You Cannot Be Serious (29 page)

One evening, I was sitting on my back porch with my old friend Tony Graham, a former UCLA player who’d also been on the tour for a while. My porch is right on the beach, and it was a perfect evening, with the kind of Pacific sunset that fills your whole soul. It was getting to be high tide: Some big waves were starting to roll in.

Tony and I had hit a few balls earlier, and now we were just sitting on the porch, in a quiet, philosophical mood, watching the waves and the gorgeous sky. I was talking about how the Gilbert match at the Masters had seemed like a sign from God that I needed to stop for a while; I wondered aloud about my future. And Tony said, jokingly, “There’s got to be some other sign from God that’ll let you know.”

And just at that moment, a wave rolled all the way up to the porch and left a tennis ball sitting right at our feet.

Tony picked up the ball. We looked at each other, wide-eyed. “My God, man, there’s your sign!” he said.

And I swear, for the whole rest of the night, not a single other wave came even close to the porch.

I
WANTED NUMBER ONE BACK
, so I started training. I wanted to get stronger, in order to be able to compete on a more equitable basis with players like Curren and Becker, so for the first time in my life, I began lifting weights. All the wise heads in sports training said you needed to be flexible, too, and so I also started doing yoga. In addition, for the first time, I briefly hired a coach, Paul Cohen, who had written a fantastic motivational letter to me while I was on hiatus. “I’m going to be better,” I thought, as I jumped rope and pumped iron. “I’m going to be better.” I was
convinced
of it. I thought about Lendl out there, doing what he was doing—I was going to train every bit as hard, if not harder. From here on in, Häagen-Dazs was out, along with every other dessert, and beer. From here on, it was fish and white meat skinless chicken, fruit and veggies. I began to lose weight again.

For five months, it was yoga in the morning, tennis in the afternoon, stationary bike and weight-training at night—day in, day out. And at the end of every one of my very full days…I was exhausted. I kept thinking, “It’s going to come back, it’s going to come back, it’s
got
to come back.” After all, I was training like a boxer: Whenever I watched a boxing match, I would look at those men and think, “My God, they have so much energy.” I thought that sooner or later, that would happen to me—I’d be like Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman, in
Man on the Moon:
“Here I am!” I thought I would have energy to burn. It never happened.

I overtrained, I think. A lot of it is mental—you’ve got to love it, or you can’t break through the pain. I never enjoyed it enough. Lendl loved it—but in the end, that wasn’t me.

O
N ONE OF THE
very first afternoons Tatum and I spent at my new house in Malibu, we were playing Frisbee on the beach when a neighbor came over and said, “Hey, there’s someone dug in over there, taking pictures of you.” I looked and, to my astonishment, about fifty yards away, a man in a bunker in the sand was pointing a huge telephoto lens at us.

I had thought this was private property, but I quickly learned otherwise when I walked over to the photographer, who informed me that any part of the beach below the tide line was public domain, and that he was perfectly within his rights.

I suppose I should have just blown it off and gone inside, but it seemed so outrageous! I started yelling at him, throwing sand at him. Ridiculous—but what were my alternatives? I was furious, but my rule with photographers was always
Don’t hit the guy.
You can do practically anything else—spit, throw sand, hurl invective—but
don’t punch the guy,
because you’ll get sued.

The photographer was working for the English papers, and he eventually became an acquaintance—not a friend, mind you. I know his name to this day. When Tatum became pregnant, he said, “Look, you can do this the easy way or the hard way. Because either way, we’re going to be around. So if you want to make it miserable for yourself, you can, but…” It turned out that he was getting a retainer of $1,500 a week just to follow me—whether he got a picture or not! I thought, “Who the hell am I? I’m just some tennis player. What in God’s name is going on here?”

It turned out that he was being paid the retainer to get the first pictures of Tatum with the new baby. I asked him how much he was going to be paid if he got the pictures. Fifty thousand dollars, he told me. So I cut a deal with him. I said, “Listen, I’ll let you get the first pictures—but you give me twenty-five thousand dollars, or I’m going to release the photos for nothing.”

