You Cannot Be Serious Read online

  At forty-three, I’m a father of six. I don’t want to be a caricature anymore—in some ways, I feel I’ve hidden behind that for a long time, or at the very least, I’ve gotten by without having to be particularly mature.

  See, part of the magic of playing tennis for a living is that it lets you act like a kid for as long as you can keep going. Now, some of you will say, and I agree, that it’s good to keep that kid in you, but every kid has to grow up sometime, or else wind up a case of arrested development.

  I always considered myself more well-rounded than most tennis players: I read, I thought, I looked at the outside world. But I always looked at it from a distance. It was hard to get away from the feeling that everything revolved around my own closed little universe, one I ventured outside of just to get perks—to get good seats at a concert, or meet people I would never have known if I weren’t a famous tennis player. And I didn’t venture out of it a great deal. In a lot of ways, I was really oblivious to the outside world. And let me tell you: Once you get away from the real world, it’s very difficult to make that transition back into it. Look at all the ex-celebrities who wind up sick or angry or burned-out. Or dead.

  There was a time—I’ll admit it—when my head was so big it barely fit through the door. Having kids, I hope, changed all that for me. Having kids brings you down to earth right away, unless you let other people raise them, which I was never about to do.

  Imagine that: Johnny Mac a forty-three-year-old father of six! When I first stepped out onto the world’s stage, I was a chubby-faced eighteen-year-old with a mop of curly brown hair and a red headband. Today I’m a lean-faced man with thin graying hair, lines in my cheeks, a small silver hoop in my left earlobe, and a roses-and-thorns tattoo on my right shoulder. I can change a diaper, calm a tantrum, dry tears, make breakfast.

  I’m still in good shape. I play tennis almost every day and work out on a stationary bike or jump rope when I can’t find the time or want to mix things up. My vision is still sharp enough (around 20/15), and my reflexes quick enough, that on a given day, I can give anyone on the men’s tour a run for his money for a set or two. My standards—as you may remember—are rather high on a tennis court, and I put enough work into my game so that I don’t disgust myself out there. Until recently, I actually considered going back to playing Davis Cup doubles again, after a break of nearly a decade. But you’ll have to ask my brother Patrick about that now.

  On the other hand, I’m not kidding myself. No one knows his own body like a professional athlete, and I fully realize that the machine God gave me is nowhere near as flexible as it used to be, that I’ve lost the inevitable step or two along the way. As somebody who thinks almost obsessively in numerical terms (when I was a little boy I used to amaze my parents’ friends by multiplying and dividing large numbers in my head), I’d say, objectively speaking, that I’m about 60 percent of the tennis player I was in my prime.

  Which is not too shabby. But then again, I’m not really a tennis player anymore.

  SO WHAT AM I?

  For one thing, I’ve been a tennis commentator for the last ten years, with enough pride in my work to feel that I’m at the top of my profession. This didn’t just happen by itself. As you know, I’ve always had a certain facility for speaking my mind, but commentating demanded that I focus my thoughts, speak in complete sentences, and learn when silence was more valuable than talk. In short, it was (and still is) hard work. And so I had to learn the ropes.

  Fortunately—as in my tennis career—I had great teachers. I’ve always been happier as a team player than as a solo performer, and my work with great broadcasters like Dick Enberg and Ted Robinson (and producers like Gordon Beck and John McGuinness, who gave me the freedom to be myself) has been a joy and an education to me. I believe that the joy comes through on television and over the radio—that my commentary has allowed people to see a different part of me, a far more lighthearted and self-deprecating side than I ever allowed myself to show on the tennis court.

  I’ve done a lot of growing up over the past quarter-century. On the other hand, like most people—maybe even more than most people—I’m still a work in progress. Anyone who’s seen me play on the Seniors Tour knows that even if my temper has lost a step or two, I can still get pretty far out there. It doesn’t happen nearly as often as it used to—for one thing, because I don’t play nearly as much as I used to—but now even a little bit feels like way too much (and the fact that people expect me to go too far doesn’t make matters any easier).

