You Cannot Be Serious (37 page)

I showered, dressed, went to the airport, barely made my plane, and flew back to Los Angeles. I got to Malibu by ten. I called Patty.

“Can I come over and see you?” I said. “I really need to see you.”

“Well, it’s kind of late,” she said. “I’m in my pajamas already—why don’t you come over tomorrow.”

“I want to see you now,” I said.

“What’s the hurry?” Patty asked. “Why do you have to come over now?”

“Because I just have a feeling about you and me, and my friend died tonight, and I really need to see you,” I said.

“OK,” she said. I went over, and we’ve been together ever since.

I pulled out of the Mexico City exhibition, and stayed close by Patty’s side until I flew back east to Vitas’s funeral on Long Island. It was a long day that went by in a blur of tears. Jimmy Connors, Mary Carillo, and Vitas’s sister, Ruta, all gave touching tributes to Vitas, but at the moment when I might have gone up and said a few words myself, I found myself too undone to move. I’ve regretted it ever since.

T
HAT WAS THE WEEK
that brought Patty and me together for good, but consistent physical proximity (which, I’ve learned at long last, is absolutely essential to a relationship) took a little while to work out. After all, she lived in Topanga Canyon; I lived on Central Park West. Ruby was just starting the fourth grade at Topanga Elementary; Kevin and Sean were in the third and second grades respectively at Trinity, and three-year-old Emily had just started preschool at Rodeph Sholom, on the Upper West Side.

It may sound like
The Brady Bunch,
but it wasn’t funny. It was a bumpy start.

We did the bicoastal-relationship thing for a while: Occasionally, Patty would fly east to visit, and when I had my kids for a week or two at a time, over vacations, I’d take them out to Malibu. It was wonderful when we did manage to get together, but it could be very rough when we were apart, which was most of the time. Even when we did meet, there were adjustments and difficulties—any couple knows you don’t just shift into happy gear the second you see each other, and it’s all the more problematic when you’re both regretting the many obstacles of living three thousand miles apart.

And there was more. The custody battle between Tatum and me had been protracted and ugly, and much of it got aired in the always-helpful tabloid press, which only worsened things, especially for the two boys, who were old enough to begin to understand what was going on. Tatum had tried to get full custody of the children, claiming that my emotional abusiveness—my anger problems, as differentiated from her anger problems—and my protracted absences for tennis business made me an unfit father.

I countered with the simple statement that though I did still do some business traveling, I was no longer a touring tennis pro. I had stopped touring not just because my career was ending, but because I’d realized there was no way I could be a real father to my kids if I was on the road thirty weeks a year.

Soon after the separation, I asked my assistant at the time to go to the New York Public Library and check every study on children and divorce they had. The studies suggested overwhelmingly that the best-case scenario for the kids was that the father spend as much time as possible with them—and that in most cases the father didn’t. Joint custody, the studies said, was better for children by far, both in terms of the way they viewed the divorce, and the parents’ involvement with them. Over and over during the proceedings, I said to Tatum, “Show me a single case where it says the mother should have full custody of the kids when the father is financially independent and not working a nine-to-five job.” And there weren’t any.

I had the research done because I needed to back up, for her and for me, what I felt in my heart: I didn’t want to be a father who wasn’t with his kids.

Even after the court decided on joint custody, however, there were constant border wars between us about arrangements, and every time I said an unkind word to her, threats by Tatum to sue for custody because of my anger issues.

This is what Patty was walking into the middle of.

She was also walking into a relationship with someone whose life’s ambition was to become a rock-and-roll musician. Patty didn’t want to burst my bubble, at first. She wrote a song for me right around then, called “Wish I Were You,” contrasting, with some amusement, my enthusiasm for music and her distaste for the business.

Almost from the start it had seemed beautifully obvious to me that Patty Smyth was the lead vocalist I’d been looking for ever since I first picked up that black Les Paul guitar. But the harder I pushed, the more she resisted. When I first said, “Hey, can I play in your band?” she said, “Why don’t we play mixed doubles at Wimbledon?” I thought,
Oh my God, am I that bad?
Patty didn’t even play tennis!

