You Cannot Be Serious (31 page)

However, after the U.S.A. lost for the third year in a row in 1986, the USTA moved into fence-mending mode. Gorman called me early in 1987 and asked me if I could play our first-round match against Paraguay.

“Paraguay!” I said. “You don’t need me for Paraguay—you can win it easily with the B-team. Besides, what about the Code?”

“What if it wasn’t an issue?” Gorman asked. “Would you play?”

“Not this time, Tom. You don’t need me.”

Well, we got beaten by Paraguay. Aaron Krickstein and Jimmy Arias went down there; Arias was up 5–1 in the fifth set of the fifth and deciding match, and then he lost to somebody named Hugo Chapacu, who was ranked around 500 in the world! I remember it, because I was playing an exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal, and someone came up to me and said, “America lost three–two to Paraguay.” I said, “You must be joking.”

Suddenly, we were faced with elimination. The next tie we were to play was a relegation match against Germany. In Davis Cup, if your country loses a relegation match, you get bounced down from the main sixteen countries into zonal competition, which is the minors. You have to fight your way back. And Germany would be tough—Becker had won Wimbledon the last two years in a row.

I thought, “OK, enough’s enough; I’m going to get back on the team.” I missed Davis Cup—it was the last little vestige of team sports in my life. I called Gorman and said, “OK, I’ll play.”

He said, “Let me call you back.”

Well, that didn’t feel right. When Gorman called back, he told me, “Listen, I want you on the team, but you need to play a tournament in South Orange the week before.” He was talking about Gene Scott’s tournament in South Orange, New Jersey—the first tournament I’d ever played, eleven years before, the place where I’d collected my first ATP points. It was a nice tournament, but it wasn’t exactly the big time. And what was this, anyway, an audition?

I said, “What are you talking about? What’s that going to prove?”

Gorman said, “I’m sorry, I can’t pick you unless you play there, because I want you to get a couple of matches under your belt.”

I counted to ten. “Tom, I’ve won four Davis Cups and a few majors. Do you think I might know how best to prepare myself?”

“I’ll get back to you,” he said.

Gorman eventually called me to propose a compromise: Paul Annacone, Tim Mayotte, and I would play off, and the two winners would be on the team.

I swallowed my pride—a big swallow—and said yes. I wanted to go back to Davis Cup. Mayotte and I made the team.

And we lost to Germany, 2–3.

Tatum was due to give birth right around the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open, and—if it was possible—I was more on edge than I’d been the whole year.

I couldn’t not play the tournament. Skipping Wimbledon had been a big enough gesture—I wasn’t about to announce my retirement.

I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. I went with “did,” and made a colossal mess of it, in my third-round match against my nemesis from the 1985 Australian Open, Slobodan (Bobo) Zivojinovic. I had won the first set, and I was serving for the second at 5–3. Not once but twice, Zivojinovic hit shots that clearly landed over my baseline—I saw both of them with my own eyes—but the linesman said nothing, costing me the game.

My relationship with tournament officials had grown progressively more adversarial with each year since 1977, but since I’d returned from my layoff, things had worsened radically. I recognized that my problems with umpires had more to do with me than with them. Linesmen weren’t the problem; I was.

They were fallible at the very best, but I had known that for a long time. Now, however, I had decided that because they were unable to make good calls, they were trying to screw me, and that, therefore, they were the enemy. I didn’t think,
Look, these are human beings making mistakes.
I thought,
They are adversely affecting my career, therefore every one of them is an opponent, just like the person I’m playing against.

Arthur Ashe would always say to me during Davis Cup, “Listen, calls end up evening out.” That was his theory: Over the course of the year, you’re going to get a hundred bad calls that work against you, but you’ll get a hundred that work in your favor.

I didn’t agree, to put it mildly. To me, the
timing
of bad calls always felt crucial. If a linesman or an umpire corrected a bad call when I had a comfortable lead, it didn’t matter (and no lead ever felt comfortable to me). It was the times I was down break point in a tight set that mattered.

