You Cannot Be Serious (33 page)

Needless to say, tuning up on the grass at Queen’s would have been a slightly better preparation for Wimbledon that year, where I lost in the second round to Wally Masur.

My motivation suffered from a combination of having kids and, for lack of a better term, going Hollywood. Appreciating the good life. I couldn’t seem to focus as intently on the job at hand. It became less important to be number one—so I settled for number four. I was still making a ton of money; I was still the biggest guy in tennis. I just wasn’t the
best
guy. Yes, I might have lost a step, but before, I had always found a way to do what it took with what I had. My ferocity had gotten me there. Now my ferocity seemed like something I had to unlearn if I was going to be a good husband and father.

I tried, hard. In my darker moments, however, I sometimes wonder why I went to the effort, because it ended so badly. Sometimes—I can’t help it—I feel as if I wasted my time. Ultimately, I have no one to blame but myself. I’m the one who chose that life, that wife. Nobody made me do it. I naïvely believed that this person actually thought along the same lines as I did—and maybe she did, for a while. In her own way, Tatum tried hard, too, but ultimately she just didn’t have the wherewithal to bring it off. She was so young!
We
were so young. As angry as I get, I do feel for her—when I can get through the anger.

12

W
HAT DID YOU EXPECT
?” a guy named McEnroe said. It was the press conference before the semifinals of the January 1991 Australian Open. “Edberg versus Lendl, McEnroe against Becker.” The only difference was: I wasn’t the one saying it. Patrick McEnroe had then proceeded to give Boris Becker a good scare, winning the first set in a tiebreaker before succumbing in four.

One of the nicer surprises of the beginning of the ’90s was my baby brother Patrick’s reinvention of himself as a tennis player. He had followed a strong junior career—at one point rising to as high as number three in the nation—with a not-especially-distinguished varsity career at Stanford. I think that when he did so well in the juniors, it was the first time people started paying him a lot of attention in his own right, and so he wilted a bit when he got to college. When he got to his senior year, our mom told him to forget about his dreams of playing professional tennis: It was time to look for a real job.

I had a talk with Mom. I said, “Listen, you lay off him. He’s got to try to play professional tennis. It’s gone too far now; he’ll regret it the rest of his life if he doesn’t do it. Everyone’s comparing him with me, and he’s really his own man. And I think he can make it if he just puts his mind to it.”

Our tennis games are as different as our personalities. Patrick is a right-hander, with that same two-handed backhand he used as a little boy. He tends to stay back more than I do, and his best stroke is his backhand return of serve. He’s easygoing and soft-spoken; I’m—well, you know how I am. As I’ve mentioned, he started playing much earlier than I did, and at first it looked as though he might go even further. One year, our parents took us all to Miami, for the Orange Bowl, where I played the 14-and-unders and Patrick played the 12-and-unders—at age six! He lost in the first round (to a twelve-year-old), and walked off the court dejectedly. Another spectator turned to my father and said, “He doesn’t have to worry—he’s got six more years in the twelves.”

When he actually did turn twelve, Patrick was even better than I’d been at that age, but then he didn’t do as well in the fourteens and sixteens. By the time he was seventeen, he was significantly stronger. In 1983, he lost two extremely close three-set matches to Stefan Edberg in the semifinals of the juniors at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. He was wild-carded into a couple of ATP tournaments early in his career, but part of him wondered if he deserved it. The first time we ever played each other on the tour was at Stratton Mountain in 1985, in the first round. He was nineteen; I was twenty-six, and number one in the world. I behaved myself, like a nice older brother, and won, 6–1, 6–2.

He struggled for his first couple of years on the tour, but then when he hit his mid-twenties, he recommitted himself to the game and really improved his ranking, ultimately rising as high as number thirty-one in the world. He wound up more successful at doubles than at singles, but he had some excellent singles results. Along with his semifinal in Australia, he won one career singles title, at Sydney in 1995, and later that year, he had a great run at the U.S. Open, getting as far as the quarterfinals, where he gave Becker a very close match (a match for which I did the television commentary—with some bias, of course).

