You Cannot Be Serious (5 page)

And so my parents pushed me. It wasn’t in a bad way—you know the horror stories about tennis parents—but they were the driving force. Somehow, deep in my soul, however, I know there was a positive side to it. I seriously doubt I would’ve been the player I became if I hadn’t been forced into it in some way.

My dad was the one, mainly. He seemed to live for my growing little junior career—he was so excited about having a son with some actual athletic talent. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he’d been the twelfth man on the varsity basketball team at Catholic University. (Sorry, Dad!)

He worked very hard five days a week, but his real pleasure in life, it seemed, was coming to watch my weekend practice sessions at Port Washington. He’d just stand there with a huge smile on his face—he never seemed to get bored with watching me play tennis. Sometimes (I confess) I’d think, “Come on, take a break, take your wife out to lunch!” But he didn’t seem to want to do anything else.

I don’t think I ever wanted to quit entirely, but I remember telling my dad that I wasn’t enjoying it. I’d say, “Do you have to come to every match? Do you have to come to this practice? Can’t you take one off?”

His response would either be to laugh—“Ha-ha! You’re kidding!”—or act hurt. There was never an in-between. He never said, “OK, I’ll go do something else.” It was just, “It’ll be all right.”

The better I got, the harder it was to think about giving up the game. I know that Harry Hopman—who knew what he was talking about—began to tell people, “This guy could be really good” (interestingly, he even said this to my mom and dad, though he was usually very careful about what he said to parents). I remember when I was thirteen and I lost in the round of 16 at the National Indoors in Chicago, a tennis columnist named George Lott—he’d once been a great doubles player, and had won a couple of Wimbledons back in the ’20s and ’30s—wrote that I was going to be the next Laver. I was amazed, and a little more hopeful. The next Laver!

My parents were pretty impressed by that! Still, their heads weren’t turned—which impresses
me.
They had strong ideas about my future, and in their minds, my future was going to be four years of college and a solid profession. (At one point in my teens, my mother said to me, in all seriousness, “John, why don’t you become a dentist? You’re so good with your hands.”)

Mom and Dad always said, “Get a college scholarship.” And then, once they met Hopman, who told them war stories about Davis Cup and playing for your country, it was, “Get a college scholarship and play Davis Cup.”

In any case, I didn’t play a great deal during the school year—which saved me, I think, from getting burned out. After that one National Indoors, I didn’t go again. I would usually play the Orange Bowl in Miami over Christmas break. (My baby brother Patrick started his tournament career—at six!—in the 12-and-unders at the Orange Bowl. Mark was more interested in swimming.) The Easter Bowl was played in the New York area. It wasn’t tennis-tennis-tennis. At least I did get breaks from it.

Meanwhile, though, I was still moving up in the rankings. My dad was so excited. He said, “You can do it, you can be the best. You can do it, you can
do
it!”

But I remember saying one smart thing at the time—the most brilliant comment I ever made. I said, “Dad, listen, don’t talk to me about rankings. I don’t want to be number one until I’m eighteen. Don’t ask me to be the best in the fourteens. Just wait ’til the eighteens, because that’s when I’ll get a college scholarship. I’ll work my way up and peak at the right time.”

Which is exactly what I did.

I
N THE MEANTIME
, I got a look at my future when I ballboyed at the U.S. Open, at Forest Hills, for a couple of years, starting when I was twelve. The pay was $1.85 an hour—just minimum wage—but after the paper route, it felt like a major step up. Besides, I loved the work.

Not that it was a breeze, by any means. In fact, the first match I ever ballboyed in my life, I almost fainted on the court. Raul Ramirez was playing a Venezuelan named Jorge Andrew, the sun was blazing, and I started getting dizzy. They used to have orange juice and water on the courts at Forest Hills, so on a changeover, I dragged my way up to get some orange juice. Even then, I just barely made it through this match—which didn’t even last that long; Ramirez won in straight sets. I thought, “God, best-of-five is intense.”

I remember ballboying for Arthur Ashe against Nicky Pilic, and Pilic was just brutal. He was all over you: “Come on, give me the ball! Bounce the ball right! Here, two balls! Give me the other ball!” You had no idea what to do—you’d just throw anything, and then he’d get pissed off at that. I really felt like punching the guy. I thought, “If I become a tennis player, I’m never going to do that”—and in fact I was always pretty good about not getting on the ballboys. I think that’s pushing the envelope. Or is that just the dad in me talking?

