You Cannot Be Serious (24 page)

The week after Wimbledon, we were to play Argentina in Atlanta (it was a big match, because they’d upset us the year before). One night, before the tie, I got a call from Arthur, who said, “Listen, is it okay if you don’t come to the team dinner?” There was always a traditional team dinner, the Tuesday or Wednesday before the tournament. I said, “What are you talking about?”

I wasn’t wild to go to the team dinner—it was, frankly, a pretty deadly evening: You’d put on your jacket and tie, and the USTA president would make a speech—still, it was a ceremonial occasion, and getting together as a team meant something.

“Why don’t you want me to come to the team dinner?” I asked Arthur.

“Jimmy would prefer it,” he said

“Jimmy would prefer it?” I repeated, incredulously. “I’ve played every match for the last six years, and now Jimmy
prefers
that I not come, so you don’t want me? Gee, Arthur, that doesn’t seem like too cool a thing.”

Arthur thought about it for a minute. “You’re probably right; that probably isn’t too cool a thing.” He apologized, and told me to come ahead to the dinner.

So then Jimmy refused to go.

Not only that, he also refused to stay in the team hotel—mainly because of me, I assume. He also showed up for the tie on the Thursday before our Friday match. Lesser mortals sometimes show up as much as five days before a big tie, and practice five hours a day. Jimmy didn’t feel he needed to practice. And this went on. We played the whole tie, never practiced together, and didn’t talk.

And our team won the match 5–0.

I
N MID–AUGUST
I went to the Canadian Open, in Toronto. The word around the tournament that week was that Vitas was having problems controlling himself.

This was the ’80s, and drugs were at least as prevalent around the circuit—where there was plenty of money to pay for them—as in the rest of society. (I also suspect that steroids and amphetamines were, even then, beginning to make inroads into the top ranks of tennis.)

In the past, I had known Vitas to get crazy at exhibitions; in between events, he occasionally went off the deep end for a couple of weeks. However, that was considered legitimate—a form of relaxation. Besides, his energy and resilience were always so amazing that nobody really noticed.

Now, though, I think he was pushing the envelope. The custom at the time was to give the tournament some respect. As screwed-up as it might seem now, players actually contemplated: How many days before an event was it cool to get loaded? A week before? The night before? It all depended on the person.

I ran through Vitas, 6–0, 6–3 in that final; I even had to throw him a couple of games to make it look competitive. I could tell by his play that something was off; that he wasn’t himself. That was when I really started to worry about him.

But maybe the person I really should have been worrying about was myself.

S
TILL
, the McEnroe juggernaut just kept rumbling on. In the second round at the U.S. Open, I destroyed a young Swedish upstart named Stefan Edberg, 6–1, 6–0, 6–2, then burned a swath through to the semifinals without dropping a set. On what came to be known as Super Saturday, after the three-set men’s thirty-five-year-olds division final, after the Lendl–Cash semi (which ran quite long, Lendl winning in a fifth-set tiebreaker),
after
Martina Navratilova beat Chris Evert Lloyd in a three-set women’s final—Connors and I finally walked onto the court at close to seven
P
.
M
.!

Here was Jimmy’s chance for revenge. In the press conference after the Wimbledon final, I’d said that I now felt all I had to do was play well and I should beat everybody out there. Connors had taken grave exception. “That’s an awfully big statement to back up for the next four or five years,” he said.

Now, at Flushing Meadows, it was put-up-or-shut-up time. Jimmy had won the tournament the last two years in a row; he could work the New York crowd like nobody’s business. He was angry, and hungry.

But so was I. I really didn’t want Connors to equal my three-Opens-in-a-row record, and I really wanted to get through to the finals and get revenge on Lendl for the French.

The match with Jimmy was a slugfest from the start, an exciting five-setter that wound up running until eleven-fifteen
P.M
. The Flushing Meadows crowd, exhausted with over twelve hours of tennis, started filing out of the stadium when we went to a fifth set. It killed me that we were playing such a great match, but that the stands were only a quarter full by the time we finished.