And that’s exactly how it worked out. He took the first couple of pictures when Kevin was a couple of days old—and kept the other paparazzi away—and I donated half the fifty thousand to charity, so at least I could feel he wasn’t getting all of it, and that I was making something positive out of an embarrassing situation.

Kevin Jack McEnroe was born at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica on May 23, 1986. That day—that whole period—was the happiest I’d ever been. There’s nothing comparable to the birth of your first child. First, there’s the miracle of just watching him come out: You think, “My God, how does that
happen?”
Then comes the relief that he’s healthy. You feel grateful, weepy, blessed.

I also felt very good that he had been born during a period when I was taking time off. I was firmly convinced that that was the right thing to do, and I was positive it was going to better my career.

I’ve got to smell the roses here,
I thought.
I’ve got to regroup.
I knew I needed some time off, and I knew that when I eventually came back, I’d be better off for it. Being a father for the first time would help me put things in perspective. I strongly believed that you could have a child and be number one. There was no doubt in my mind that I could do it. It felt exactly like all the other challenges I had set for myself in life. I had attained those goals; why not this?

At the same time, Kevin’s birth made the picture much more complicated. Suddenly, tennis didn’t feel as all-encompassing. There were even strange moments when it seemed trivial. I’d be in the Malibu house looking out the window and I’d say, “This is amazing—I’m on the beach in Malibu, and the sun’s going down, and it’s this incredible color.”

Suddenly, my profession and my life had become two separate things. I kept trying to get my mind around it.
It’s like singles and doubles,
I thought.
Like Davis Cup and Wimbledon. They’re not the same.
My career thus far had been incredibly intense, but there was nothing to compare with the intensity of life itself.

And that was the moment—I didn’t realize it at the time—when my passion for tennis began to shift in another direction.

I
N
1986, when I didn’t go to Wimbledon for the first time in nine years, I remember thinking that somehow the sport was going to come to a complete standstill—I literally almost convinced myself that the tennis world was going to stop without me.

I thought I was making a point: “I’m not going to put up with this nonsense until something changes,” meaning the paparazzi, the tabloids—the way they were all over me. Obviously, a fair amount of it was self-induced, but I felt, nevertheless, that it had gotten completely out of hand.

It gradually dawned on me, over the course of that year and the next, when I didn’t play Wimbledon again, that not only was tennis going on without me, but—as Becker won once more in 1986 and Pat Cash won in 1987—that the game was changing radically: Power tennis was taking over. Suddenly, I thought, “Hey, they’re still playing Wimbledon,” and there I was, sitting on my behind, and I hadn’t proven anything. In a certain way, I felt I had wasted two years—but then I realized what a mistake it was for me even to think that….

One afternoon in late June of 1986, while Wimbledon was going on without me, I was at home in Malibu and there was a knock on the door. I opened it and a man said, “I’m from the
News of the World,”
one of those English papers that were always tormenting me during the Wimbledon fortnight.

I thought,
No! This is my
house.
They’re knocking on the door of my
house.” I thought I was going to punch this guy’s lights out, but I was sharp—I looked across the street for the photographer stationed there to catch a
picture
of me punching this guy’s lights out. Sure enough, there he was. So I just said to the reporter, “Would you please step in here, because I have a little question to ask you….”

He started to edge away.

“Come on in!” I said.

He ran across the Pacific Coast Highway.

W
HEN
I
FINALLY ADMITTED
to my mother that Tatum was pregnant, the first words out of her mouth were, “You’re going to get married, right?” I said, “Yeah, of course”—even though, to tell the truth, marriage was never the first thing on my mind. I knew I wanted to have a family, but back then, I wasn’t sure whether the formalities mattered to me or not.

Pretty soon, though, I realized that they did matter to Tatum, and before I knew it, I was promising my mother that we’d be married in the Catholic Church. Tatum actually sort of tried to become a Catholic for a while. She met with a priest, took instruction: It eventually petered out.

