You Cannot Be Serious (32 page)

I suggested that she try working with a trainer again, and because we were friendly with Madonna and Sean Penn, Tatum hired Rob Parr, a trainer who had worked with Madonna. Madonna was thin and successful—maybe some of that would wear off on her.

Moderation was never one of Tatum’s strong points, though. Soon she was training like a maniac, lifting weights and running six miles a day. She was in amazing shape, but I felt concerned when she started complaining about knee problems. I said, “I think you’re running on pavement too much.” She kept going anyway.

And she kept feeling frustrated that work wasn’t dropping into her lap. Part of her knew that if she wanted to get acting jobs, she would have to go out and try hard for them—but with two small children at home, she wasn’t in a position to do so. She blamed me for this, and I just saw it as our life. Later on, when things got much worse, she would say, “Oh, John doesn’t want me to work,” which wasn’t true. I didn’t want her to be filming while I was playing Wimbledon, but I did try to be supportive. In fact, in a way, our situation was ideal, because it allowed her to feel her way back into acting without the pressure of having to make a lot of money. Couldn’t she be happy about developing her craft and gradually establishing herself as a mature actress?

I said, “Look, financially we’re in pretty good shape. I’m not winning, but I’m still making the same money I was in eighty-four. You haven’t worked for a while. Why don’t you start small? Work with good actors in small projects, so you can be around them?”

She would snap at me then: “Who the hell are you? I’ll do what I want.” And then she’d go up against the hottest actresses of the moment, Demi Moore and the like, and she’d get rejected every time.

One night we had dinner with Madonna and Sean, during a period when I’d been pestering Tatum about taking acting lessons. “I can’t not practice and then think I have any sort of chance of winning Wimbledon,” I told her. “You’ve got to work at your craft.” I’d say that over and over—I’d try to be the sensible guy. She’d brush me off: “What do you know about movies? You’re an athlete.”

Then, at dinner, Madonna said, “You know, Tatum, there’s this great acting class I’ve gone to—you should give it a try.”

“What a great idea!” Tatum said.

I sat there thinking,
That’s what I’ve been saying the last three years, but thanks for taking credit.

Then Madonna told her, “You can have a career and be a mother, too—you can do it all.” I couldn’t help thinking,
What the hell do you know about it? You’re the most career-obsessed person I’ve ever met in my life.
Not to mention that she hadn’t even had a child at that point!

Tatum kept auditioning and auditioning, and never getting any parts. A little while later, after the movie
Working Girl
was a big success, someone decided to do a TV series based on the film, and Tatum tried out for the lead role. She decided to do her reading in a heavy Brooklyn accent, and the producers said to her, “We want to give you the part, but come back tomorrow and just speak in a normal voice.” She went back—and did the same accent again. I thought, “Why would she do that?” The only answer I could come up with was that somehow, she really didn’t want the job—or to work at all.

We were together eight years, and over that time, she acted in three projects. One was a play with William Hickey that ran for a week. One was a strange independent movie,
Little Noises,
with Crispin Glover, which went straight to video. The one project that had any sort of an audience was a 1989 after-school special with Drew Barrymore and Corey Feldman. It was called
Fifteen and Getting Straight,
and it was an anti-drug movie.

I
T WAS
T
ATUM’S
twenty-sixth birthday, November 5, 1989, and I was playing Boris Becker in the semifinals of the Paris Indoor. Tatum was seated at courtside. And both Boris and I had come down with a hacking cough.

Let me explain. Ever since he had burst onto the scene in 1985, Boris had had a locker-room reputation for suddenly going into a loud coughing fit at key psychological moments in a match—say, when you were serving at break point, or when he needed a rest before his own serve. He was a big guy, with a big chest, and his hacking was deep and resonant—it wasn’t something you could ignore easily.

He was at it again this year in Paris, and before we met in the semis, I decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. As soon as we began to play, every time Boris began to cough, I would answer with an even louder and longer bark of my own. It was a little childish, maybe, and it might have had something to do with the fact that, at number two, Boris was now two spots above me in the rankings. Still, in my mind, the coughing was just a new form of trash-talking. I wanted to teach him a lesson.