After I’d left the tour, it was definitely easier for me to root for Patrick. I’d once thought that if I had to lose to someone, it would be best if it were someone I was close to, my brother or a friend. When push came to shove, however, things felt different. I always wanted my family and friends to do well—just not as well as I did. I learned that when Peter Fleming beat me a couple of times. When Patrick and I played that first time at Stratton Mountain, it was a mismatch. Six years later, in Basel, Switzerland, it was a different story.

That was the year he’d gotten to the semifinals in Australia, so he was more of a contender. This was also the third round, not the first, and so I was in one of my more intense modes. He’d never seen that from me before, and I think it took poor Patrick aback. I just couldn’t help myself. I really laid it on—dirty looks, the whole routine—and he basically folded, the way most people did. I was outplaying him, too, so I’m sorry I had to do the other stuff. It was a compliment, Patrick!

The one other time we played was in a final, in Chicago, in February of 1991. A final was a different matter altogether. I thought, “God, if I lose to Patrick, that’s it. I’m jumping off the Sears Tower.” I couldn’t lose to my little brother!

Yet I felt bad about it, too. At that point I had won seventy-six tournaments, and Patrick hadn’t won any. He had established his own identity, but he was not going to be a Grand Slam winner. I wanted the best for him—but not at my expense.

I really didn’t know how to feel.

This time, I behaved myself. I thought, “You’ve got to just play. Don’t make any trouble.” I remember feeling like I was going to explode, though—it was almost impossible for me to keep everything in. I was ready to have a meltdown.

It was a well-played match, and he took the first set, 6–3. I won the second, 6–2, but the third was neck-and-neck until 3–3. Then I broke his serve. I was serving at match point when suddenly a phone rang at courtside. That was when, for one of the few times in my life, I actually said something funny. I looked at my father, who was courtside. “Dad, Mom’s on the phone.” Everybody laughed. Patrick laughed. “Tell her I’ll be home soon,” he said. He was right—I served out the match.

Why was I able to joke that once? I think I was so tense about the occasion that I just needed to do
something.
I didn’t feel good about winning, but I couldn’t imagine losing. I would have much preferred not to have dealt with it at all.

It was the last tournament I ever won, and I had to beat my brother to do it.

T
HERE WAS NO
paternity leave after Emily’s birth. Two weeks later, I was out on the road again, mostly going through the motions. At the end of May, I headed off to Paris, where I lost in the first round to Andrei Cherkasov, a Russian journeyman. I’d taken 1990 off from playing Davis Cup to make room for some new guys named Agassi, Chang, and Jim Courier, but I went back in June and lit a bit of the old fire by winning two matches in our successful tie over Spain.

That fire was sputtering, however. I could no longer pull off the big ones—I’d occasionally play a big match and beat the defending champion, or get to the semis at an important tournament, but then I’d lose to some young buck. Not only was I not winning the big ones; I sometimes wasn’t even playing the small ones: After I’d made a rude remark to a woman who had overstayed her time at a practice court at Queen’s Club in 1985, I found out that the woman was the club president’s wife—Queen’s ended up rescinding my membership, and even though I was reinstated a few years later, the self-inflicted wound never completely healed. I no longer played this key Wimbledon warmup.

At Wimbledon that year, I was soundly outplayed in the round of 16 by Stefan Edberg, who made my net play look inadequate. I remember thinking, “Weird forehand, kick serve that’s under a hundred miles per hour—and he’s kicking my ass.” At the Canadian Open, I lost to Derrick Rostagno in the third. At New Haven, I lost to a huge-serving young Goran Ivanisevic in the quarterfinals.

And at the U.S. Open that year, nineteen-year-old Michael Chang beat me for the only time, in five sets in the third round, using the topspin lob against me as effectively as Lendl had four years earlier. It killed me to watch those spins go over my head and land right inside the baseline. It was as if Chang had read right through me:
He’s lost a step. He can’t get back fast enough.
The helplessness was terrible.

However, I still took pride in the fact that opponents—even the young bucks—were always very up when they played me. Maybe I was a notch in their belts; maybe they felt,
This guy’s a prick; I’ll show him.
I like to think it was because I was a great champion. Such enthusiasm, however, certainly made it more difficult toward the end of my career, when those young guys were as keen for my blood as sharks in the water!