But by the time we finished, I was the winner, 6–3 in the fifth—fifty-one games, three hours and forty-five minutes later.

I got home very late, still so jazzed up (yet exhausted) from the match that it was past two
A
.
M
. by the time I finally got to sleep. I could barely imagine having to play a final against Lendl—God almighty, that same afternoon! I woke up at noon on Sunday and staggered out of bed. By the time I got to the locker room at Flushing Meadows, I was so stiff I could barely walk. I was very worried—until I looked across the room and saw Lendl (whose match against Cash had gone three hours and thirty-nine minutes) attempting to touch his hands to his toes. He could barely get past his knees!

He’s worse off than I am,
I thought. A jolt of adrenaline shot through my body.

I felt that if I could just get in a good two hours of tennis, I could beat him. My body was saying, “That’s enough,” but in some weird way, the fatigue worked for me that afternoon. The fact that I was tired made me concentrate better; the more tired I felt, the better I seemed to hit the ball. It was a purely mental thing
—push, push—
and I didn’t get angry at anything because I needed every ounce of energy I had.

I won the first set, 6–3. At one juncture, after I double-faulted in the second game of the second set, he had a break point. I came to net on a first serve at 30–40, hit the volley, and Lendl uncorked a huge forehand to try to pass me on my backhand side. The ball hit the tape and caromed up at a weird angle, and I swung around in a full circle and hit the forehand volley for a winner. Sometimes it helps to be unconscious!

Second set, 6–4.

That was when visions of the French final flickered through my head. However, I knew I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—choke this one away. I gave the third set everything I had: When I broke his serve once, that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to drive a stake through this guy’s heart. I got the second break, went to 4–0, and even though Lendl never stopped trying (the way it seemed he had the previous year, in the final against Connors), I had too much momentum. Final set, 6–1.

I had my fourth Open.

It was the last Grand Slam title I would ever win.

A
T THE END OF
S
EPTEMBER
, we played Australia in the Davis Cup semifinals, in Portland, Oregon. Connors was there, and we still weren’t speaking. Peter and I took our doubles match handily, and we won the tie, 4–1. I should have been on top of the world.

But on October 1, 1984, I was standing in the Portland airport, waiting to board a flight to L.A. for a week off, and suddenly I thought,
I’m the greatest tennis player who ever lived—why am I so empty inside?

Except for the French, and one tournament just before the Open in which I had been basically over-tennised, I won every tournament I played in 1984: thirteen out of fifteen. Eighty-two out of eighty-five matches. No one had ever had a year like that in tennis before. No one has since.

It wasn’t enough.

The feeling had been building up for a while. I’d been number one for four years, and I’d never felt especially happy. I had written it off to the fact that Borg had stopped playing, and that my relationships weren’t going well. Now the year was winding down, and it was nearly six months since I’d last lived with Stella.

It was hard for me to pull away from that—from having someone to live with. I was comfortable traveling without a coach, just hooking up with tennis friends on the road and with non-playing friends in New York and L.A. At the same time, both of my two closest friendships, with Peter Fleming and Peter Rennert, had taken turns for the worse. Both guys were trying to make their way on the singles tour, and they were having a tough time. I knew they felt in my shadow, which didn’t help matters. Nor did the fact that Peter Fleming had gotten married.

I wasn’t comfortable being totally alone. But what were the alternatives?

Stella and I had gotten together again, very briefly, around the time of the Open, but she still wanted a commitment. I’d made an offer to her: “Why don’t we just have a baby? That’s a commitment, isn’t it?” To my twenty-five-year-old mind, that seemed like a good idea: I needed a change. For some odd reason, though, Stella still wanted to get married, and that was that.

I would meet girls on the road: It didn’t take a whole lot. Friends of mine would bring them. If I went to a restaurant, they’d be there. I’d go to a nightclub; they’d be there. There were always girls around the tennis matches. Were they out-and-out groupies, the kind they had in rock-and-roll? I wouldn’t go quite that far. However, Borg had certainly opened the floodgates, and I reaped a few of the benefits.