Naturally, it backfired. I must have echoed him ten times in the first set alone, and in my time-tested fashion, I once again managed to alienate the crowd: Every time I coughed, they began to rustle and boo. On a changeover near the end of the set, Boris said, “Come on, John—give me a break. I have a cold.”

“You’ve had a cold for four years,” I said.

With the crowd against me and Boris annoyed—and now trying harder than ever—I had put myself in a perfect position to blow the match, which is exactly what I wound up doing, losing in three sets.

In our hotel room afterwards, Tatum was furious with me. “How could you embarrass Boris that way?” she said.

“Whose side are you on?” I asked her.

I guess I know the answer now—she wasn’t on my side.

At the moment, though, I elected (even though I felt I was right) to smooth over a fight with my wife rather than stand on principle. I went to Boris’s room—he was in the same hotel—and apologized. “Listen, Boris,” I said. “I’m sorry. I did it in the heat of competition.”

He was extremely gracious. “I understand,” he said. “To me, it’s over already—don’t even think about it.”

For me, though, that fight with Tatum on her birthday, and on the day of a big match, was a down note on which to end the year. I had started 1989 at number eleven, and I’d fought my way up to number four; with this loss, and my subsequent loss to Becker in the Masters a few weeks later, my ranking would once more begin to slide.

And, after that year, the men’s Masters would never again be played at Madison Square Garden. In a remarkably shortsighted move, the ATP traded prestige and media attention for dollars, and moved the tournament to Germany when the German Tennis Federation came up with a bigger contract than the Garden was willing to offer. As far as I was concerned, moving the event had destroyed it. It was the end of an era.

It was also the end, for all intents and purposes, of my top-ten ranking. In early 1990, Hamilton Jordan, the executive director of the ATP, instituted a change in the ranking rules that ran counter to the wishes of the top players. The new rules rewarded pros who played more events. Only their top fourteen results were counted, even if they had played thirty-five or more tournaments. These rules obviously weren’t designed for a player with a wife and kids.

I didn’t agree with the change, I didn’t feel it was in my best interests as a husband, and I knew that it would hurt my ranking. Ultimately, I felt that the rule change hurt the game, and my personal feeling was that, in the ostensible interests of generating more tennis action, Jordan had sold us out. Had the players been more organized, we might have started boycotting tournaments in protest, but once the change was in effect, apathy set in.

I
N
J
ANUARY
1990, I was playing Mikael Pernfors in the fourth round of the Australian Open. At one set all, I disagreed with a call a lines-woman had made, and I walked over to her. I didn’t say anything; I just stood in front of her and stared at her, bouncing a ball up and down on my strings. “Code of conduct warning, Mr. McEnroe,” the umpire announced. That seemed debatable to me, and so I debated it for a few moments. The umpire prevailed, and I calmed down and won the third set.

Then, serving at 2–3 in the fourth, I hit a forehand approach wide. Suddenly, on that very hot Australian afternoon—it was 135 degrees on the court—I saw red. I slammed my racket to the ground. The frame cracked. “Racket abuse, Mr. McEnroe,” announced the umpire. “Point penalty.” My anger did not subside. I went up to the umpire, let him know how I was feeling for a minute or two, then demanded to see the tournament supervisor. The supervisor materialized, and calmly said that a cracked racket frame was an automatic penalty. That was when I broke some new ground. As the supervisor turned away, I made an extremely rude suggestion, in a very loud voice. There was a gasp in the stands—McEnroe had topped himself.

“Verbal abuse, audible obscenity, Mr. McEnroe,” the umpire said. “Default. Game, set, and match, Mr. Pernfors.” It was the only other time in my career, besides the doubles at the 1986 U.S. Open, that I had been defaulted. I had also made history by becoming the first player defaulted out of a Grand Slam event in the Open era.

I plead idiocy—but I also plead ignorance. If you look at my career, you’ll see that in dozens of matches (and I’d say that it really was only dozens; people might be surprised to hear it), I took matters to that edge where if I incurred one more penalty, I was gone. However, the one and only time that I went over the edge, I literally didn’t realize that the default rule had been changed, from four steps to three.