The second set against Zivojinovic was one of those times. After that second shot landed over the baseline without a call, I screamed something foul, and the umpire issued me a warning. Zivojinovic broke me, we changed sides, and I let the umpire know, in what had become my customary terms, what I thought of the officiating in this match.

Point penalty. Zivojinovic served three straight boomers (three was all he needed) to make it 5–5.

I was still boiling, and when I double-faulted to go down 5–6, I walked up to the umpire and let him have it again. What really got me going, however, was a CBS technician who pointed a boom mike at the umpire’s chair while I ranted. I gave the microphone man—and all of America—one hell of a sound bite.

I made a complete ass of myself for the umpteenth time, but somehow I managed to hit a new low, using a penalizable obscenity approximately six times in the course of the minute-and-a-half changeover. I say “approximately” because, I promise you, I’ve never looked at the tape, and I lost count in the heat of the moment.

And now the umpire said, “Game penalty, Mr. McEnroe. Game and second set to Mr. Zivojinovic, seven games to five.”

I stood and thought for a moment. I had now taken three steps: warning, point penalty, and game penalty. The next step was a default. I think back on that umpire—a young man named Richard Ings, just twenty-two years old with an Australian accent—with severely mixed feelings: On the one hand, he had been helpful by lumping together all my obscenities into a single offense, when he could have defaulted me after one or two expletives. I believe he was trying to dignify the occasion (as well as himself and me) as much as was possible under the circumstances.

On the other hand, he acted the way tennis usually did where I was concerned: weakly. Once again, it would have been better all around if I had been defaulted the first time I went so dramatically over the edge. It probably would have happened far less often after that, if at all. As it was, though, officials didn’t want to lose their big ticket-seller at the moment, so they just made me someone else’s problem by slapping my wrist. Then, when I accumulated enough fines, I had to miss the next tournament, which wound up hurting smaller events, not me.

I calmed down in the next set (one of my strengths was that I could always snap back into focus almost instantly), but lost in the tiebreaker. Then Zivojinovic started missing a few first serves, and I won the last two sets to take the match. The victory tasted like ashes, however.

I restrained myself after that (amazingly, since Tatum was due any minute), and wound up defeated by time instead of my own temper. In my quarterfinal against Lendl, Ivan the Terrible brutalized me with topspin lobs—it was the most phenomenal such exhibition I ever witnessed. He had to have hit it over my head fifteen times.

Expert gamesman that he was, Lendl picked up on my edginess about the imminent birth. Also, as the match wore on into dusk, I found that for the first time in my life I was having trouble seeing the ball. Was there something wrong with my eyesight? Was that an excuse? Was he just better?

After I’d lost that match, I was forced to realize that Lendl had been able to victimize me mainly because I wasn’t moving well. My back was tensing up on me again—I had a sacroiliac problem. Sometimes I felt I could barely make it to the court. I know a lot of it was psychological, but whatever it was, it felt awful. Suddenly I was losing to guys like Wilander and Mecir on indoor carpet. On clay, it was a different matter—they had more of an advantage there—but on any other surface, even a slow one, I knew I should be winning.

I kept thinking, “This is impossible. There’s no way I can be losing to these guys.” But it was happening anyway.

The most difficult thing for me to accept, when my body started letting me down, was that I wasn’t able to cover the net as well. Suddenly there was a whisper along the tennis grapevine:
He’s fragile.

That was hard to take, because at my peak, I was quicker than people realize. Borg had the speed of a great sprinter; Vitas moved differently, in quick little steps, but was also very fast; and Johan Kriek was one of the fastest human beings ever to step onto a tennis court. There were others, too. But I still always felt I was one of the quickest players out there, certainly in the top 10 or 20 percent.

Then I wasn’t anymore.

As I lost a bit of my speed up to (and back from) the net, I had to rely more and more on my craftiness, which worked reasonably well for me until the big hitters started taking over the game. Becker was the first; then along came Agassi and Sampras. I wasn’t used to having that pace generated at me from the baseline, or facing a serve that consistently hard.

