the kind of match I most dreaded: one I had to win, or I’d look like the world’s worst choker.

Frawley had a big mane of wavy hair, like a rock star, and an edgy attitude: He had nothing to lose, he had come this far, and he was going to pull out all the stops. Besides, Aussies, as a rule, don’t tend to be especially reverent.

I was beyond irreverence: I was contemptuous. From the moment play began, I was muttering to myself about this upstart who felt he deserved to be on the same court with me. It was pure bravado, of course, born of sheer anxiety—the prospect of being stopped just short of my date with destiny was unthinkable, and yet, to the demons that always lurked on the edge of my mind, all too thinkable.

If Frawley didn’t hear my mutterings, he certainly picked up the message, and he didn’t like it a bit. Whenever I would complain about a call—and my complaint rate was starting to pick up fast in this match—he would complain to the umpire, R.A.F. Wing Commander George Grime. We played a tight first set (a lot tighter than I would have liked), and after one “out” call, my needle went into the red. “You’re a disgrace to mankind!” I screamed. (Not every line can be immortal.)

“Warning, Mr. McEnroe,” said Wing Commander Grime.

“But I was saying it to myself, umpire,” I tried—not really knowing, to tell the truth, whom I had said it to.

I won the match in a jittery three sets, and the other shoe dropped: I was fined $10,000 for my aggravated behavior. (I later appealed the fine and won.)

H
OW CAN
I
DESCRIBE
my feelings going into that final? Happy but tense, or tense but happy? I was thrilled to be in the rematch I’d wanted so badly, but Borg had won here an unbelievable five times in a row. On the other hand, this time I had actually experienced a Wimbledon final, a final I had almost won. I had my U.S. Open victory against Bjorn under my belt. As confident as I felt about my chances, however, I knew that anything could always happen in a big match, especially on Centre Court.

One thing was for certain, though: There would be no more misbehavior from me in this tournament. Thanks to my action-packed lead-up, I knew the crowd and the officials would jump all over me the second I opened my mouth. And I knew I’d need every ounce of my energy.

I got off to a sluggish start. I was tight, nervous, over-impressed with the occasion. I could feel the crowd was against me (I was beginning to get used to it). At the same time, it was hard
not
to be over-impressed: This was the apex of tennis, the rematch I’d dreamed of, against the player I’d idolized since my early teens.

Borg won the first set, 6–4.

As I loosened up, the match turned into a dogfight. I won a tight tiebreaker to take the second set, and the third set was going in that direction, too. Underneath my nerves, and my certainty that I had to play every point to my utmost, a strange idea was starting to materialize:
He’s not quite as hungry as last year. This is my match to take, if I can take it.

Borg had a set point in the third-set tiebreaker. Then a bad call against me gave him double set point. I summoned everything I had, and negated one set point. Then the other. Then I won the set.

I never relaxed until the last point, but after I took the third set, I knew in my bones that I was going to win.

When we shook hands, Bjorn looked oddly relieved. (And what about me? Was I more relieved at not losing than thrilled at winning? I’m not sure I could tell you even now.)

But the minute I picked up that trophy, I’ll tell you this: No matter what I had said to my father, I wanted to win it again. I knew then that I was coming back.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE MATCH
, Alan Mills, the tournament’s assistant referee, called my father and asked if I planned to attend that night’s Wimbledon victors’ dinner. My father said that he’d ask—but I pleaded exhaustion. I just wanted to relax (at last!), and celebrate with my friends, including some new buddies from the Pretenders (whose lead singer, Chrissie Hynde, would soon incorporate my now-famous phrase “You are the pits of the world!” into her song, “Pack It Up”). Frankly, the Wimbledon dinner sounded like a snooze. Maybe I could just stop by for coffee and dessert, we suggested, and say a few words?

That sounded all right to both of us—but when Mills relayed the word to Sir Brian Burnett, the head of the tournament, the answer came back like a rocket: “If John does not attend the entire banquet, his invitation is withdrawn.”

Withdrawn! We simply found that unreasonable. It felt like Wimbledon high-handedness at its worst, so I gave the banquet a miss. I wanted to be with my friends.

The London tabloids had another field day. The news came later that, for the first time in a hundred years, Wimbledon had decided not to give the men’s champion an automatic membership in the All England Club, “due to Mr. McEnroe’s poor behavior and antics in the fortnight.”

My initial response in New York was an eye-rolling shrug. The next time they would see me was when I would defend my title.

N
UMBER ONE
.

It happened at the ’81 U.S. Open, and it happened in the most bizarre way possible.

I finally seemed to have Bjorn Borg’s number. I’d now beaten him the last three times I’d played him: at the last year’s Open, in Milan, and at Wimbledon. Now, if I got through to the finals at Flushing Meadows, I would play him for a championship he had never won and that I’d won the last two years in a row.

I played Vitas in the semis. It was a tremendous five-setter, the antithesis of our 1979 final, which had ultimately felt hollow to me because of his lackluster play. This time he was hitting the ball with a fury I had never seen before. His serve let him down a little bit in the fifth, and that made the difference.

