You Cannot Be Serious (7 page)

But Guerry didn’t come up to shake my hand right away. Instead, he went over to the line where my shot had landed. He just stood there looking at the mark, while I waited impatiently to shake hands: I wanted to seal the match, fair and square, and I felt the handshake was a necessity, win or lose. A couple of guys on my Junior Davis Cup team, who’d been there to cheer me on, were calling, “Just walk off the court!” And I was thinking,
No, I’m not walking off the court. Not until I shake this guy’s hand.
Meanwhile, Guerry was looking for a mark that showed the ball was out.

A minute went by, which is a long time when you’re waiting for that final handshake. Finally, Guerry said, “No, no, no, that ball was out!
This
is the mark.” The umpire got off his chair, squatted down, looked at the mark, and said, for the second time, “The ball was in. Game, set, and match, McEnroe.”

I was thrilled. But now more people on my team were telling me, “Get off the court. Forget the handshake. Something’s bad.” Because Guerry was sort of stalling, still refusing to come up to the net. The commotion grew.

By now, a few minutes had gone by, they’d called the match for me twice, and—I’ll never forget this—out of nowhere, a woman named Anita Shukow, who happened to be the head referee, came strolling out from behind a fence about 500 feet away. She’d been out of sight of the court, but someone must have heard the uproar and alerted her. She walked over, looked at the mark, and said, “If this is the mark, the ball was out. Deuce.”

I was about to lose it—I couldn’t believe this was happening. I kept saying (mostly to myself), “I’m not playing. Forget it. That’s it. That guy called the match for me twice. This is over, period.” But then, another part of me thought,
What if they default me? It’s still deuce; I still could win this.
I was just two points away….

So—of course—I folded completely and lost, 5–7. Now it was time for the floods. I totally fell apart in the locker room, crying and crying—I was so humiliated that this had happened, that this had been taken away from me!

But—are you ready for this?—there’s a kicker. In the first round of the Open, Guerry came up against an experienced old Aussie pro named Ross Case—his nickname was “Snake”—and the exact same thing happened! Guerry was down 6–5, there was a close call on match point, and he looked for a mark that was out. The difference was: Case walked off the court within ten seconds. It was a lesson I learned the hard way about the differences between the juniors and the pros: When the final score is announced, get off the court.

I would soon learn a few more lessons.

It’s funny: I seem to have a memory (and to this day I don’t know if it’s a real memory or not) that I later played Guerry in another tournament. I always said to myself,
If I ever play this guy again—
especially when I got better and could do a whole lot more on the court
—if I ever play this guy again, he’s going to suffer like he’s never suffered before. I’m going to drop-shot him and lob him, just keep him out there and make him look like a bum.

Which is exactly what I did. Unless I did dream it. But I refuse to check the record books, in case it really was a dream.

A
S
I
ENTERED
my senior year of high school, I was the number-two junior in the country, but now that Larry Gottfried had moved up out of the category—he would never do as well again—I was the expected number one. My headmaster at Trinity, Robin Lester, was willing to give me a little leeway with my classes and homework so I could travel to a few tournaments. It seemed as if this could be my year.

Accordingly, that fall, I decided to finally try and notch up my conditioning. In addition to my soccer games, I started jogging for the first time in my life, one or two mile-and-a-half laps around the Central Park Reservoir every day after school. It felt like a major distance to this novice runner. It was also unusually cold in New York that autumn—or so it seemed to me. A little cold-weather jogging around the Reservoir, however, wasn’t exactly the best preparation for the incredible heat of the Argentine Open, in Buenos Aires, in the Southern Hemisphere spring of November 1976.

I was playing the junior event, but many of the players were tough, up-and-coming, South American clay-court specialists. I’ll never forget my semifinal match against one of the best of them, José-Luis Clerc, a tall, slim Argentinian who would later become a top-five player and one of my most formidable Davis Cup opponents. I won the match in what sounds like a routine fashion—6–3, 6–4—but thank God it was only two sets, because the sun was so broiling hot that one more would’ve done me in. I spent twenty minutes in the shower after the match, just letting the cold water pour onto my head.

