You Cannot Be Serious (30 page)

After dispatching a very young (sixteen-year-old) André Agassi in the quarterfinals, I ended up, ironically enough, playing Becker in the semis, and I was just all over him verbally, trash-talking on every changeover. In retrospect, it had more to do with my brittleness at the time than anything else, and I probably picked the wrong person, although it made for an exciting match. I can’t even remember exactly what I said to him—I’ve blocked it out. It was nothing terribly original, I’m sure. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” or “I’m going to kick your ass”—which, by the way, I didn’t do.

Trust me on this: I’ve been guilty of many verbal escapades, but trash-talking was something that didn’t occur that often in my matches. I wish it had. Every once in a while, an opponent would say, “Hey, come on, stop yelling at the umpire,” and I’d respond with a “Screw you—worry about yourself.” But that was the extent of it.

This was on a whole new level. And then all the anxiety and negative karma got to me. The match went to a tiebreaker in the third set, and I was up 6–3 in the tiebreaker. Two serves to me. I double-faulted on the first. On the next, I came to net and hit a beautiful volley just inside the baseline, and Boris just barely got his racket on it, and as I was about to put away the ball to win the match, I heard the linesman say, “Out!”

Then I fell apart and lost the match.

The ball was clearly in, I knew it, and they screwed me on match point. I was positive of it:
They’re out to get me. They’re screwing me.
That’s exactly what I thought.
Everyone’s against me.
I was fighting a totally uphill battle. The paranoid part of me, the part that felt everyone—linesmen, umpires, other players, reporters, paparazzi—had it in for me, now saw it really happening.

When you tell people enough times to piss off, they’re not exactly going to go out of their way to help you out. Even though I
may
have been wrong a few times about calls that I protested, I’m also sure that with all the marvelous goodwill I’d built up, there were umpires and linesmen who, given the chance, would look the other way or miss a call—and not in my favor. There’s no question that that ball was in. However, it was close enough that, in his own mind, the linesman could justify calling it out.

Even paranoids have enemies.

I
T WAS ALL DOWNHILL
for the next month. I went to the Canadian Open and lost to Robert Seguso in the third round.

I hit bottom, physically, at the end of August, just before the Open began. I literally felt unprepared to play a best-of-five-set match. Something was way off in my body chemistry. I was too thin, I had no endurance.

It showed in the first round of the Open (I was seeded ninth), where I lost in four to Paul Annacone, who would become Pete Sampras’s long-time coach. As icing on the cake, Peter Fleming and I got stuck in traffic and were defaulted in the doubles for showing up a few minutes late.

McEnroe and Fleming defaulted at the U.S. Open, for being two minutes late! That felt like the ultimate, sickening proof that everyone was against me. They’d all been trying to screw me, starting from my first tournament back, at Stratton Mountain. They just didn’t want me back, I felt.

I said, “I’m out of the tournament—to hell with it. I’m going to have a cheeseburger and a beer!”

On my new cheeseburger-dessert-and-beer diet, I promptly won three tournaments in a row, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

I couldn’t keep it going, though I was under tremendous pressure. I had been number two in the world in February of ’86, and simply from the events I hadn’t played over my six-month absence, I had dropped to number ten.

Then, as soon as I got back, I had a whole pile of ATP points to defend—after all, in 1985, I had won Stratton Mountain
and
the Canadian,
and
made it to the finals of the Open. Well, in 1986, I got to the semifinals at Stratton, the third round at the Canadian, and the first round at the Open. Coming out of the Open, I had dropped to number 20 in the world.

The three wins were a good start, but I needed to play a very heavy schedule if I was to have any hope of fulfilling my next goal, making the Masters. The trouble was, playing heavily meant traveling heavily. Tatum and the baby were traveling with me, and none of us was enjoying the grind. We went to Paris for the indoor tournament: I lost in the quarterfinals to a qualifier named Sergio Casal. Over to London, where I needed to do well—and lost in the first round to Pat Cash, who was on his way to winning Wimbledon in six months. (“God, you served like shit,” he said, when we shook hands at net. I later found out that that was his puckish sense of humor.)