She had hit a wall in her own music career: Despite the success of her self-titled second solo album in 1992 (a single from the album, “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough,” which she sang with Don Henley of the Eagles, became a number-one hit), Patty had found herself struggling for motivation and fed up with the record business. She had decided to take a break to think things over.

Just as our relationship began, Patty was asked to sing a movie theme song. In October 1994, she recorded, “Look What Love Has Done,” which she had co-written with Carole Bayer Sager, James Ingram, and James Newton Howard. The song was used as the theme for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,
Junior,
which came out a couple of months later, and not long afterward, to Patty’s amazement, “Look What Love Has Done” was nominated for an Academy Award.

We then proceeded to go through a fiasco which, somehow, seems all too emblematic of my music career. After I had pestered her many times about our playing together, she decided to throw me a bone. To my vast excitement, she told me that she would allow me to play acoustic guitar in the band backing her up when she sang “Look What Love Has Done” on the Academy Awards telecast—in front of a television audience of a billion people!

I learned every note of that song, rehearsing it over and over with my bass player John Martarelli, who was also an excellent guitarist. Patty and Ruby had come east for a school vacation; now they and I and my kids all flew west for the big broadcast.

We were scheduled to rehearse for the telecast on the day we arrived. Since our flight had come in a little early, we decided to drop the kids off at the beach before we went back to the studio in Hollywood. Early quickly turned into late, though; we were delayed getting to the rehearsal, and when we walked in, Gil Cates, the director, told us that the band had already rehearsed the song.

“You rehearsed the song without the singer?” I asked, incredulously.

Cates looked at me uneasily, but didn’t respond.

I asked the question again, with a little more agitation. Once more, Cates said nothing.

“Let’s just get out of here,” I said to Patty.

As we walked outside, I was congratulating myself on keeping my cool—but Patty felt that in fact I had made a scene, over something that wasn’t a big deal. That evening, we got a call from one of Cates’s assistants, who told us that if I planned to play with Patty, she would be replaced on the telecast by James Ingram. I was, the assistant said, “a distraction.”

Patty decided I wasn’t going to distract anybody. She was going to sing that night, and I was going to watch. The night of the telecast, as I sat proudly in the fifth row, I felt more nervous than I would have been if I’d been up there playing. Patty sang beautifully, but Elton John won for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” his song for
The Lion King.

A month later—look what love had done—we were expecting.

We were both marriage-shy, for a number of reasons. Happy marriage simply wasn’t something in Patty’s history. Her mother had left her father when Patty was a little girl; she had never lived in a conventional nuclear family. To top it off, her father had died when she was eight. Patty and Ruby’s father had split up when Ruby was still a baby, and, like her own mother, Patty had learned to live as a single parent. That was what she knew; that was what she was used to.

I’ve already listed my reasons. Once you’ve gone through the pain and the difficulties and the maneuvering and the lawyering and the high emotions of a long, bitter divorce, you literally feel as if you’ve been through hell. You can’t help being jealous when you hear the stories of amicable divorces, when you run into men who say, “My ex-wife and I get along well.” Something down deep in you says, “Never again.” And the best way to ensure that is never to marry again.

Having children outside of wedlock is complicated. But Patty and I were committed to each other. What wasn’t complicated was my absolute determination to stay faithful. It seemed to me that there was no other way. If that made me an anomaly in the world of macho married tennis players, so be it.

In September, Patty and Ruby moved to New York to live with me. We were a family of four—and on a regular basis, a family of seven. The big apartment wasn’t empty anymore.

The end of 1995 brought a minor distinction and a major miracle. The minor distinction was that, after having toured Hawaii, Japan, South America, and the U.S., my band had become the most-traveled unsigned band in the history of music!

The miracle was the birth of Anna Smyth McEnroe, on December 27th. Nine weeks before the due date, Patty experienced a pain in her stomach. It felt to her like a muscle pull, but for the next day or two, she didn’t feel the baby moving. We went to the doctor to ease our fears, but instead, Patty was ordered to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital. For the next two weeks, she hung on like a champ as the fetus continued to develop. Finally, the doctors felt they could wait no longer.