When I played Sampras in the semifinals of the 1990 Open, I was convinced that I didn’t need to be so aggressive; that I could actually afford to stay back. I thought I was solid enough from the baseline to bring it off. It may seem crazy now, but I believed I could just bide my time: Instead of coming in and feeling unsure because I’d lost a bit of my quickness, I felt I could wait it out an extra shot or two if necessary.

I thought I had a great chance to win it, that I could wrap up my career with a fifth Open. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Who would have thought it? Pete was nineteen; that was the first year he ever won a Major. He had beaten Lendl in the quarterfinals, and he beat Agassi in the final. I don’t think I have anything to hang my head about; he’s turned out to be a great champion. But at the time, I was really disappointed at how poorly I played, how badly prepared I was.

What I didn’t realize was this: It’s never possible to be prepared when the future takes over from the past.

A
FTER THE
1987 O
PEN
, I was fined $7,500 for my tirade during the Zivojinovic match (plus another $350 for ball abuse earlier in the tournament), which, because I’d already been fined $18,000 that year, resulted in an automatic two-month suspension. To date in my career, I had amassed $80,500 in fines, almost half of it—$38,500—in the horrible year of 1987.

In another way, though, the year turned out to be wonderful: Sean Timothy McEnroe was born on September 23, at NYU Medical Center in downtown New York City. One part of me thought of the two-month suspension as paternity leave.

I
T WAS A BRIEF PERIOD
of calm in an ever more turbulent time. We now had two babies in the house, a toddler and an infant, and even though we could certainly afford nannies and other people to help around the house, we both felt more and more overwhelmed. I was trying to get my tennis career back on track; Tatum, barely out of adolescence at twenty-four, was trying to figure out who she was, and what it meant to be a mother.

She didn’t have the strongest of foundations on which to build a sense of motherhood. Her own mother had had such problems with alcohol and pills that she’d barely been present when Tatum was little; for a time, Ryan had carried most of the burden, to the best of his limited ability, while pursuing a full-time acting career.

As Tatum told it, though, once she’d entered her teens, her father seemed to lose interest in fatherhood, especially after he’d gotten together with Farrah Fawcett, who appeared lukewarm at best about being a stepmother, surrogate or otherwise, to Tatum and Griffin. Once Ryan moved to Farrah’s place, Tatum said, she and her brother were frequently left alone in their father’s beach house in Malibu.

And now here she was, alone much of the time with two small children of her own, and back in Malibu.

She was still very conflicted about her work—or her lack of work. Her acting career had tailed off pretty sharply after she came out of her teens. The transition to adulthood is perilous for every child actor: Very few make the jump successfully. As a young woman, Tatum just couldn’t seem to bring the same charm to the screen that she’d projected as a little girl, and even as a teenager. She’d finished her last movie,
Certain Fury,
just before we met—it had vanished quickly, to the relief of everyone involved in it, including Tatum, who refused to do any press or publicity for the picture.

Sometimes she thought it would just be a good idea to leave it at that. She would often say, “Will you love me if I never work again?” Trick question! I wanted to say that I would feel fine about it, but if she then decided she did want to work, I didn’t want to be the one who had told her, “You can’t do it.”

The one thing I felt strongly about was that I never wanted both of us to be working at the same time. Even that was tricky, though, because I made up my schedule every September for the coming year, and acting jobs tended to come up on the spur of the moment. I wanted to plan out well in advance when Tatum might be working—but I didn’t think agents, producers, and casting people were likely to be very concerned about my tennis schedule.

At the same time, Sean’s arrival made all of that academic. With two babies in the house, Tatum couldn’t suddenly turn around and tell Hollywood, “OK, I’m ready to work now.”

Still, she continued to be conflicted. With Sean’s birth, she had naturally gained weight, and in the months afterward she seemed obsessed with taking it off. She had grown up in an environment where being thin and beautiful meant everything—employability being one of those things—and she’d suffered terribly when she’d gone through a chubby phase as an adolescent. In the first months of 1988, I kept feeling worried that her obsession about losing weight was taking her back to bad habits she’d cultivated as a teenager.