You Cannot Be Serious (6 page)

When I was getting ready to go away for Junior Davis Cup, Jean and I got together one afternoon to say goodbye for a couple of months. We played tennis at the Douglaston Club, then afterward sat by the court holding hands. Jean said, “You’re not going to go out with any other girls while you’re gone, are you?” And I said, “Look, I’ll make a deal with you—I promise I’ll only go out with one girl a week.”

Now, where in God’s name did I get off, saying that to her? And what was she supposed to say to me? Even after all these years, that afternoon is so embarrassing to remember. What on earth was I thinking?

I was feeling my oats, I guess. At the same time, though, I was ridiculously insecure. That summer, when I was on the Junior Davis Cup team, I used to carry six rackets with me onto airplanes, hoping someone would say, “Hey, you’re a tennis player?” so I could say—very quietly and modestly, of course—“Yeah, I’m number two in the nation in the sixteens.” Something like that. I just wanted some sort of recognition for who I was becoming, what I’d accomplished. But it never happened.

More signs of immaturity: Earlier that year, Port Washington sent a group of players up to a tournament at the Concord Hotel, in the Catskills. During those long, slow evenings after matches, my pal Peter Rennert and I did what kids often do, horsed around a little. One of our tricks was to light a towel on fire and knock on one of the other players’ doors, throw the towel in the room and yell, “Fire!” Naturally I’d have a bucket of water ready, and just nail the guy. I know, I know. And it didn’t help any when one of the victims told on me.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, wasn’t even my fault. One day, Port Washington went to Princeton to play their team. My matches were over, a few were still being played, and the rest of us were standing around by the bus, just looking for something to do. So Peter Rennert and I decided to go down to the Jadwin Gym and play a little basketball. Before we left, I told another Port Washington boy still playing his match, where we were going—I won’t tell you his name. “Just come and get us when the team is finished,” I said.

Peter and I got into a pickup game and played for a half-hour or so, and eventually the other player came down. He’d been sent by Hy Zausner, the head of the academy, to bring us back to the bus—but the guy didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.

Just as he came in, someone else quit the game, and I said to the guy who’d come to get us, “Hey, we need another player.” Now, did he say to me, “Listen, there are people waiting”? No, he just got into the game! So, another ten minutes went by, and in walked Zausner, furious. “How dare you keep everyone waiting?” he screamed at me. Not at anyone else; at me. “I’m sick and tired of your attitude!”

Not long afterward, my parents got a letter saying I was suspended for six months from the Port Washington Tennis Academy for bad behavior. “We’ve got to set an example,” the letter said.

After I explained the situation, my parents were furious at Hy Zausner. “How dare he not tell us face-to-face?” they said. “This is totally outrageous.”

Peter Rennert got the same six-month suspension, but his parents were mad at him, not at Zausner, so they went in and apologized, and Zausner dropped Peter’s suspension. Meanwhile, my parents refused to go in at all.

It wasn’t until much later that Peter told me about that, and meanwhile I’d gotten a whole theory in my mind that it was me against him, because he hadn’t been suspended and I had. At the Easter Bowl that spring, Peter and I ended up playing each other in the semifinals, which made it a little more interesting: I thought,
I’m not going to lose to
him. And I swear to God, on the first point of the match—Hy Zausner was sitting right behind Peter—I hit a serve wide, and it went
boom
right into Zausner’s forehead!

Anyway, because of the suspension, my parents never looked back to Port Washington. Meanwhile, Harry Hopman had left to go start his own tennis academy in Florida, and Tony Palafox had gone on to become head pro at a club in Glen Cove. So Mom and Dad called Tony up and said, “Listen, John would like to come work with you full-time.”

Tony took me on full scholarship. I would get the chance to show my gratitude.

3

I
N THE ELEVENTH GRADE
, I stopped playing basketball. On the face of it, this may not sound like a big deal, but in fact I was extremely disappointed. Basketball had been a part of my life for at least as long as tennis, and it was a chance for me to be part of a team and hang out with friends. I’d always loved the game, and I was pretty good at it. (I remember scoring one-third of my team’s points in an early C.Y.O. game. Never mind that the final score was 3–2!)