After Anna was born, seven weeks early and in the midst of one of New York’s snowiest winters ever, she spent the first month of her life at Lenox Hill. Finally, after a huge thank-you to all the doctors and staff, and a not-so-kind word to the paparazzi outside, Patty and I brought Anna home.

I
N
O
CTOBER OF
1996, I stood in the living room of an unpretentious middle-class house in a quiet suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, and shook Nelson Mandela’s hand.

I remember handshakes, especially when they’re important ones. Both Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes disappointed me with mushy, almost fishy grips. Maybe boxers think they need to protect their hands! Both Pete Rose and Joe Theismann almost broke my hand. But Nelson Mandela was different: He had a big hand, and it felt soft, yet strong. It’s hard to explain, but an almost magical warmth seemed to emanate from it.

It was the first time (at long last) that I’d gone to South Africa: I was there for a Champions Tour Seniors tennis event, and Patty was there with me. Bjorn Borg was also in the event, and so was Yannick Noah, who—somehow appropriately, I thought—won the final. Patty, Bjorn and his girlfriend, Yannick and his then-wife, and a few other people were standing in Mandela’s living room. But he was shaking my hand, and saying that it was an honor to meet me.

I had to restrain the urge to look to either side when he said that, to say, “Who are you talking to?”—I knew (even if I couldn’t quite believe) that he was talking to me. We sat down on his couch and chatted for a few minutes. He said that while he was in prison on Robben Island, he had heard about my 1980 refusal to play in Sun City. And then he said the most amazing thing: that he and the other inmates on Robben Island had listened to my 1980 Wimbledon final against Borg. That gave me chills. But I knew that the main reason I was sitting on Mr. Mandela’s couch was my visceral decision fifteen years earlier to follow my conscience instead of the money. Sometimes what goes around really does come around.

W
E FELT SOME STRAINS
at the end of 1996: My ex-wife was continuing to have drug problems, and Kevin, Sean, and Emily, who were spending a lot of time with us then, were feeling quite anxious about her. There were days when I was off traveling for the Seniors tour—I was starting to play a bit more often now—and Patty was the one in charge of five kids, ages twelve down to two. She would find herself going to school conferences for the boys in the slightly staid halls of Trinity, and feeling a little strange about it.

“I feel too weird,” she would tell me. “Here I am, the rock-chick girlfriend, at Trinity. I can’t do this and be just your girlfriend.”

Meanwhile, my kids kept asking Patty if we were going to get married.

I’d been grappling with my fears about marriage for a while; my usual solution was to change the channel and think about something else. But now the channel-changer was stuck: There was no getting around the issue.

Forward, always forward—
just like that, I made up my mind. I loved her. Who else was I going to spend the rest of my life with? My proposal wasn’t one for the ages. Yes, I did get on my knees, but it was in front of our Traulson refrigerator in the kitchen. I took off the friendship ring I had given her early in our relationship, held it in my hands, and asked her to marry me.

Patty said yes.

I followed that with, “I don’t have to get you another ring, do I?” Always the diplomat.

However, all’s well that ends well: I did give her a proper engagement ring during our Christmas in Sun Valley.

We decided to have a very small wedding, just immediate family and about as many friends as could come on short notice. And we wanted to get married in Maui, so we could stay right there and honeymoon afterward.

A week or so later, Bjorn called and asked me to play an exhibition with him in Houston. I told him I would do it if he and his eleven-year-old son, Robin, would come to my wedding. I thought it would be a good way for our kids to get to know one another, and for Bjorn and me to spend some time together. He said we had a deal.

My innate discretion and good breeding prevent me from disclosing more than a few details about my bachelor party. Let’s just say I remember two things: The strippers were ugly, and the shots were flowing freely. If the express purpose of the party was to get me as sick as a dog for the next day’s ceremony, then the occasion was a roaring success. I think the cigars are what finally did me in.