  I’m trying to work it out. One of the things I’m striving to come to terms with is the deep-down part of me that isn’t completely willing to give up my anger. After all, I feel certain that it’s part of what drove me to the top, and though I may not be at the top of my game anymore, that fire in my belly is still hot. Where would I be if I let it go out?

  And what exactly do I need it for now?

  PRIDE IS A FUNNY THING. While throughout my playing career, I had a lot to be proud of—and much to regret—I was never one to dwell on things. After all, I’m a serve-and-volley player: my whole game was, and still is, based on moving forward, always forward, then making the winning shot.

  But once your career is over you’re in a funny place if you’ve done reasonably well as a professional athlete, namely: Where do you go from here?

  During my whole career, I basically went from one thing to another: The next thing always just came around the corner. Make no mistake, I had goals along the way—to win the NCAA’s, to win Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the Davis Cup; to try to emulate my hero, Rod Laver—and I achieved a lot of them. In the last few years, however, I’ve given a lot of hard thought to who I was, who I am, and who I want to become.

  I’m very proud of my tennis career. I won 77 singles tournaments and 77 doubles—154 tournament titles in all, more than any pro ever to play the game. My singles record puts me in third place, all-time, after Connors and Ivan Lendl, and in doubles titles I’m second only to Tom Okker, who won 78.

  Think about how few great players had significant records in both singles and doubles. Not Borg (he almost never played doubles), nor Connors, nor Lendl. Think about how few American stars of the modern era have played Davis Cup. One of my very proudest achievements is having helped resuscitate the Cup in this country, starting in the late ’70s, a time when the other top Americans—especially James Scott Connors—weren’t especially interested in wasting their energy on playing for practically nothing when there was so much money to be had in tournaments and exhibitions.

  Call me corny, but I’ve always been extraordinarily proud of representing my country: There’s simply no thrill in tennis quite like it. You may remember the pictures of me running around the court with an American flag after our dramatic victory over Switzerland in my last Davis Cup tie in the final year of my career, 1992. (A meeting between countries in Davis Cup is called a “tie.”) In all, I played for the cup in thirty ties over twelve years, winning forty-one singles matches and fifty-nine overall.

  The main point, though, I’d like to think, is not the number of matches I won, but the five cups I helped gain for the U.S.A.

  I guess you could say that history, and whatever part I’ve been able to play in it, has always felt extremely important to me. My idol, Rod Laver, has a rock-solid claim to being one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and for a very good reason: He achieved (not once but twice!) the colossally difficult feat of winning all four major titles—the French Open, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open—in a single calendar year.

  I was never able to do it. I won three Wimbledons and four U.S. Opens, but never a French or Australian Open.

  Pete Sampras has won thirteen Grand Slam titles, and even though the French Open has eluded him, he’s won seven Wimbledons, four U.S. Opens, and two Australians—an unbelievable, maybe unbeatable, record.

  Like me, André Agassi has seven Grand Slam titles altogether; but unlike me, he’s won all four of
the majors, even if not in one calendar year. His place in history is secure.

  Where does that leave me? I guess only time will tell.

  I did win over $12 million in prize money overall, and, with the help of my dad and some other wise heads along the way, invested my winnings and endorsement proceeds intelligently and conservatively enough to be able to support my wife and children in great comfort. The endorsement money came slowly at first, because of my bad-boy image, but it built up fast once Madison Avenue, or Phil Knight, more specifically, learned how to market me. I still have significant endorsement deals today, especially with Nike.

  Why, then, do I still feel driven?

  A lot of it has to do with my tendency to see the glass as half-empty. I’m smart enough to know that there’s no sense thinking about what you didn’t do instead of what you did. You lose perspective if you compare yourself to people who are out of reach or who it’s inappropriate to compare yourself to.

  But sometimes I do it anyway.