Nor was I any less intense about basketball than about tennis. At Buckley Country Day, my headmaster, Ted Oviatt, who doubled as the basketball coach, once benched me for talking back during one of our most important games.
Me!
I’ll admit I probably never saw a shot I didn’t like, but I loved to compete. By tenth grade, I was on Trinity’s JV team, but to my dismay I found myself the nonplaying sixth man (shades of my dad at Catholic University). I quit in disgust, but was lured back—it didn’t take much—and, to my surprise, started the final four games.

Deep down, though, I knew my b-ball days were numbered. I didn’t want to be a varsity benchwarmer, and the coach, Dudley Maxim, didn’t seem to know my name. So I quit for real. The good news was that for the first time, I was able to play tennis more than two days a week during the winter. My game started showing it right away. Getting taller didn’t hurt, either—by the time I turned seventeen, in February of 1976, I had almost reached my full height of five-eleven and three-quarters (which I round off to six feet).

Seventeen was also the blessed age when I got my driver’s license, and just a couple of months later came that other huge rite of passage, getting my first car. It was—are you ready?—a secondhand 1972 Ford Pinto, the infamous burst-into-flames-on-contact model, in a color that had once been white. I loved it anyway. My parents bought it for me, for the grand sum of $100, from one of my dad’s law partners, Don Moore; Dad and Mr. Moore used to drive it to work. But something definitely had to be done about that crummy exterior, and so Dad very generously took the Pinto to Earl Scheib in Long Island City and had it painted a very snappy shade of red, or at least that’s what it was supposed to be. Actually, it came out orange.

An orange ’72 Pinto! Add the Pioneer car-stereo system I’d won in a tournament (amateurs could take home prizes, but not cash) and I was all set.

I was also now out of the 16-and-unders and into the 18’s—a big step up in terms of competition. I was mostly up to the task. I made the Junior Davis Cup team again, and was inspired once more by the coaching of Bill McGowan. Bill was twenty-four, a former player for Trinity University’s national-championship team, and a great, no-nonsense guy. The previous summer, at the National Hardcourts, in Burlingame, California, I’d come down to breakfast one morning and ordered pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon—and a hot-fudge sundae. Bill took one look at my chunky sixteen-year-old body and told me that henceforth I would be limited to one hot-fudge sundae a day, not three!

I had dropped more than ten pounds in the year since then, and had grown more mature physically and mentally. But Bill was still keeping a close eye on me. In my second summer of JDC, I was in a clay-court event in St. Louis, and the gray-haired, bespectacled umpire in my final match was a little slower with his decisions than I would have liked. I started to make my feelings known—loudly—and Bill called me over to the fence. “John,” he said. “If you don’t shut up right now, I won’t hesitate to yank you out of this match and send you straight home.” I shut up.

The other big thing that summer was that at a tournament at Kutscher’s, the old Catskills resort, I met Stacy Margolin, a young Californian starting to make her mark on the junior circuit. Stacy was small, cute, athletic, and blond, and we were immediately attracted to each other. Over the next couple of years, we would get together at events around the country; in between, we talked on the phone and exchanged letters.

T
HAT BICENTENNIAL SUMMER
, I was able to win the National Clay Courts, in Louisville, once again. At that point in my career, I was still very much a clay-court player. I’d always been able to get everything back from the baseline. Yet even though I had grown quite a bit, my serve was still suspect, and although I could volley, I wasn’t quick or strong enough yet to take advantage of my net play. My doubles results were consistently better back then, and that’s why: With only half the court to cover, I got to the ball more often.

Where I differed from most other baseliners was in the shortness of my backswing: Since I hit the ball on the rise, constantly moving forward, I could—theoretically—get to the net more easily and end the point with a volley or an overhead, instead of standing out there all day trading moonballs. Now if I could just get faster, fitter, and stronger!

A parenthetical note: People have always talked about what a good volleyer I was, and I’ll accept the compliment. However, I think the most undernoticed of my skills was my speed at backing up and covering the overhead, which allowed me to close in on the net and get the best possible angle for the volley without worrying about the other guy putting a lob over me. I’ve always worked extensively on my smash. I see a lot of people in practice sessions—even a lot of professionals—go up and hit all of two or three overheads, thank you very much. It’s not enough.

