You Cannot Be Serious (26 page)

At the end of the first day, we were down two matches to zero. That was a very big hole to be in against Sweden, in Sweden, on slow red clay. The next afternoon, Peter and I played doubles against Edberg and Jarryd, and very quickly found ourselves down two sets to one, with the Davis Cup on the line.

We were down 5–6 in the fourth set, and Peter was struggling with his serve. All of a sudden, Connors was on the sidelines clapping and yelling, “Come on, guys!” And I thought,
Who the hell are you kidding?

I have no idea what was going through his mind. Maybe he’d realized for the first time that we weren’t going to win the Davis Cup. My next thought was,
We’re not going to win this. We’re not going to come back.
I’m
not coming back. Screw you!

But then I thought,
How can you think that? You’re playing for the United States of America!
Still, I couldn’t help myself. I had won four Cups already; this was the seventh year I’d played, so my record was pretty strong.
Four wins and a final isn’t bad
, I thought.
The hell with this guy. You want to win? Try again.

I wasn’t terribly proud to be thinking this way. I’m still not proud.

Edberg and Jarryd were a great doubles team, and there was no reason to expect we could come back and win the match. And we didn’t. Peter double-faulted on match point. It was the first Davis Cup doubles match we’d ever lost. I felt awful, but at least I could console myself that I hadn’t missed a ball on purpose or done anything that caused us not to win, once Connors started clapping.

Half the loss was mine, anyway. My intensity level had been low; I wasn’t into the match. It’s not much of an excuse. It’s just what happens when a team isn’t really a team.

Then, that night, suddenly, somehow, all was forgiven between Connors and me. Don’t ask me how. We all went out for dinner, and one of Jimmy’s cronies (he always had cronies around), a red-headed guy named Billy, said, “Hey, why don’t you let bygones be bygones?” We both just shrugged and said, “OK, why not?” Jimmy and I ended up having a drink or two late into the night, feeling like we might even be able to be friendly from then on.

He went back home the next morning to be with his wife. We had two singles matches to play that afternoon, meaningless except to allow us to save our honor. I beat Wilander, and Arias lost, playing a tough match against Sundstrom, and cramping up because he was so uptight. We played hard, but we lost the tie, 4–1.

The final blow for me, and the event that changed my Davis Cup life, was the ceremonial dinner that night. Imagine, in the first place, having to sit through a long ceremony in a foreign country when you’ve put in a poor showing and functioned horribly as a team. Those dinners are deadly to begin with, and this one felt twice as long as usual. It just went on and on.

We were all bored and miserable and fidgety. At one point, during “The Star Spangled Banner,” Jimmy Arias, who was at my table, was talking a little bit, just being his usual self, laughing about something in a smirky way. It wasn’t anything mean, but it would become a crucial detail in the case that was later mounted against us.

After what felt like about four hours of speeches and toasts, I leaned over to Ashe and said, “Listen, Arthur, when can we leave this dinner? Isn’t enough enough?” Arthur said, “You can leave after the next speaker.” So the next speaker finished, and Arias and Peter Fleming and I all got up and left. What we didn’t know—and I don’t think Arthur knew, either—was that the
next
speaker was to be Hunter Delatour, the president of the USTA.

Delatour had seen Arthur excuse us, but now he looked to our table, where Arthur was sitting without any of his players, and saw red. He proceeded to give an apologetic oration, saying that the team’s behavior during the matches (lumping me in by implication—I guess for past indiscretions—despite the fact that I hadn’t uttered a peep) had made him embarrassed for America, and ashamed to be the USTA president.

My father, who had come to Gothenburg to watch the tie, was furious, as was the normally unflappable Arthur, who felt Delatour had no business washing dirty linen in public. Arthur told my dad that he thought Delatour, who was in his last year in office at the USTA, was kissing up to Philippe Chatrier, the head of the International Tennis Federation at the time, in hopes of landing a position there.

However, the upshot of that whole week was that the USTA drafted a new Code of Conduct. From here on, if you didn’t sign the Code, you couldn’t play Davis Cup.