I was in no shape to give my U.S. Open juniors nemesis, Ricardo Ycaza, much of a match in the final. Still, I did have the pleasure of seeing Guillermo Vilas, the fittest guy of them all, win the main tournament. Just looking at him made me realize I would have to work a whole lot harder.

I
N
D
ECEMBER
, I had a pair of big victories in Miami, winning the Sunshine Cup against Yannick Noah and Gilles Moretton of France in my last doubles match with Larry Gottfried, and winning the Orange Bowl, beating Eliot Teltscher in the singles final. Even though there were no international junior rankings then, the best foreign players all came to the Orange Bowl, so I was now effectively the top junior in the world. The months to come would confirm my status.

In January, I headed back to South America, traveling to Caracas for the Venezuelan Open Juniors, where my most vivid memory is not of the players I beat in a comparatively weak field, but of the soldiers sticking machine guns in the car window before we drove up the hill to the matches. In the world outside the safe old U.S.A., a lot was going on that I’d never dreamed of.

And then in February, I went to Ocean City, Maryland, for an indoor tournament on the Bill Riordan/Gene Scott tour. Riordan managed Jimmy Connors at the time, and he put together a series of non-ATP events that Gene directed. It was there, on my eighteenth birthday, that I coughed and hacked my way to a 5–7, 4–6 loss to Ilie Nastase.

I had bronchitis, a frequent problem with me until my airways matured. Physically and emotionally, I was still a kid. Being able to play one of tennis’s greats, however, to such a close loss gave me the feeling again that maybe I really could play with the pros. My nineteenth year would more than bear that feeling out.

All this traveling was starting to make me feel very sophisticated, but my first trip to Brazil, for the Banana Bowl in March, convinced me I still had a lot to learn. I flew alone down to São Paulo, and when nobody showed up to meet me at the airport, I literally couldn’t find anyone who spoke English. I’d been given a couple of phone numbers to call, but no one on the other end could understand me, either. If they’d spoken Spanish instead of Portuguese, I might’ve been able to say or make out a few words, but this might as well have been Chinese.

So I sat by the luggage carousel. And sat. Finally, after about an hour and a half, a fellow saw my rackets and said, “Tennis?”

“Yeah!” I said. He motioned me to follow him. As we walked off, I thought,
This guy could be anybody, anybody at all.
But what were my other options at the moment?

He drove me to the home of a Brazilian junior player named Cassio Motta, which seemed to be a kind of checkpoint for tournament participants. At least now I knew I wasn’t being abducted. But the tournament itself was a two-hour drive from there, down to Santos, where Pelé had played soccer.

We were driving, it was absolutely pouring rain, and I swear to God, it felt like our driver was going a hundred miles an hour. It was scary how fast it was, and you couldn’t see more than five feet in front of you in the rain. I was sitting in the back, with no seatbelt. Then suddenly, right ahead of us in the fast lane, an orange “Caution” cone appeared, and then another, and another, and then a broken-down car was right in front of us. All this happened in a second or two.

The guy veered right, and we started to skid, and just as we veered, a bus loomed up next to us, going just as fast as we were. We swerved, and skidded, and banged into the bus, but our driver didn’t even slow down—he just took off and passed it! When we got to the end of the highway, the bus caught up and cut us off, and the bus driver began opening his door to try to block us; our guy drove up on the curb to get away from him.

Finally we stopped, the bus stopped, and the two drivers stood screaming at each other in the rain. It was a lovely introduction to Brazil.

There was this, too: Over the next few days, as I started to play my rounds, I noticed—there’s always a lot of free time at tournaments—that the South American players were constantly going up to the fifth floor. I wondered about that for a while, then I found out what was going on. How can I put this delicately? Let’s just say that there were ladies up there, and that money was changing hands. The Banana Bowl indeed! I never visited that fifth floor, however, or any similar establishment.

I won the tournament, by the way, beating a couple of guys named Andrés Gomez and Ivan Lendl in the process. Now no one could challenge my status as the number-one junior in the world.