However, the match I really remember from those early days is one in which I was just a spectator: Ilie Nastase against a German named Hans Pohmann. I loved the way Nastase played—he was a genius with a tennis racket, plus he brought an incredible energy to a match: both positive and negative energy. To tell the truth, he was basically out of control that day, but I loved it. Probably only four people in the stands were for him—but I was one of them. Nastase just had this quality of making people love to boo him. It’s even been said once or twice about me.

As far as I was concerned, Pohmann was just some cocky German guy who was faking cramps. He’d run during the point, and then cramp between points—unbearable! He was really milking it. And the crowd was just eating it up. Nastase was unbelievable, though: He even spat at Pohmann once. Then he tried to shake the umpire’s hand after the match, and the umpire wouldn’t shake! I loved it!

It was great to see all the guys who were like legends to me. Nastase was poetry in motion. Ashe’s backhand was beautiful when he let it go, but to be honest, I thought the rest of his game looked a bit mechanical. He had a sort of herky-jerky serve and a weird chip forehand. I preferred Stan Smith’s classic style.

I liked Guillermo Vilas, the Bull of the Pampas, early on. His look was great—the big, hairy chest, the muscular thighs, the flowing hair. There was something beautiful about him: It seemed so cool that he could be both soulful (he wrote poetry; he played guitar) and strong. He was incredibly fit, worked incredibly hard. Even though I didn’t play like him, I thought his ground strokes were phenomenal.

I was thrilled to see Laver in person, even if he was in the final act of his career, and the great Ken Rosewall, another of Hopman’s boys. It killed me the way he’d act tired in the warmup, mope around the court and look like the world was coming to an end—and four or five hours later he’d still be going strong (and his hair would still be perfectly combed)! People don’t remember how much Rosewall, Mr. Understated, used to throw his racket. I’m not talking about once or twice—he used to throw it thirty to forty times in a match! It wasn’t with the ferocity that I did it, though—he’d bounce it and toss it and kick it, but in a very, very low-key way.

The first year I was at Forest Hills, I freaked out when I saw Pancho Gonzalez smoking after his match. I thought,
This can’t be! Athletes don’t do that!
And then, when I asked him for his autograph, he gave me a look which, if looks could kill, would have dropped me on the spot. He finally gave me the autograph, but he wasn’t particularly nice about it. And he definitely had a cigarette in his hand. All I could think was,
Forget the autograph. How can Pancho Gonzalez smoke?

I
PLAYED FOOTBALL
until the seventh grade. I was Buckley’s quarterback, and played defense, too, until the day I got the wind knocked out of me. I vividly remember the coach yelling, “Get up! Get up!” I couldn’t respond, because I couldn’t breathe. I thought, for about ten seconds, that I was going to die. Later that day, I staggered home, and my parents said, “Hey, what about soccer?” And I said, “That sounds like a better idea.”

The soccer team, however, basically consisted of all the people who couldn’t make the football team. The soccer and tennis guys were considered sissies, which I found annoying. Here I was, working my guts out, and other kids thought I was some kind of wimp. In the years since, people have stopped seeing tennis (and soccer, for that matter) as a sissy game—though what hasn’t changed is the sense that it’s still too inaccessible and expensive. Something needs to be done about that.

In the ninth grade, I left Buckley and started making my commute to Trinity, and practically as soon as I arrived, I became known as “the tennis guy.” It was an extremely minor distinction: people didn’t exactly come out of the woodwork to watch my high-school matches. The fact that I lived in Queens, while virtually everyone else in the school was from Manhattan, also made me kind of an outsider.

Remember my saying I was a top student at Buckley? Trinity was where I discovered mediocrity, at least academically. Tennis and soccer became increasingly distracting—and so did girls.

Up to that point, my love life, if you want to call it that, had been a bit of a comedy of errors. I take the blame. I was shy and a little arrogant at the same time. I had plenty of athletic confidence, but I certainly didn’t think of myself as God’s gift to girls. As a result, I made a lot of fairly clumsy moves.