I believe firmly that players at every level should practice
every
shot, from any position on the court, using a variety of paces and spins. Lobs, drop-shots, and half-volleys—all shots that are too seldom paid attention to by recreational players—can change the outcome of a match.

And all that is just working up to practicing what has become the most important shot in tennis, the serve. A good server should be able to keep a receiver off-balance the same way a good baseball pitcher (Pedro Martinez is an excellent example) can befuddle hitters by mixing speed, placement, and spin.

When I came into the game, most of the tournaments were on clay, even on the professional level: Most people don’t remember that even the U.S. Open was played on clay from 1975 through 1977. As a result, the top players then—Connors, Borg, Vilas, Gerulaitis, Harold Solomon—were mainly baseliners, which meant a lot of matches were excruciatingly long conditioning contests. I thought there was a need to take the game to a new place—but I didn’t yet have the serve to do it.

Again, my Achilles’ heel was fitness. That summer, I lost the finals of the National Juniors in Kalamazoo to Larry Gottfried, in five sets (I never did win that damn tournament). My conditioning—or lack of it—was a definite factor. I lost almost every best-of-five-set match I ever played in the juniors. As a kid, I’d been able to duck Harry Hopman’s calisthenics sessions because I’d felt I was in naturally good shape from playing soccer and basketball and riding my bike. I was still playing soccer, and plenty of tennis, but I was at a different level now. I couldn’t just play myself into shape. As I closed in on college age, the stakes were higher—and the opponents tougher.

Larry Gottfried was the younger brother of Brian Gottfried, who got to number five in the world in 1977. Larry was the number-one junior in ’75 and ’76; he was also my doubles partner, the guy who was always ranked just ahead of me, the super-hard worker. Larry would actually play a match and go practice afterward! I was amazed and appalled. But he never seemed happy with his success; he was one of those people who seemed to peak too early, and he enjoyed the road far too little.

Later that summer, thanks to my old friend and supporter, Gene Scott, an ex-player (and member of the 1963 Davis Cup team) who was the director of a small event in South Orange, New Jersey, I got a wild-card entry into my first ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) tournament. In the first round, I beat a lefty named Barry Phillips-Moore, whose claim to fame was having invented the spaghetti racket. (Do you remember that crazy string job? It was eventually outlawed.) I won 6–0, 6–2, my first victory ever on the ATP tour. Then I played a guy from New Zealand named Onny Parun, a real character: he wore a string around his neck and would bite it in his mouth while he served, mumbling to himself the whole time. I thought,
I can’t lose to this guy. He’s horrible!
Well, apparently he wasn’t
that
horrible: I did lose to him, 7–6, 6–1. He also happened to be number 18 in the world at the time. Still, the results were encouraging enough to make me think that maybe, just maybe, I had the stuff to play with the pros.

And I got five ATP points for winning one round! At the end of the year, I was the 264th-ranked player in the world.

Because I’d made it to that final in Kalamazoo, I was also given a wild card for the qualifiers of the U.S. Open. (I also played in the U.S. Open juniors, where Ricardo Ycaza of Ecuador beat me in the semis.) I won the first two rounds of the “qualies”—as I had done the year before, when I’d beaten Tony Parun, Onny’s brother, before being demolished by one Vladimir Zednik.

This time, I felt more prepared to make a breakthrough. Then, in the third round, I played Zan Guerry.

Guerry was ranked something like 150 in the world, so it was a big round in more ways than one. It turned out to be a really long, contentious match, clay-court tennis at its worst, or best, whichever way you want to look at it.

We’d played for three and a half hours—I had lost the first set, 5–7, and won the second one, 7–5—and I was serving at match point, 5–4 in the third set. We got into an extended rally, and finally, when Guerry approached the net, I hit a backhand that shot by him, a winner, right on the line. The umpire (in the qualies there was one umpire on the court, who called both the score and the lines) said, “Game, set, match, McEnroe.” And I thought,
U.S. Open! I’m in!
I broke into a big grin.