M
EANWHILE
I’
D APPLIED
to college—Stanford, USC, and UCLA. Stanford was my first choice because UCLA and Stanford were the best teams, but I preferred USC to UCLA—George Tolley was the USC coach at the time, and he seemed a little more laid-back than Glen Bassett at UCLA.

I went on a college visit to Los Angeles; it was my first time there. L.A. was also Stacy’s home town, and so we got to spend a lovely few days together while she showed me the sights, including the USC and UCLA campuses. At UCLA, I asked Glen Bassett, “So how do you run things here? What’s your coaching style?” And he said, “Oh, we work really hard—we practice five hours a day.” I said, “Thank you very much.” That was it for UCLA!

In April, I played in my second Riordan/Scott event, a clay-court tournament in Virginia Beach, Virginia, that featured both Vilas and Connors; they were numbers two and three in the world at the time. I beat Charlie Pasarell, who was number 49, and Bob Lutz, who was around number 30. It’s true that both of them were more comfortable on fast courts than on clay; still, a victory was a victory.

As I was getting ready to play my semifinal against Nastase—again!—I very shyly (or so it seemed to me) walked out onto a court where Vilas was hitting with his manager, the crazed former Romanian Davis Cupper Ion Tiriac, and asked if I could warm up with them for five minutes. Five minutes was all I ever needed right before a match. For years afterward, however, both Vilas and Tiriac loved to tell the story about the cocky young McEnroe, annoyed that they were on the court at all, demanding to hit with the great Vilas.

Maybe, deep down, I was a little starstruck by Vilas in his greatest year. But even if I did still look like a kid, I was a lot more than a fan.

This time, I took Nastase to three sets.

In May, after Stanford accepted me for the coming fall, the United States Tennis Association gave me $500 and a plane ticket, said “Good luck,” and I went off to play the French and Wimbledon Juniors. Since I had a couple of ATP points, I was also going to try to qualify for the main draws, and I planned to meet up with Stacy, who would be playing the juniors in the French.

Soon after I checked in to the players’ hotel, the Sofitel, I did a double-take: Somehow I had failed to realize that my hotel bill wasn’t going to be taken care of by the USTA, but by yours truly, J.P.M., Jr. That five hundred bucks had seemed like a lot of money…until I checked in. Now I did some quick calculations: The players’ rate was around thirty dollars a night, and I was going to be in Paris for the three days of the qualifiers, and, whether I qualified or not, the fourteen days until the end of the junior tournament. After that came two weeks before Wimbledon, then two weeks
at
Wimbledon…five hundred bucks for seven weeks wasn’t exactly going to cut it!

But before I could think about money, I had to play tennis.

In my head, I kept hearing what my Port Washington buddy Vitas Gerulaitis had told me before I came over: “Here’s what’s going to happen on your first trip to the French—you’re going to play some guy from Europe that you’ve never heard of, and you’re going to get your ass kicked.”

Thank you, Vitas. Sure enough, the first round in the qualies put me up against someone named Robert Machan, a stiff from Hungary—or so I thought. Before I knew what was happening, the stiff was indeed kicking my ass, 6–3, 2–0. Then it suddenly dawned on me: I was hitting every ball to his backhand. That’s common when you don’t know someone’s game. Out of desperation, I started hitting the ball to his forehand—and, lo and behold, Mr. Machan could not hit a forehand to save his life.

On to the second round.

M
Y BIGGEST DISCOVERY
about tennis so far was that things seemed to get a whole lot more exciting as I went up the ladder. Paris in ’77 was my first real taste of the big time, and I’d never seen guys work so hard. I’ll never forget watching an American named Norman Holmes playing someone who was the French version of Norman Holmes, in the second round of the qualifiers. It was incredible how hard they were going at it—hustling and diving onto the court until their whites were completely covered with red clay. Maybe all of a hundred people were watching, but it was one of the all-time best matches I’ve ever seen.

Norman Holmes won the match, qualified, and eventually rose to around 100 in the world. He wasn’t a world-beater that afternoon, but that wasn’t the point. Watching him made me think, “If this guy can try that hard, there’s no reason why I can’t.”

Who knew how far I could go if I pulled out all the stops?