The first girl I ever kissed was Jeannie Gengler, behind the tennis bubble at Port Washington, in the seventh grade. It felt like a very big deal—to me, at least. After all, Jeannie was in the eighth grade! She was also from a big tennis family—her sister Margie was a player, too, who later married Stan Smith. And Jeannie really liked me. I don’t know why, but she did.

So what did I do next? Not more than a couple of days after that kiss, I asked another girl in my class, Susan Weinstein, to go steady! I never said a word about it to Jeannie. Susan said she’d think it over.

This happened on a Friday, and I thought I was all set. Then Monday came along, I walked into class, and Susan gave me the big freeze-out: She was already going steady with someone else, she said. What had happened, of course, was that Susan and Jeannie had talked to each other. By Monday, it seemed as if everyone in the class knew what a jerk I’d been. I felt terrible about what I’d done to Jeannie and mortified about what Susan had done to me. It was awful.

By the time I got to Trinity, nothing had happened to bolster my sexual self-confidence (and it didn’t help matters that I was one of the smallest kids, boy or girl, in the ninth grade.) I did like a few girls in my class—one, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, now runs the political magazine
The Nation.
I would stare at her, and try to talk to her, but when I opened my mouth to ask her on a date, nothing came out. The humiliation from seventh grade still felt fresh.

Miraculously enough, though, I found my first real girlfriend in tenth grade. Jean Malhame was a Douglaston girl, the younger sister of my buddy Jim Malhame. She was dark-haired and pretty, and she played a very decent game of tennis. God knows why
she
liked me, but God bless her.

I
N
M
AY OF MY TENTH-GRADE YEAR
—this was now 1975—I took my first solo trip, to a resort called Walden on Lake Conroe, outside of Houston, to try to qualify for the Junior Davis Cup team. It would be a tremendous honor to make the team—not to mention the fact that if I did, all my expenses would be covered for the ten weeks I’d play over the summer. My parents had been shelling out a lot of money to take me to tournaments: I wanted to help out, and to feel a bit more independent, too.

There were twelve spots on the team, and most of the guys going out for them were a year or two older than I was, bigger and stronger and more accomplished. Nobody in the 16-and-unders had ever qualified for JDC before.

I was in Texas for a week and a half, and it was unbelievably hot and humid. I’d never felt heat like that before. Primarily because of my light skin, heat has always been my worst enemy on a tennis court. My nerve endings frazzle, my concentration wanders; it’s very difficult for me to gather my skills and play my best.

We played nine matches in ten days, and I was four and four going into the final. Everything rested on that last match: If I won, I was on the team; if I lost, I wasn’t. I was playing a guy named Walter Redondo, a seventeen-year-old who, as a five-foot-ten fourteen-year-old, had beaten me badly a couple of years before in the national 14-and-unders. Walter was a sort of Hawaiian-looking Hispanic kid from California, still a crucial few inches taller than I was (like everybody else), and built like an Adonis. He had a beautiful game: His serve, volley, and groundstrokes were all picture-perfect. A lot of people thought he’d be the next big star in tennis.

But—probably with Harry Hopman’s voice whispering in my ear—I wanted badly to play Junior Davis Cup. When I phoned my parents the night before the match, I told them that no matter how hot it was, I was going to stay out there as long as I had to and win.

And that was just what happened. I beat Walter in a dogfight of a two-setter, 6–3, 7–5. I think, ultimately, that I just wanted it more than he did. As it turned out, he had peaked—both in height and in skill—at fourteen. He wound up playing a year or two in the pros, but he couldn’t find his way. It’s amazing how many people that happens to: They have the strokes and the fitness, but whatever is driving them isn’t driving them hard enough.

That match was a real turning point for me, a huge confidence-booster. The long and short of it was, that day I was just mentally tougher than Walter Redondo. I also learned about myself that even if I didn’t particularly enjoy playing tennis matches—I hated losing them much more.

F
ROM THIS DISTANCE
, I can see that at sixteen I was a combustible mix of maturity and immaturity, boldness and shyness. Toughness wrapped around a gooey center. I was an ordinary adolescent, and also—it was beginning to seem—some kind of extraordinary one. However, it’s never any picnic to be extraordinary (especially as a teenager), and the contradictions confused me. As graceful as I could feel on a tennis court, I was often staggeringly awkward in the rest of my life.