That blood was evident at an indoor tournament in Birmingham, England, in November. I had been wild-carded into the event, and been paid a substantial guarantee to show up. I certainly failed to give Birmingham its money’s worth, however, playing a pitiful excuse for a tennis match in my first-round loss to the German Alexander Mronz (who would later achieve his greatest fame, briefly, as a boyfriend of Steffi Graf).

I thought I had hit a new low. When I returned to New York, however, as I walked off the plane, the customs agent said to me, “You hear the news?”

“No,” I replied.

“Magic Johnson announced he has AIDS.”

Suddenly, the loss to Mronz didn’t seem so significant anymore.

By the time I played an exhibition against Agassi at the Los Angeles Forum, a few weeks later, I realized that I needed some help. Hiring coaches might have gone against my instincts before, but when the dynamic former touring pro Larry Stefanki approached me after my lack- luster match, I was ready to listen. Clearly, whatever I was doing wasn’t working.

“You really shouldn’t bother playing at this point, Mac, unless you’re ready to make a real effort,” Larry said. I was listening. Larry had been a solid enough player, but it was his energy and enthusiasm that were electric: He was like a walking cup of espresso.

To begin what was to become my last stand on the circuit, I put together Team McEnroe: Larry as my coach; Rob Parr, the trainer who had worked so effectively with Madonna and Tatum; and a young Canadian masseur named Derek Nobles. I rented a house across the road in Malibu for my support group and hunkered down to prepare for the 1992 Australian Open.

It worked. Larry and I flew down to Melbourne in January, where, in the third round, I had one of my best wins ever against Boris Becker, 6–4, 6–3, 7–5, a month before my thirty-third birthday. I eventually made it through to the quarterfinals before being beaten by Wayne Ferreira—a disappointing end to a potentially great run. Still, the tournament felt like a good strong step back toward winning.

Another disappointing aspect of the trip was when I read in the newspaper that I had not been selected for the Olympic team. In 1988, the first year since 1924 that tennis was included in the Olympics as a medal sport, I had felt lukewarm about the position of professional tennis in the games. Instead of participating, I’d chosen to play my regular touring schedule. Now I felt my Olympic days were numbered, so I had been hopeful that Tom Gorman would pick me for the singles squad. I had discussed it with him, and requested a return call only if he planned to offer me the doubles slot. He hadn’t called.

I was away from home for two and a half weeks on that Australian trip, the longest I’d ever been away from my kids, and I missed them badly. I flew to Hawaii to meet my family and prepare for the first-round Davis Cup tie against Argentina, my debut as a doubles specialist. As soon as I saw Tatum, however, I noticed she was acting odd around me. I chalked it up to my long absence, but the feeling hung around over the following weeks and months.

The strangeness only deepened when five-and-a-half-year-old Kevin came down with what at first seemed to be severe food poisoning, but then turned out to be a rare childhood disease, Heinlein purpura, which caused him to miss six weeks of school. It was a scary time, and it should have drawn Tatum and me closer together; instead, we seemed to be pulling farther and farther apart. I felt perplexed and concerned.

My state of distraction didn’t help my tennis. As 1992 moved along, Team McEnroe began to feel less helpful than unwieldy—it was nice to be able to get a massage every day, but there were days when I felt I was doing it only because I was paying the masseur’s salary. My uneasiness about my home life also made training more difficult. Larry was a superb coach—he would go on to work with Marcelo Rios, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, and Tim Henman—but ultimately, I was in no emotional shape to lead a team. By June, it was just Larry and me.

On Saturday, the fourth of July, 1992, I played my last singles match on Centre Court at Wimbledon, having defied all the naysayers and advanced to the semifinals against twenty-two-year-old Andre Agassi, who had yet to win a Grand Slam tournament. It was fifteen years, almost to the day, since my 1977 semifinal against Connors: the amazing run that had launched me into the tennis heavens.

This, too, was the end of an amazing run. For fifteen years, I had been a presence—terrible or wonderful, but never boring—at Wimbledon, stirring conversation and controversy even when I didn’t show up. In my own inimitable way, and without even willing it, I had become part of Wimbledon’s tradition.