You Cannot Be Serious (27 page)

However, I still wanted a French Open title badly. I got through to the semis, where I faced Mats Wilander, who had broken into the top five in the world. It was an extremely windy, cold day when we played. Connors was to play Lendl in the first match, at twelve-thirty
P
.
M
.

I was trying to figure out when to eat—it may not sound like a big deal, but it’s very important. You try to judge when you’re going to play, and back up a couple of hours from there. You really don’t want to be too full or too empty: A match can hang on the right timing. It’s a little difficult, and the unexpected often happens.

I came back to the hotel at eleven-thirty
A.M
. from a practice session and ate a good-sized lunch. By now, it was pouring rain. I’d practiced indoors, but I figured that with the rain, the match might not go on anyway. Then I turned on the TV and watched in total horror as Lendl and Connors began to play in the rain. They put them on the court, for whatever reason.

And Lendl was just killing Connors. I don’t know what had happened to Jimmy—either he was hurt, pretending to be hurt, or just totally in the doldrums. Lendl wound up destroying him in something like an hour and twenty minutes. At two sets to love, I was still at the hotel. It was 6–2, 6–3, 3–0 when I arrived at the courts. You usually want to give yourself around an hour at the venue before you play, just to get dressed, stretch, settle down. When I went out to play, I was totally unprepared.

It was just one of those days. I lost the first set, 1–6. I had set points in the second set at 5–4 to level the match, but I lost it, 7–5. I was up 5–1 in the third set, then lost that, 7–5. I should have been up two sets to one, and instead, I lost the match.

The tabloids were all over us again in Paris, so I was in a pretty ragged mood when I came back to New York. I was glad not to be playing Queen’s. I decided to give myself a break, just train for a week or ten days on the grass courts at Piping Rock (a club in Nassau County) or Forest Hills, and then go back and try to win another Wimbledon. I had been in five straight Wimbledon finals, so skipping the tune-up was a big move for me, but I just needed the peace and quiet.

Then Boris Becker won Queen’s, and Johan Kriek, whom he had beaten in the final, said: “I predict that if Boris is still playing this well, he’ll win Wimbledon.”

Not if I had anything to do with it! I didn’t take Tatum to Wimbledon: It would’ve been too much for her, for us, and for me. When I got there, I thought, “I’ve come here to play. I’m not here to mess around. I can stay in my room; I don’t have to go out. I can just focus on the tennis.”

It didn’t help. The tabloids, American and British, kept on churning out the crud—whether it was lies about Tatum, or her mother’s substance problems, or other cockamamie stories. They were in the papers, and I’d say, “I don’t want to look at them”—and then someone would say, “Hey, John, did you see that story in the
Sun
?”

I felt I wasn’t being beaten by any opponent that year; I was being beaten before I got on the court. In the quarters I played Kevin Curren, who was a very difficult opponent on grass. I’d defeated him at Wimbledon a couple of years earlier, when his serve had looked daunting, but he’d done a lot of improving since then. He also had a new graphite Kneissl racket, which was giving his serve even more pop—as if it needed any! With the new rackets, it was becoming more and more apparent that when a guy was already a big hitter, things were going to become problematic.

Curren overwhelmed me with his serve. I just couldn’t get any rhythm going on the return. The score wasn’t even close—6–2, 6–2, 6–4. I felt old out there. Old at twenty-six.

By the time Peter and I made it to the semifinals of the doubles, after Curren had crushed me, and with the pressure of all the tabloid stories, all of a sudden I got sick. I walked around hunched over from the stress, ill to the point where I was literally losing control of my bodily functions.

I remember sitting in the locker room before the doubles semifinal, bent over, feeling so bad that I thought,
I’ve got to get the hell out of here—
but I wasn’t going to default on my partner.

It didn’t matter: We lost anyway.

And Becker beat Curren in the singles final. He was seventeen years old.

I
PLAYED HIM
not long after he won Wimbledon, in an exhibition in Atlanta, at the Omni. There have been some great exhibitions over the years: Atlanta was like Milan—phenomenal crowds, incredible energy. Boris ended up beating me 7–5 in the third, and I thought,
This guy’s got the biggest serve I’ve ever seen in my life. No one has ever hit a bigger serve.