  I’ll confess it: I feel I could have done more. There are nights when I can’t get to sleep for thinking about the Australian Opens I passed by when I was at the peak of my game and always felt I’d have another chance; the French Open that I had in the palm of my hand, then choked away.

  I can practically hear you saying, “Come on, McEnroe! You’re rich, famous, and healthy; you have a loving family, a more-than-comfortable life. You’ve done amazing things and been to amazing places—things and places most people can barely dream of. Why not just relax and enjoy what you have?”

  Here’s what I’d say back to you: I’m working on it, hard.

  But at the same time—I’m a serve-and-volley player. My style is, as it’s always been, to move forward, always forward.

  My standards for myself are, as they’ve always been, extraordinarily high.

  Why should I change now?

  2

  WHERE DID IT COME FROM? That’s the question interviewers always work around to asking me. How did you get that way? And the first thing I tell them is, I’m a New Yorker. New Yorkers don’t hold anything back—sitting in traffic or just walking down the street, we lay it on the line, and we don’t whisper when we do it.

  My dad’s like that. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but not the fancy Upper East Side—it was the patchwork of Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and Hungarian working-class enclaves known as Yorkville. His father, John Joseph McEnroe, immigrated here from Ireland in the early 1900s, and worked as a bank messenger and security guard. (He also made a little money on the side as a trombone player in Irish bands, so I come by my performing interest honestly. My actual musical talent, though—that’s another question.)

  Coming from such a humble background, my dad did extremely well to be able to go to college at all, let alone work his way through night classes at Fordham Law School and wind up as a partner in one of the biggest law firms in New York.

  But Dad has never forgotten his roots: He’s full of Irish music and humor; there’s nothing he likes better than to get together with friends and have a beer or two, and sing and tell jokes at the top of his lungs (unlike me: I can’t remember a joke to save my life). I still remember how boisterous my parents’ parties were when I was growing up—and how, the next morning, my dad would always be bright-eyed and full of energy, ready to go at the world again.

  As those of you who watched tennis in the ’80s may recall, my mother was much quieter: My shyness, I think, comes from her. And some of my edge. My mom, Kay—born Katherine Tresham, the daughter of a Long Island deputy sheriff—tended to see the world in a somewhat harsher light than my father, who always seemed to have a smile and a kind word for everyone. My mom has never been as trusting of outsiders as my dad is; she could hold a grudge with the best of them. Unfortunately, I’m like her in those ways, too.

  My parents met in New York City in the mid-’50s, when my father was home on vacation from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and my mother was working as a student nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. Typically enough, their relationship started at a bar one night, when a couple of my mother’s nurse friends ran into my dad and some buddies of his. Dad didn’t hit it off with any of those nurses, but they introduced him to a girl who turned out to be perfect for him. John and Kay got married while Dad was in the Air Force, and I was born on February 16, 1959, at Wiesbaden Air Force Base, in West Germany.

  When my father got out of the service, we moved to an apartment in Flushing, Queens, home of La Guardia Airport and home-to-be of the New York Mets. Dad worked during the day as an assistant office manager at an advertising agency and attended Fordham Law by night. There’s a story that’s typical of my mother: When Dad finished his first year, he proudly told Mom that he was second in his class. “See, if you had worked harder, you could have been first,” she said. (The next year, he was.)

  We were still in Flushing when my brother Mark was born in February of 1962, but then, shortly before Dad’s graduation, we made the big move to the suburbs, way out east to Douglaston, Queens—first to another apartment, and then to a two-story saltbox house at 241–10 Rushmore Avenue.

  Douglaston was a typical New York–area bedroom suburb: nice, safe, clean; nothing fancy. The houses were small, square prewar Cape Cods and Colonials; there were a lot of young families like us, with a station wagon in the driveway, a barbecue grill on the back patio. Kids rode their bikes, played football and stickball in the street and at Memorial Field, played basketball in the driveway. It was Leave It to Beaver, Queens style.

