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Credit: Photograph by Harry Benson
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People loved booing John McEnroe. Now he’s the game’s best ambassador.
This year’s U.S. Open is under way, showcasing the world’s top tennis players—and, potentially, some world-class temper tantrums. Still, it would take an exceptional number of smashed racquets to outdo the all-time champ, John McEnroe, whose talents as a player were often overshadowed by his high-volume outbursts on the court.
In September, 2000, the staff writer Calvin Tomkins profiled McEnroe, who was beginning to enjoy one of the great image makeovers in sports history. Then forty-one, McEnroe had grown up not far from the grounds of the U.S. Open, in Queens, where he developed what Tomkins describes as a “Mozartean inventiveness” behind the net. As an eighteen-year-old, McEnroe had arrived at Wimbledon to play in the junior tournament, but instead entered the men’s contest and reached the semifinals, the youngest qualifier ever to do so. Yet he also returned home having been dubbed a “Superbrat” by a London tabloid, setting a template for the remainder of his career.
By middle age, the former No. 1 had mellowed, mostly, becoming a respected TV commentator—as he remains today—capable of reflecting with impressive objectivity on his own rapid plunge from singles dominance to relative mediocrity. Not that he’d become a saint: Tomkins notes a memorable verbal altercation between McEnroe and a heckler on the seniors’ tour, as well as both positive and dismissive comments that he made about Venus and Serena Williams. “John is the most undiplomatic person you’ll ever meet,” his second wife tells the writer, “but what I love about him is that he doesn’t live in regret.”
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The United States Davis Cup team’s humiliating 5–0 loss to Spain in July, in the semifinals of the yearly competition, did not come as a surprise. Spain has three of the world’s best clay-court players in Alex Corretja, Albert Costa, and Juan Carlos Ferrero, and the slow, red-clay surface that the Spaniards provided for the matches, in the pleasant northern seaside city of Santander, did not favor the mobility or confidence of an American team whose top players, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, had both pulled out at the last minute because of injuries. The Spaniards were so confident, and the Americans so diffident about their chances, that during the week preceding the matches the only real suspense came from the possibility that John McEnroe, the United States team’s forty-one-year-old captain, would pick himself to play doubles.
The United States has not won the Davis Cup since 1995, and the doubles, sandwiched between the four singles matches, has been a big part of the problem. In his first year as the Davis Cup captain, McEnroe fielded a team that barely squeaked by Zimbabwe and the Czech Republic, losing the doubles in both series; reporters kept asking McEnroe, who is generally considered to be the finest doubles player of all time, why he didn’t use himself, and he kept saying that he had not ruled out the possibility. This time, in Spain, he did put himself on the playing roster, and for nearly a week speculation about his playing in the doubles completely dominated international news coverage of the event. All this was fairly annoying to McEnroe, a private man whose public fame makes him a good deal more uncomfortable than you would expect.
He didn’t play, as it turned out, and America lost the doubles as well as the four singles matches, and McEnroe, glum but relatively gracious in defeat, seemed disgusted mainly with himself. At the press conference after the doubles match, wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and a warmup jacket zipped to the chin, he kept rubbing his face with both hands, like a man brushing away cobwebs. His comments were blunt. Alex Corretja had “played a really solid doubles match,” and as for Juan Balcells, his partner, who is virtually unknown outside Spain, “even Balcells played reasonably well.” He added, “He’s got the greatest eighty-three-mile-an-hour serve in the history of tennis.” But Todd Martin and Chris Woodruff played well, too, and nearly won—the match went to five sets. “I mean, we deserved better,” McEnroe said. “They should have won.”
McEnroe’s decision not to play had been made two days before the matches started, in consultation with his teammates; the next morning, he had hopped in a taxi and gone off to visit the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, sixty miles away. “It would have been interesting, had I just been a little more prepared,” he told me. “I felt like I could have shown them a couple of things. There’s not a lot of players around who have the technique for doubles—all these bludgeoners. But I also played like crap recently, so who knows?” He held out his left hand—his racquet hand—to show me a nasty-looking blister that had formed around and underneath a callus in the middle of his palm. He also had a back problem, he said, from all the time he’d been spending lately, at the French Open and at Wimbledon, sitting in a booth and commenting on the matches for NBC, USA, and the BBC. “I’m falling apart,” he said. “It’s age, I guess.”
My father once took me to see Bill Tilden play, at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, in New Jersey. The already mythical champion was past his peak then, but he was still the game’s dominant figure. I remember Tilden coming from behind in the third set, and my father, who was a big Tilden fan, bending over and saying to me, as the lean, saturnine figure in long white pants prepared to serve for the match, “Watch this.” Four first serves, four aces.
A lot of players have held me in thrall since that baptism. The styles of Don Budge, Pancho Gonzalez, Lew Hoad, and Rod Laver are as firmly imprinted on my somewhat floppy memory disk as those of Jimmy Connors, Martina Navratilova, and Pete Sampras. For years, I was almost embarrassed to admit that the one I’d enjoyed watching the most was John McEnroe. How could anyone like McEnroe, that perennial sorehead, whose on-court tantrums and obscenity-laced philippics against line judges and umpires had earned him record-breaking fines and suspensions? It is generally agreed that McEnroe was a tennis genius—the most naturally gifted player who ever lived, according to Arthur Ashe and many others—and his record as an active player is pretty spectacular: seventy-seven singles titles, including three Wimbledon and four U.S. Open championships, balanced by seventy-seven doubles titles; a record fifty-nine wins (singles and doubles) in Davis Cup competition; the No. 1 ranking in the world in 1981, 1983, and 1984. A serve-and-volley player who depended on quick reactions, touch, and court sense rather than on brute power, he could dismantle an opponent’s game with a variety of shots and angles that frequently brought audible gasps of surprise from onlookers. At its best, his tennis had a heady, Mozartean inventiveness that made your spine tingle.
As for the bad behavior—well, even that came to fascinate me. Repellent as it was to see him stand there and scream at an umpire, like a spoiled, red-faced child, there was something oddly authentic about it, a sense of towering outrage against injustice. He knew he couldn’t win the argument or change the call. Some players felt he did it as a tactical ploy, to make them lose their concentration, but it was McEnroe’s concentration that generally suffered, and, as he has pointed out, when you call an umpire “the pits of the world,” which he did at Wimbledon in 1981, the man is not likely to rule in your favor on the next close call. The gentlemen’s code in tennis was defunct by the time McEnroe hit the scene, of course, trampled to death by Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors, and other loutish performers. A tennis Code of Conduct, with penalties for infractions, was introduced in 1980, mainly to deal with Nastase, the Romanian eccentric whose stalling, arguing, and bizarre antics turned many of his matches into tiresome travesties. Connors excelled at sheer vulgarity, spewing obscenities and simulating masturbation with his racquet handle. While his behavior often provoked laughter, McEnroe’s drew angry whistling and booing or else, on occasion, appalled silence. He was out of control, but the emotion was painfully genuine.
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