He hadn’t played like that in Milan. Now he had won Wimbledon, and he had more confidence. It wasn’t just that his serve was big—it was that he knew where to place it. Curren had had a huge serve at Wimbledon, but this kid’s service was heavier, and had more spin, and was more un-readable, more unpredictable. He backed it up with that presence of his, and his nutty willingness to dive for shots. (It helps to be a teenager!) He had some pretty big groundstrokes, too.

Becker was simply a physical phenomenon. For someone that young, it was incredible how big his legs were. That’s what amazed me. He still hadn’t turned eighteen. I was getting old, and the future was moving in fast.

I
N
A
UGUST
, I beat Lendl in straight sets in both warmup events for the U.S. Open: Stratton Mountain, in Vermont, and the Canadian Open. He was fighting hard to take number one from me, and it was all coming down to Flushing Meadows, where, frankly, I thought my chances for a fifth title were extremely good.

I advanced routinely to the semifinals, where I played Mats Wilander. It was a match that would change my whole life.

We went out onto the court at eleven
A.M
. on Super Saturday. It was incredibly hot out, but I stayed calm, knowing I’d have to conserve every ounce of my energy. I was right: It was a long, tough, five-set match. Mats threw a lot at me, constantly mixing it up—I’ve always thought he’s one of the most intelligent players I’ve ever played. Down two sets to one, I threw everything I had into it, and I managed to win the last two sets and pull out a victory.

It’s hard to describe how tired I was after that match. Then came a long women’s final, then Lendl didn’t get out there against Connors until almost seven
P
.
M
., when the heat of the day had tempered, and then Connors was gimpy—something was wrong with his ankle. Lendl beat him in three easy sets, barely breaking a sweat.

I couldn’t believe how bad I felt the next day. The truth is, my body hadn’t felt right for the last four or five years, but this was the worst it had ever been. I’d pulled a hip muscle in early ’85, and I’d started getting it strapped up by the trainer every time I played. That comforted me to the point where I could go all-out, but something was still just a little bit off. I thought it would go away, but it never did.

What had happened was that my body had started tightening up through all those years of pounding. Although people always said my style looked effortless compared to Lendl’s (one sportswriter wrote that when he closed his eyes and listened to the two of us play, Lendl sounded as if he was moving furniture, and I was almost inaudible), effortlessness takes work.

I’d always prided myself on my movement. There was a catlike quality to it, I liked to think; I got the job done, even though people rarely said, “Hey, this guy’s really fast.” I didn’t place a great deal of strain on my body, because I didn’t think it could take a lot of strain. My legs were always powerful (even in my early teens, I could press an incredible amount of weight on a leg machine), but I didn’t have a lot of upper-body strength. I’d always recovered pretty quickly. So if I just had enough time, I could win.

However, recovery time starts to decline as young men age, and the process accelerates in world-class athletes. Time was running out on me.

The next day, a little after one
P
.
M
., I was in my house in Oyster Bay with Tatum and her brother Griffin, watching the Giants game on TV. It was pouring rain, and for the first and only time in my life, I was praying that it would rain the entire day. Normally, you’re so stressed out at the prospect of a big match that you just want to get it over with, but today I knew that my body wasn’t right. I prayed for a postponement.

Then, all of a sudden, there was bright sunshine on the television.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, throwing my clothes and equipment into my tennis bag as fast as I could. We all went down and got into the car—and then, after we’d gone five blocks, Griffin said he’d forgotten his camera. Could we go back and get it? I turned around, he got his camera, and then we wound up sitting in U.S. Open traffic on the Grand Central Expressway and getting to the National Tennis Center at three-fifteen, forty-five minutes before my final. There was barely time to get taped up and stretch.

I’m not sure exactly how, but I actually got off to a good start against Lendl, going up 5–2 in the first set. Then suddenly, on the changeover, I stood up and…This is hard to explain. But when people describe out-of-body experiences, I understand completely. Because I stood up and walked over to my side of the court, but my body was still back in the chair.