Girl tennis players were also an option. I never had to try too hard, wherever I was. When you’re number one, everything comes to you.

But I wasn’t very happy.

V
ITAS HAPPENED TO BE
in L.A. that week, too, and one day he told me, “You’ve got to come to this party!” Richard Perry was a friend of his, a music producer who threw legendary parties at his place in the Hollywood Hills. It sounded too good to pass up, so I went.

It was a warm October night in Los Angeles, one of those L.A. nights when the air smells like orange blossoms and feels like silk on your skin. I walked into the party and almost had to laugh—there wasn’t anyone in sight who wasn’t famous. However, my eyes went right across the room to an intense, sharp-featured girl with dyed red hair, and then her eyes locked with mine.

I went over and introduced myself, even though no introductions were needed. I knew very well that Tatum O’Neal had been the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, in 1974, for
Paper Moon.
I knew she’d starred with Walter Matthau in
The Bad News Bears,
which I’d thought was an excellent movie as well. I was all too aware that her father was Ryan O’Neal, the Tom Cruise of his day.

Was I overly impressed? A bit starstruck? Maybe.

Maybe Tatum was, too. It’s a funny thing when two well-known people meet: There’s an immediate magnetism, because you seem to have so many things in common—not the least of which is that you both instantly feel liberated from what the rest of the world usually demands. After all, someone else who’s famous would never act like a
fan.

However, as I’d learned way back when I started going to Richard Weisman’s amazing Manhattan parties, famous people are fans, too. They’re just more sophisticated about hiding it—and hiding things and assuming you have a lot in common without looking too far underneath isn’t a great way to begin when you’re trying to get to know someone.

Of course, Tatum and I didn’t know any of that then. Our eyes had locked, we were physically attracted, and we each knew and liked what the other had done. And we were both searching for something. Maybe my fiery spirit reminded her of her father’s own famous temper. For my part, I liked her confidence, her total ease in the midst of this star-studded evening. She wasn’t even twenty-one yet, but she had the poise of an experienced woman. While the party boomed and buzzed and milled around us, we sat in a corner, talking and talking and talking. From time to time, she leaned over and whispered something funny about this person or that person around the room. The conspiracy was sexy, the whispering was sexy, and the way she smelled when she leaned close was sexy, too.

And so at a certain point it felt quite natural to kiss her. She smiled. I kissed her again.

That was as far as it went that evening. But as I drove back down through the purple hills after the party, Tatum’s phone number scribbled on a scrap of paper in my pocket, my heart felt full for the first time in a long while.

T
HE
S
TOCKHOLM OPEN
was where I had won my first giant victory over Borg in 1978. I’d won the tournament that year and the next, and now I was coming back as number one in the world.

I was also coming back as a very unhappy guy.

The last place I wanted to be right then was at a tennis tournament in Sweden. Tennis felt beside the point now. Tatum and I had played phone tag when I’d returned to New York, and the more we kept missing each other, the more urgent it felt to talk. We finally connected while I was in Stockholm, and the more we talked, the more I wanted to go home and get to know her better. The more we talked, the less I felt like being halfway around the world from her. I was lonely, burnt out, and exhausted. Something had to give.

I was almost constantly on edge during that tournament—especially as I got pumped up in tight situations and the anxiety started to creep in. I got into a tough semifinal match against Anders Jarryd: In the third set, he actually had a match point against me. Where was Borg? I thought. Who in God’s name was Anders Jarryd, and what was he doing with a match point against
me?
I got out of it, but then when there was a line call that didn’t look so great, I went ballistic.

I called the umpire a jerk. He hit me with a $700 fine. I whacked a ball into the stands—another $700. Then I smacked a soda can with my racket. That was another $700, plus, as an added bonus, I got soda all over the king of Sweden, who was sitting in the front row. (I didn’t get charged extra for that.)

I somehow managed to win the match—and to beat Wilander in the final the next day—but I realize now that I was begging to be defaulted. And they wouldn’t default me.