The next day, in the finals, Borg and I split the first two sets, and he was ahead 4–2 in the third. He had broken me twice, and was serving to go up 5–2, but I hit two great topspin-lob winners over his head in that game, and after the second one, I could’ve sworn I saw the air go out of him.

From there on in, it looked as if Bjorn was doing something I had never seen from him before: throwing in the towel. After having been down 2–4 in the third, I wound up winning that set 6–4 and cruising through the fourth, 6–2. In the last set, it looked to me as though he was barely trying.

There are times—usually in exhibitions, but sometimes even in big tournaments—when you feel so bad physically or mentally that you’re simply not able to go all-out. It’s a tricky situation. You don’t want to lose by just missing every ball, so you hit a shot and leave a part of the court open.

At that point, your body language clearly says, “I’m not going to cover that—just hit it there, it’ll be a winner, and the people will think, ‘Look, he was too good.’” That’s what happened with Sampras when he played Lleyton Hewitt in the finals of last year’s Open: Pete had just run out of gas—he looked as if he had glue on his feet.

And that’s what happened with Borg in ’81—except that it didn’t look physical to me. He came to the net and shook my hand. Then he went over to his bag, picked it up, walked off the court, walked out of the stadium, got into a car that apparently was ready to go, and—within minutes of the last point—left the facility.

No ceremony. No press conference. Nothing. The only other time I’ve ever seen that happen was at the ’77 U.S. Open, when there was a bad call on match point between Vilas and Connors, and even though Vilas had beaten him 6–0 in the last set anyway, Jimmy walked off the court without shaking Guillermo’s hand, and left the stadium.

It was later revealed that apparently Bjorn had received some type of death threat. Obviously, that would put a strain on you, so maybe that explains it. Or maybe it doesn’t.

Whatever the reason, I had now officially replaced Borg as number one in the world.

T
HE YEAR ENDED
with a bang, at the Davis Cup finals in Cincinnati. We had lost to Argentina the year before, in Buenos Aires, and now it was payback time—except that facing a team led by Clerc and Vilas wasn’t going to make payback very easy.

Both of them were brilliant singles players, numbers five and six in the world at that point, and while I felt reasonably confident I could win my singles, Roscoe Tanner was iffier against Vilas.

Doubles was going to be crucial.

On paper at that point, Peter and I were the number-one doubles team in the world, but paper and reality are sometimes very different matters in pressure-cooker situations—and no situation is more pressured than a Davis Cup final.

Then throw into the mix the fact that José-Luis and Guillermo weren’t speaking to each other.

Argentina is a lot smaller than the U.S.A., and Clerc and Vilas cast proportionately bigger shadows there than any tennis player could here, even in the game’s boom days. They were both national heroes, each of them vain about his looks and reputation and standing. Vilas was a god in Argentina, a national legend: No one in tennis, let alone from Latin America, had ever had a year like his 1977. Clerc was just a notch below him, and coming on strong. He was also just twenty-three, while Guillermo was approaching thirty—a little long in the tooth for a tennis player. All that made them naturally competitive to start with, and there had been disagreements—about who should captain their Davis Cup team, about how the money for the tie should be divided.

Peter and I may have had our disagreements, but nothing like that.

Still, I’m of the opinion that when you take two great singles players and put them together, they can make a highly effective doubles team—whether they’re talking to each other or not. And that’s exactly what happened in Cincinnati.

That, and a lot more.

From the beginning, it was a wild afternoon: It seemed anything that could happen in a tennis match
did
happen: bad blood (Clerc and I also happened not to be crazy about each other), bad calls, bad behavior.

Peter and I went out swinging, and we won the first set easily. The crowd was shouting, stamping their feet, waving American flags. But then the Argentineans did something odd in the second set: they switched sides. Perfectly legal. Vilas, a left-hander, had been playing on the left to start out, but now he was on the right, and their forehands were in the middle. Suddenly they were playing much, much better than they had been earlier.

We didn’t quite notice it at first. Then, however, in the middle of the second set, something truly weird happened.

One of your advantages as home country in Davis Cup is that you get to select the surface on which you feel you can win. Naturally, in South America, we always had to play on red clay, and I had to adjust my strategy a bit to longer rallies. At home this year, we’d picked a fast indoor carpet, to suit my serve-and-volley game. In the middle of the second set, Vilas walked over and pointed his racket at a split seam in the surface.
“Rota,”
he said. “Broken. It’s coming apart.”

Now the two of them went to the umpire, Bob Jenkins of Britain, and told him they wanted the court fixed. Right away. “We’ll fix it later,” Jenkins said.

“No, no, we want it fixed now,” Vilas said. “We’re afraid we’re going to fall on it.”

From our perspective, these guys were just trying to throw us off—break our rhythm. They were starting to gather a little steam; they wanted to take a break, marshal their strength (and maybe mend a fence or two), and come out smoking. We shook our heads.