I had gone totally dead. I had nothing left. Zero. I had set points against Lendl, but I lost 7–6, 6–3, 6–4.

It was a huge turning point. Lendl had lost in the final here three years in a row, twice to Connors and once to me. Now, once and for all, he had proved to New York that he wasn’t a choker. His confidence soared after that match (he would go on to win two more U.S. Opens, and was in eight consecutive finals, from 1982 to 1989—an incredible record), and mine dropped away. I would never win another major tournament.

He had knocked me off the mountaintop. He was number one.

You can pick a handful of athletes, over time, who have changed the public’s perspective on how a sport is played. Lawrence Taylor did it in football with the position of outside linebacker; Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova did it in tennis. Lendl had trained like a maniac to reach number one; he had lost fifteen pounds on Dr. Robert Haas’s diet. My not-very-funny joke at the time—that I’d gone on the Häagen-Dazs diet—showed that I could no longer take number one completely seriously. I had lost the will to do what it took to stay on top: The territory up there was simply too punishing.

I needed a rest.

When tennis players saw what Lendl had done to edge by me in 1985—especially after the way I’d played in ’84—they were ready to sign on. People said, “Wait a minute, I’m going to train harder; I’m going to do more off-court.” And they did. Today’s tennis stars, male and female, are bigger, stronger, faster, and more durable than ever before: They’re the direct result of Lendl’s example. The combination of fitness and racket power had left me out in the cold. The master of the wood racket was heading toward extinction.

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER
I lost to Lendl, Tatum and I went back to California. I needed a couple of days to rest before I played the tournaments in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And then the night before the semifinals in L.A., we found out that Tatum was pregnant.

It was very strange: That same night, Tatum’s mother cooked us a very rich casserole for dinner, and then the next morning, I literally couldn’t get out of bed. I was sick as a dog, and I had to default the semifinal. I was in bed through the weekend, and was able to play San Francisco only because the tournament had a Wednesday start, but I was still sick enough there to lose to Kriek in the quarterfinals.

I don’t know if I was reacting to the casserole or to Tatum’s news, but it was bizarre: In a certain way, I was totally happy. I was going to be a father! Whenever I was able to stop retching, I couldn’t stop smiling.

Four days after we’d heard the news, my mother received a phone call from
People
magazine, and was asked to comment about a report that Tatum was pregnant. Was it true? My mother said she doubted it, because her son surely would have told her.

Why didn’t I? Because I panicked. In fact, I hadn’t told her because, although my parents were often affectionate with Tatum, I knew, deep-down, that they didn’t approve of her. She was an actress, her parents were divorced, she was too young, she hadn’t gone to college. I suspect they knew other things about her, too; things that Tatum and I could never discuss with them.

And then, beyond all that, to have a child out of wedlock! My parents were churchgoing Catholics: My brothers and I had all been baptized and confirmed, and I had gone to Mass every week until I was eighteen. Even though I had decided for myself that organized religion was a sham, and that God, if He exists, must be deaf, dumb, and blind—Catholic guilt doesn’t go away easily.

Finally, several days later, I called her to wish her happy birthday. We talked for a little while—and I said nothing. I hung up, and felt awful.

More Catholic guilt! I couldn’t stand it. I called her back, and I said, “By the way, I forgot to tell you you’re going to be a grandmother.” And that’s how she finally found out. It’s been the story of my life, in a lot of ways: Many great things have happened to me, but all the attention I’ve been paid has often had a way of turning good to bad. Suddenly, after I’d been feeling so ecstatic, the world felt sordid.

I
N
N
OVEMBER OF
1985, I played six one-night exhibitions with Borg, as part of the Tennis Over America tour I’d been doing for the past four years. This was the first time that Bjorn had come along. It was six cities in six nights, a tough grind, and, to put it mildly, my old friend and adversary no longer had the same severely regimented personality that he’d had when he’d dominated world tennis. To be perfectly honest, I was a little concerned about his ability to get through the week. Still, there was an enormous demand out there to see us re-create the old rivalry, so off we went to make a little money.