At the moment the words flew out of my mouth, I thought, “Okay, I’ve lost the game.” I thought that it was going to be four games to two in the fourth, but that I was still up two sets to one. I still felt certain I’d win the match. But when the umpire said, “Game, set, match,” the first thing I thought was that my agent, Sergio Palmieri, had forgotten to tell me about the rule change.

Obviously, I can’t just say, “It happened because my agent forgot to tell me about the change.” Of course I have to take the responsibility for the whole incident. I truly believe, though, that if I had known the new rule, I would have contained myself. I sometimes went off the rails, but I always knew where I stood.

I
LEFT
A
USTRALIA
, wife and two small boys in tow, swamped by photographers wanting to get one last shot of a humiliated McEnroe fleeing the country. I had seldom been so happy to get back to Malibu. I stewed about the default for a couple of days—until one morning, when I was watching CNN for results from Down Under, I saw something that put my problem in perspective.

Tragically, an Avianca Airlines passenger jet had crashed near Kennedy Airport in New York. Incredibly, the anchorwoman soon said she had an uncomfirmed report that the plane had crashed on John McEnroe’s home in Oyster Bay. I was stunned. My first thought was to worry about my parents, who also lived on the property. But they were on vacation in Egypt, and my two brothers, I realized, were also elsewhere.

The newscast then went to a reporter on the scene, who was talking to an Oyster Bay neighbor of mine, whose first words were, “The plane did not crash on John McEnroe’s house—but they’re using his yard as a morgue.”

Talk about mixed emotions! I felt, all at once, relieved, spooked, sorry for the victims, and guilty at worrying about my property. It was then and there that I decided to sell my Oyster Bay house. Life is too weird.

O
NE NIGHT
in the summer of 1990, Tatum said, “What about a third? Want to go for the girl?”

I was back from another tournament. Kevin was four, Sean almost three. I felt as if we were just beginning to get a grip on our lives. “I don’t know,” I said, hesitantly.

“Come on,” she said. “What are you, chicken?”

I said, “Chicken? You’re the one who’s got to go through it, not me. And you’re the one who’s always talking about how difficult it is to have a career. Do you think having another child is going to solve that problem?”

As it turned out, the conversation was academic. Emily Katherine McEnroe was born on May 10, 1991. At first, we felt, “This is perfect; we’ve finally got two boys and a girl. This is the answer.” But then we found it wasn’t the answer.

Maybe we were too spoiled. We had more than enough money, and fame, and we enjoyed the good things that money and fame brought us. At the same time, we aspired to live like normal people, and that just wasn’t possible. It seemed that there was never enough calm in the house. Too often, Tatum was upset and embarrassed by my latest outburst on a tennis court—and the outbursts got worse as the tension at home increased. My answer to all this was to over-indulge in marijuana. I thought it would relax me and help me appreciate my life more. Unfortunately, it often had the opposite effect.

It was very confusing—in our way, we were both trying to be good parents and good partners to each other, but her career was in eclipse and mine was in decline, and you need to feel reasonably good about yourself before you can be kind. We loved our children, but it felt harder and harder all the time to come up with any kindness for each other….

T
HE HIGHEST MY RANKING
ever got again was number four, at the end of 1989. I saw I was being overwhelmed by some players, whether it was Becker on a good day, or Edberg or Lendl, but that my game was finally coming back. It had taken three years. I ended 1986 at fourteen in the world; in 1987 I was number ten, and in 1988 I was number eleven. By 1989, I wasn’t playing a lot of tournaments, but at least I had gotten to the point where I was contending. Contending, but not winning the big ones. I was knocking on the door; I just wasn’t able to get in.

My drive stopped. My commitment waned. There could be no better example of this than my idiotic decision, the week before Wimbledon in 1988, to play an exhibition with Mats Wilander for GOAL, a Dublin-based charity. What was the idiotic part? For starters, I hadn’t played Wimbledon in the previous two years, and while the GOAL event did feature tennis during the day, it culminated with a boxing match between Mats and me at night! In my mind (after a few shots of tequila), I won a unanimous decision: I threw a lot of punches, but I couldn’t lift my arms for the next three days.