We flew back to New York. If I won the Houston Open in November, the Masters was a possibility. However, it was a tense time between Tatum and me. When I mentioned one more trip to her, she looked me in the eye and told me that if I went to Houston, I was going alone. I pulled out of the tournament, and we returned to Malibu.

I’d played only eight tournaments that year. If the ATP had divided my total points for 1986 by the number of events I’d played (which would have seemed logical), I would have been number six on their computer. But their formula at the time called for a minimum of twelve tournaments, so I came out number fourteen in the world.

Number fourteen, and not in the Masters—I felt furious at life.

W
E FINALLY WENT
on our honeymoon, to Hawaii, at Christmastime. At last I had given myself time to put aside all the nonsense that had taken place from August to November: It was as if I had taken a deep breath and said, “OK, let’s start the new year fresh and just kick some ass.”

We were staying on Oahu, at the home of a Japanese man I’d met playing golf. On New Year’s Day, we woke up to a glorious Hawaiian morning, a velvety blue sky, and a fresh breeze blowing. And Tatum turned to me and said, “I’m pregnant.”

“There goes nineteen eighty-seven,” I said.

11

T
HERE WAS A WEDGE
between us. It wasn’t just my undiplomatic comment; it was the sentiment behind it, which we both understood: I felt I had blown 1986, and I couldn’t afford to blow another year.

We hadn’t intended to have another child right away, but we hadn’t been trying especially hard
not
to have one. We were just kids, really—mature beyond our years in some ways, quite young in others. Tatum had just turned twenty-three in November, and I was still twenty-seven. We had had to try for six months before conceiving Kevin, so it had stuck in our minds that making a baby was never going to be easy for us.

Well, this time it was all too easy.

I seriously wondered whether we should go ahead with the pregnancy. Tatum asked me what I was thinking about, and I said, “Are we prepared to deal with this?” She couldn’t stand the question, let alone the answer. When we weren’t locked in long silences, we began having screaming arguments.

All couples fight—couples need to fight—but our quarrels were nasty, and they escalated fast. We both had tempers, and Tatum was no shrinking violet. She was a tomboy from a tough household: Her father was a frustrated boxer, and her brother was quick with his fists. As our relationship grew more contentious, I noticed that whenever I raised my voice, she would flinch, as if I were about to hit her—except that I never had, or did.

I think she compared all men to her father, which put me in a tricky position. At first, she saw me as a better version of Ryan, but as things became tougher between us, the comparison got less favorable. She said then and later that I bullied her, but the truth was, she always gave as good as she got.

It got harder and harder to feel good about the pregnancy. In the last three or four months of her pregnancy with Kevin, I hadn’t played tennis at all, which had made it much easier for us, but I didn’t feel I could stop playing now, because I was trying so hard to come back. I was starting to develop back problems because of the tension; I was having trouble just focusing.

Then, in early February, something happened: Tatum started bleeding profusely. Our doctor told us that this kind of bleeding led to a miscarriage about 20 percent of the time, so I began to prepare myself for the possibility. Just before the bleeding had begun, I’d still been thinking, “Are we ready for another child?”—but when I took Tatum to the doctor, to my amazement, I suddenly burst into tears. I realized how much I wanted this child, and how frightened I was of losing it. I felt tremendous relief when it turned out that everything was okay.

That still didn’t translate into a new attitude about my career, however—it simply wasn’t fun to get out there and play. That was when I again decided to hire a coach. I was under a huge amount of stress, and I needed a boost. My first thought was to ask Borg’s coach, Lennart Bergelin, to work with me, and to this day, I wish I had, because I know that he would have nurtured me, and nurturing was what I badly needed at that point. I felt awkward about asking him, though, because I still wasn’t 100 percent sure that Borg wasn’t going to play again, and it felt strange, simply because Lennart had been with Bjorn all those years.

I wish I had just talked to Bjorn about it. People switch coaches all the time—it wouldn’t have been that odd. Then again, I wasn’t thinking straight about many things in those days. Maybe, too, I just didn’t want to work that hard.

And maybe something in me knew that I was reaching for some kind of magic that was no longer there.