I wouldn’t compete for my country for two years.

T
ATUM AND
I spent Christmas in New York, then flew back to L.A. for New Year’s Eve. That night, we and a few friends went out drinking, then later, the two of us were back at Ryan’s house, playing pool with Tatum’s half-brother Patrick. By now it was three or four in the morning, and I had to fly to Vegas the next day to get ready for an event. Finally, I said, “Look, I’ve got to go to bed.”

Tatum stayed up, drinking and playing pool with Patrick. I don’t know when she came to bed, but it probably wasn’t until six or seven. At around eleven
A
.
M
., I nudged her and said, “Listen, I’m going to Vegas. Do you want to come?” I had had enough of L.A. and partying, for the time being: I was a tennis player, I wanted to go play tennis. I was sure Tatum wouldn’t get out of bed, because she’d been up all night partying. But she did. She got in the car and went with me. We were together now, for better or worse.

That was the start of our 1985. It was a hell of a beginning to a hell of a year.

9

N
OW I KNEW
what Peter Fleming had gone through when he’d had that blazing streak in 1979: It was the rocket surge of first being in love. At the beginning of ’85, I was still riding my incredible tennis wave of the previous year, except that now I was reenergized. I was happy—I felt I’d found my other half, my life partner. Tatum was traveling with me, and in the first few months of that year, it seemed as though I couldn’t lose a set, let alone a match.

I obliterated Lendl in our third consecutive Masters final, 7–5, 6–0, 6–4—in one stretch I ran off eleven straight games. In Philadelphia, I won the final over a rising Czech star, the deceptively languid-looking Miloslav Mecir, who was shooting up through the rankings (and had made quick work of Connors in the semis). I took the title in Houston by beating the hard-serving (and equally fast-rising) Kevin Curren. And in Milan, I won the final against my near-nemesis Anders Jarryd, who had held another match point against me in the early rounds of the Masters.

In the first round at Milan, I made quick work of a big red-haired German seventeen-year-old named Boris Becker. I have to say, I didn’t find him especially impressive that first time out—he actually seemed more annoying than anything else. He spent the entire match complaining and whining about line calls and his own play. I figured that was my turf! I also figured that at that point I had a lot more basis for my attitude than he had for his. I told him he should win something before he started complaining.

I think he heard me.

A
S A DIRECT RESULT
of our screwed-up Davis Cup final against Sweden in December, the USTA told me I would have to sign a Code of Conduct if I wanted to play for the team in 1985. I said, “I’m not signing anything. You’ve got to pick me or not pick me. You know what you’re getting with me: On a couple of occasions—one of which, by the way, was not Sweden—I’ve misbehaved. But I’ll try to act the best I can and recognize that playing for my country is different than playing for myself.”

It was an impasse. Of course, I could have signed and acted exactly the same way I always had. What were they going to do, sue me? Withhold my pay? By that time, it was ten thousand dollars for the entire week. What the hell difference did it make, to sign this piece of paper? Nothing. I refused to sign.

In the first match of 1985, we played Japan. We could have sent our junior players to beat Japan. Eliot Teltscher and Aaron Krickstein went over and won, 5–0. The next match, however, was the quarterfinals, against Becker in Germany. Boris had just come from winning Wimbledon, and Teltscher and Krickstein didn’t stand a chance against him and Hans Schwaier. So that was that—there went 1985. I didn’t play. Connors wasn’t playing anymore. Lendl was claiming to be an American, but his citizenship hadn’t come through yet. We were back to struggling with the Davis Cup.

All for a piece of paper.

E
VER SINCE
the first time I’d gone to California, I’d been crazy about Malibu. Stacy had taken me there when we were together, and I’d loved the peace and beauty of the Pacific, the magnificence of that long stretch of coast.

I first got it into my head to buy a place there soon after I turned pro. I looked at places on the beach, but at the time they started at around a million dollars, and my dad said, “You’re not going to buy a place that costs that kind of money.” My father had been handling my business affairs since I started on the tour. In a lot of ways, it was a great arrangement—there was nobody I could trust more, and I only had to pay him his hourly rate instead of a percentage of my earnings—but it could also be difficult, as you might imagine.