  I even had a paper route when I was ten and eleven, delivering Newsday and the New York Times on my bike. It was brutal work: I made about a buck-fifty to two bucks a week, and people didn’t exactly throw around the tips—it was four cents from one person, exact change for $1.86 from someone else.

  I was seven and a half when my baby brother, Patrick, was born: I took vague notice of the fact and then went on about my business, which, from the time I could stand up and walk, was mainly one thing: sports, sports, and more sports. If it had a ball, I played it—and was good at it. A story my dad likes to tell: When I was four, we were playing in Central Park one day. He was pitching a Wiffle ball to me, and I was whacking some pretty good line drives with my yellow Wiffle bat. An older lady walked up and said, “Excuse me, is that a little boy, or a midget in disguise?”

  For a long time, I didn’t get much bigger than that—“Runt” was what the big kids at Memorial Field used to call me. But I was good enough that they let me play anyway. Team sports like basketball, football, and baseball were my favorites. In softball games, I learned to hit from both sides of the plate, because of the peculiar configuration of the field at P.S. 98. Soccer came a little later. I always enjoyed the camaraderie of a team. I remember long summer evenings playing stickball out on Rushmore with my good friends Andy Keane, John Martin, and Doug Saputo, evenings that seemed like they’d last forever.

  The McEnroe males were a sports-obsessed group, and we were vocal about it, whether we were rooting or playing. We were vocal about everything. We all loved each other, but we were definitely a family of yellers when I was growing up, my father leading the way, blowing off steam or just making friendly noise. We didn’t hold back in our household.

  At the same time, my parents had a serious and demanding side. They expected achievement.

  One day, I fell off my bike. I told my mom, “My arm hurts.” She was an operating-room nurse at the time, and she knew about hurt arms. She felt the arm, thought it was just a bruise, and said, “Go back to the tennis court.” Three weeks later, it was still hurting, and I was still complaining. Finally my mom took me to the doctor. I had a fractured left arm.

  And on moral matters, there were no gray areas: Everything was black and white, either right or wrong, period. They always drummed it into me: “Tell the truth. Be honest at any cost.”

  My mom and dad knew that education was the ticket to moving up in the world. The pub
lic schools in Douglaston were part of the reason a lot of young families moved there from the city, but in my parents’ eyes, public school wasn’t good enough for the McEnroe boys. I started off at St. Anastasia, a Catholic school not far from our house, but when I was in first grade (as Mom tells the story), one of the teachers said, “You should really get him out—he’s much too bright.” And so my parents sent me—on partial scholarship, but at no small financial sacrifice—to Buckley Country Day School, a twenty-five-minute bus ride away in Roslyn, Long Island.

  My mom and dad were strivers in every way; they fully bought into the American Dream. It was a restless dream for them, and a big part of it was about where you lived. We lived in four different places during my Douglaston years: the apartment, then three different houses. Once—I swear—we moved next door. Better house, my mom said. But damn, there was less of a yard to play football in!

  In the summer of 1967, we made a short move that was significant in more ways than one: a mile north, over Northern Boulevard and the Long Island Railroad tracks from Douglaston to Douglaston Manor.

  Just as the name sounds, Douglaston Manor was the right side of the tracks, a step up in the world, and our new house at 252 Beverly Road was also just down the block from a place called the Douglaston Club, which my parents had joined while we still lived on Rushmore.

  The Douglaston Club wasn’t fancy—just a clubhouse, a pool, and five tennis courts—but it was nice, and it meant something to an upwardly mobile young family. Tennis meant something, too. In those days, it was still very much a country-club game that you played in white clothes, exactly the kind of game a young lawyer for a white-shoe Manhattan law firm ought to be playing. And since Dad knew I loved any game that involved a ball, we both started playing it at the same time. Both of my brothers also began tennis in those early Douglaston Club years: Mark at age five, and little Patrick at three, when he used a two-handed backhand because it was the only way he could lift the racket!