We were married on August 1, 1986, in St. Dominic’s Roman Catholic Church, near my house in Oyster Bay. We had a tent put up so that people could enter the church privately. I wasn’t about to try to make things easier for the paparazzi.

Some of the reporters and photographers started yelling, as we came out of the church, “Just smile; come on, just pose for a few pictures! You’re happy, right? Come on!” And that was the last thing I wanted to do. Whether I was happy or not had nothing to do with it to me. Maybe it should have. I’m still not sure.

We ended up posing anyway: There are pictures of us, outside the church. I’m sorry we did it—I felt pressured to prove my happiness, which is completely ridiculous, when you think about it. I hated every minute of it.

Then some of the photographers wanted to pose a whole crowd, the wedding party and all the local onlookers, outside the church: Once again, it felt very uncomfortable. I don’t know exactly why. Why couldn’t I have been more relaxed on such a joyous day?

However, this day, especially, felt intensely private to me, and it was unbelievably hot in the church, and with all those press people outside, and the helicopters flying overhead, I just couldn’t relax. I even wondered (I’d become so cynical) if there was someone inside, even some so-called friend, who might talk to the press or take a picture. All the hounding had taken on a life of its own that removed some of the pleasure from the occasion.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, ultimately, if someone takes a photograph of you. I guess if you can get to the stage where it doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. But I couldn’t get to that point. That was the problem. It always mattered to me.

I
NEVER FELT
I was going to retire from tennis. Yes, I could afford to. But I just planned to take time off until I was ready, once more, to enjoy the feeling of being a professional tennis player. It’s a magnificent job—but it had become a case of diminishing returns for me, even as the money kept rolling in.

My plan, at first, was to come back when I was ready, but then I started worrying about my contracts: Nike said I had to play eight tournaments per year, and Dunlop wanted me to play a minimum of six. Was I going to lose that, not get paid? And what about my ranking?

I should have waited out the year, but I didn’t have the nerve.

I forced myself back, because of money and pride. It was a classic mistake that a lot of people make. Instead of thinking,
Have confidence; take a year off, then start from scratch—you could come back even better than you were
(and then people’s expectations would have been lower anyway), I panicked—my ranking was slipping!—and I went back when I was absolutely unready, mentally and competitively, to go back.

I decided to play the Volvo Open Tournament at Stratton Mountain, Vermont, in early August.

When I told my parents about it, I could hear in their voices, right away, that they were relieved. I think they really believed I was going to quit. My mom said to me, “Now you can buy some diapers for Kevin.”

I snapped at her. I said, “Mom, how much is enough? Tell me. How much money do I have to make before you don’t have to say things like that? Give me a specific number. Is it five million? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Tell me a number, so when I make it I won’t have to hear about this anymore!”

This is where I have to remind myself that as difficult as Tatum could be, I didn’t make things any easier. Instead of going on a honeymoon—which, God knows, you should do when you get married—we went to a tennis tournament. We were married on a Friday, and the following Monday, we went up to Stratton Mountain—it was like, “Quick-quick-quick, let’s get married, because I love you and want you to know I’m committed, but now I’ve got to go play tennis.”

I thought it would be a nice, relaxed place for us to stop, for me to phase back in. Vermont was so mellow—I had always enjoyed the tournament before. When we got there, though, there were paparazzi in the woods, looking to take the first picture of the newlyweds.

It was just so crazy, so uncomfortable, that I became more and more frazzled. I was in a very fragile state to start with—I was overtrained, over-tense, underweight. I gave a couple of interviews while I was there, which I now realize I shouldn’t have done. I was trying hard to be honest—I’ve always tried to be honest—but I ended up feeling I had been far too candid about my confusion at that point. I felt the writers took advantage of my vulnerability to spin out their own take on what was going on with me, and even to insinuate things that weren’t true. That was when the rumor started that since I was so thin, I must be on drugs.