He was right, though: I didn’t have the money to spend a million dollars for a house on the beach in 1979 or ’80, not after taxes, so I decided to buy a beautiful little bachelor house, on the bluff, for around $400,000. I ended up changing my mind, though, because my business advisor (Dad) worried about what would happen to a house on a hill if there was an earthquake.

Fast-forward to February of ’85, after I’d had another five high-earning years. Now I could afford to buy that beach house! And not just any beach house, but Johnny Carson’s, on the Pacific Coast Highway at Carbon Canyon Beach in Malibu, for $1.85 million plus three tennis lessons that Johnny insisted I throw into the deal! I was thinking more and more about making Los Angeles my base of operations: I loved the beach; sitting and staring at the Pacific surf at sunset made me feel at peace more than almost anything else I knew.

Unfortunately, though, I also wound up bringing Tatum back into the very environment she was trying to leave. She was struggling to get away from her family, and living just down the beach from her father, who exerted a powerful negative magnetism, didn’t help matters.

At a tournament in Houston, I was fatigued from traveling and not taking care of myself as well as I could have. In the first round, I took my funk onto the court and got into a bad fight with Wojtek Fibak, the Polish veteran. Fibak was a very smart, skilful player, extremely canny psychologically, and about seven years older than I was. He was playing a great match, but I also felt he was being manipulative, using the John Newcombe kill-you-with-kindness approach to get the crowd against me. Finally, I laced into him, hit him with a barrage of obscenities.

It was stupid and ugly. Where once I’d been lawyerly and careful about what came out of my mouth—even when I was furious—now the floodgates had opened.

I was out of control. It would have done me a world of good to get defaulted from tournaments at that point. Instead, I manipulated the rules by getting suspended on purpose at times when I needed a break.

The rule was that if you went over a certain amount in fines—initially it was $7,500—you’d be suspended. So I’d accumulate some fines, and then I’d think,
Okay, I’m at $6,800, so if I get fined this week, I’m suspended for twenty-one days.

I’d have exhibitions scheduled, though, so I’d keep playing those. That was when the ATP realized that they’d have to tighten up: They set the initial suspension at twenty-one days, but if you played exhibitions within that period, the suspension was doubled to forty-two days (that’s what had happened to me after the ’84 Stockholm Open). As a result, I had to be a little more careful, but it was still a game I played, and I wasn’t the only one.

Once I began to have bad outbursts, like the one against Fibak, I felt a lot of remorse, but I wasn’t able to do much about it. I wasn’t able or willing enough to change.

Part of me felt entitled, since I was the best tennis player in the world—a very important guy!—but even that didn’t make me feel good. When you can’t control yourself, you want someone to do it for you—that’s where I acutely missed being part of a team sport. What if I’d been playing for the Knicks? People would have worked with me, coached me. Somebody would have said, “You’re hurting the organization, but we want to help you because we want you to stay here.”

Instead, I felt more and more alone on the tennis court. Nobody was trying to help me, and I wasn’t asking anybody for help. I dug myself deeper and deeper into a hole, and I felt worse and worse about it.

T
HAT WAS WHEN
I had my brilliant idea.

My idea was that Tatum and I should have a baby. It just seemed so
right—
having children was something that had been on my mind for a while. The other thing that crossed my mind, I have to admit, was that maybe if Tatum got pregnant, she would clean up her act. Maybe it would force us both to clean up our act.

T
HE TABLOIDS
had been following us around for six months, and that was also driving me crazy. I had had notoriety in the tennis world; I had been in
People;
but I had never had the distinction of making the
National Enquirer
until they’d photographed Tatum and me in December. Now it felt like open season on me, on her, and especially on the two of us together.

Suddenly, wherever I went, it felt like a spectacle. Even my tennis events were drawing crowds of paparazzi types, people I’d never seen around the sport before. As a result, for the first time in my career, I chose to alter my preparation for Wimbledon, and not play Queen’s, where I had been in the final for seven years in a row.