I called Tony Palafox. Tony, of course, was a touchstone in his own right: a mentor, a friend, a calming influence, the chief connection (along with Harry Hopman) to my formation as a tennis player. His quiet personality always dovetailed perfectly with mine: When I was a raging teenager, Tony just stood there patiently as I swore and smashed rackets, waiting for me to let it all out so we could go on with the practice. I badly needed that kind of calmness around me now.

Tony agreed to come work with me full-time—but almost as soon as he began, I could see that it wasn’t working out. On the road, he was like a fish out of water: He simply preferred his routine, and he was so shy that it killed him to call and set up a practice court.

In May, Tony was with me at the Nations Cup in Düsseldorf. I was playing Miroslav Mecir, and I was at the end of my rope: tense and angry, the crowd booing me and rooting for Mecir. I kept thinking, “What’s wrong with these people? Last time I was here, they were rooting for Lendl against me, and now it’s goddamn Mecir!” It was driving me nuts.

Mecir was Mr. Smooth—he ran like a deer, and had incredible movement. We split the first two sets, I was down a break, and yelling, and finally the umpire said, “Point penalty, Mr. McEnroe; game, Mecir.” I said, “That’s it.”

I went to the umpire, and said, “My shoulder hurts.” Tony came over and asked what was wrong. I said, “I’ve had it,” and I just walked off the court and defaulted. I said, “I’m not playing anymore. To hell with these people. That’s it.”

Tony went home.

But I went on. What else could I do? Usually, even when you’re at the end of your rope, you find a little more rope.

I
KEPT LOOKING
for help: After Tony, Peter Fleming actually coached me for a while; later, I would work again with Paul Cohen, but his intensity was over the top even for me. None of it panned out, though, for me, or for the people who worked with me. In my desperation, I went against my gut feelings. By lifting weights and trying to change my game and hiring coaches, I was getting away from what I believed in. And I paid the price.

What happened to me is more or less the same thing that’s happened to everyone who’s been on top. Once you’ve lost it, everything spirals out of control, and it’s difficult to find your way back. The process is gradual rather than sudden, and the whole way down you keep telling yourself that things are going to change. Little by little, however, the bad days at the office start to outnumber the good ones, and pain begins to replace the pleasure you once took in your profession.

Maybe if I’d taken the whole year off in 1986, my life would have been different. Maybe not.

The one thing that stayed the same for me, for a long time, was the money. The money made things very complicated.

Maybe Borg had the right idea—to cut the cord quickly and leave when people were still going to miss him. I chose a different route. I chose world-class mediocrity for the last five or six years of my career. I just couldn’t walk away from that kind of money. What the hell else was I going to do? Being number eight or nine or ten in the world felt a lot better than sitting somewhere on my behind.

I
LOST
in the first round of the French Open to a twenty-year-old Argentinean named Horacio de la Pena. Just a couple of weeks earlier, I’d beaten him easily in Rome. It felt like yet another last straw. I said, “The hell with it; I’m not playing Wimbledon. Can’t do it.”

Part of me also felt content not to go. I had a baby at home and another on the way. Tatum needed me there. Of course, I had to come up with a reason to withdraw. My back was bothering me, my shoulder was hurting, my hip was tight—but I’m sure it was nothing worse than any other touring pro my age was going through. I was not too injured to play.

What I really wanted was for the world to read between the lines, to see my little son and my pregnant wife and know what I was thinking and feeling. I wanted to show everybody that certain things in life were more important than another Wimbledon title. I was groping my way toward that understanding: Couldn’t the rest of the tennis world understand it along with me?

And of course, the word I heard back was, “McEnroe has gone over the edge.”

I
HAD ELECTED
to sit out Davis Cup in 1985 and 1986, the Code of Conduct years. In the meantime, Arthur had left the captaincy and Tom Gorman had taken over. Tom had been a reasonably good player himself, though no shooting star, and I had the feeling he was really the USTA’s man—a company guy. He certainly wasn’t about to rock the boat and lift the Code, and since I was one of the main reasons the Code had been instituted in the first place, I didn’t expect my phone to ring.