One on One

by John Feinstein

  “I just want him to know,” he told Caffey, “that I am not a cocksucker!”

  The kicker to the story came a year later when, in the acknowledgments of A Good Walk Spoiled, I mentioned Caffey and thanked him for a number of things, including coming to Dorman’s and my defense in dealing with the “boorish security thugs at the LA Open.” The PGA Championship was played at Riviera Country Club that year, the same place where the LA Open is played every year. On Sunday afternoon, as I was preparing to leave, a man approached me and asked if I could sign a copy of the book for him.

  “Sure,” I said, and opened to the page where I normally signed.

  “Actually, could you sign it on a different page?” he asked. “Could you sign it on the page where you mentioned us?”

  “Us?” I asked. “Who is us?”

  “Oh, I was one of the security people here at the LA Open last year.”

  “You weren’t the guy who kept telling my friend and I we needed cameras to be inside the ropes were you?”

  “No, no. That was my boss.”

  “You know I called you guys a bunch of boorish thugs?” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “We just appreciated being mentioned.”

  I laughed and signed where he asked me to sign.

  My friend Wes Seeley, who still worked for the tour at the time and was very familiar with the story, heard most of the exchange.

  “Was that the cocksucker?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered. “That was the cocksucker’s assistant.”

  Beyond that, there were very few hassles in golf. We had access—without cameras—inside the ropes, inside the locker rooms, on the driving range (except at Augusta and the Memorial), and on the putting greens (same two exceptions). Players were easily approachable. I had become spoiled.

  Now I was back at a tennis tournament and within two hours had been told I couldn’t walk past a locker room.

  I did the only thing that made sense: I ran back to golf. And for the most part, stayed right there.

  I still make brief appearances at the U.S. Open each year, mostly so I can see Bud Collins and Mary Carillo and Patrick McEnroe and, if I’m lucky, Jim Courier. I still follow the sport because I love watching it, and I’m saddened by its spectacular drop in popularity in this country. Occasionally when I write about it, I still make tennis people angry.

  Not long after that cameo appearance at Lipton (Sampras did sit down and talk to me for my column once I circled the building to get to the interview room), I wrote a column saying that the best way to fix tennis was to put everyone involved in the sport in a room and blow the room up. I proposed leaving Sampras, Patrick McEnroe, Steffi Graf, Collins, and Carillo out of the room.

  “I picked up the magazine [Inside Sports] and started reading the story in an airport,” Patrick McEnroe told me. “I was getting angrier and angrier with you. Then I saw that you left me out of the room and I said, ‘Pretty good piece.’ ”

  Others were not quite as pleased. Once upon a time Jim Courier would have been a lock to be left out of the room, but he had—in my mind—changed considerably after winning the French Open in 1991 and going on to become the number one player in the world, winning four major titles along the way. After he had beaten Andre Agassi in Paris in ’91 in a classic five-set match, he walked into the interview room, pointed his finger at me, and said, “You owe me big-time.”

  He was referring to the fact that Hard Courts was about to come out and having one of the major characters win his first major title probably wasn’t going to hurt sales. I figured he was joking and I laughed, but he really wasn’t. Later Jim told me he didn’t read the book because he was afraid I had ripped him. Even when his mother read it and told him there was nothing in it that would bother him, he still didn’t read it.

  That same summer, after the Lipton incident, I wrote a piece in Tennis saying that the sport should give the media the same access as golf did, if only so tennis fans would have the same chance to know and understand the players that golf fans were afforded.

  A couple of weeks after the story appeared, I was walking out the player/media gate at the U.S. Open when I heard a familiar voice calling my name. I looked up and saw Courier, walking with José Higueras, his coach. In all the time I’d known Jim, he had always called me John. Now he was shouting, “Hey, Feinstein!” until he got my attention.

  I walked over with my hand out to say hello. He ignored it and began pointing his finger at me.

  “You stay out of the locker room this week, you hear me?” he said. “Go hang out in a golf locker room with your golf buddies.”

  This was when the locker rooms at the Open were still accessible to the media, unlike any other locker rooms in tennis.

  “Hey, Jim, if I want to go up to the locker room, I’ll go up there,” I said. “Last I looked you’re playing in the tournament not running it.”

  “You stay the hell out of there!” he yelled.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “How about I stay out until Friday when you’ll be gone.”

  Cheap shot. Courier had not had a good summer. He took a step in my direction and I took a step in his. Fortunately, Higueras got in between us before I could get my ass kicked and Courier could get in trouble for kicking my ass.

  “John, do me a favor and get the hell out of here,” Higueras said. People were stopping and staring because they recognized Courier. I always liked Higueras.

  “Jim, I don’t know what’s happened to you, but it’s not good,” I said—and walked away.

  The funny thing is Courier loves golf. A few months later he ran into Davis Love somewhere and my name came up. “He said to me, ‘Feinstein just likes you guys because you’re nice to him,’ ” Davis told me later. “I said to him, ‘Is that a bad thing?’ ”

  My pariah status in tennis was further sealed a few years later when I wrote an Op-Ed piece in USA Today saying that the biggest problem with tennis was that no one in the sport would admit that it had problems. “I guarantee you,” I wrote, “when I go out to the U.S. Open today, more people will be upset with me for writing this than with the state of their sport.”

  Sure enough, I wasn’t five minutes inside the main gate when Pam Shriver, who I’d known for years, was pointing a finger at me saying, “How can you possibly say anything’s wrong with the sport?”

  Much funnier was my encounter that day with John McEnroe. I was standing in the long hallway under the stands of Arthur Ashe Stadium talking to Elise Burgin, who had been one of the main characters in Hard Courts and was doing TV commentary for Sky TV, a British outfit. (Every ex–tennis player alive is on TV someplace talking about the sport to several dozen avid listeners.)

  McEnroe stalked by, glanced at me, and said nothing.

  “Hey, John,” I said as he headed down the hallway. “You don’t say hello?”

  McEnroe turned and walked back in our direction. “Why should I say hello?” he said. “The only reason you’re out here is to destroy tennis.”

  “Actually tennis is doing a pretty good job on its own,” I said. “I’m really out here to try to get you the job as Davis Cup captain” (McEnroe was campaigning for the job at that point).

  He smiled and walked back to where Burgin and I were standing with his hand extended. “In that case,” he said, “it’s good to see you. Welcome back.”

  Even Peter Bodo, who was once my colleague at Tennis Magazine and a good friend, can barely bring himself to speak to me these days. Some of it is our extremely divergent political views, but beyond that Peter is genuinely angry with me for not giving today’s players their due.

  We did finally sit down and talk about it over coffee at last year’s Open. “All you ever do is write and say that the politics of the game suck,” he said. “You never give guys like [Roger] Federer or Rafa [Nadal] or the top women their due. They’re good, really, really good.”

  “I don’t disagree,” I said. “But to sit here and just say ‘all is well in t
he sport’ when you can clearly see that politics have been killing it for years is ridiculous. You’re old enough to remember when the Davis Cup was really a big deal in this country. Now it’s on Tennis Channel, which last I looked reaches about fifty-five homes.”

  Bodo shook his head in disgust. “You decided you didn’t like the people in tennis,” he said. “That’s all it comes down to.”

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe that is what it comes down to. Certainly my boyhood memories of the sport are as warm, if not warmer, than those of any sport because of my parents’ involvement. I still enjoy watching a really good match and still make a point when I am at the Open every year to find my way to the back courts to try to watch a match between a couple of unknowns from up close.

  But then someone tells me I can’t walk past a locker room or that they don’t talk on practice days and I throw my arms in the air and sprint back to golf.

  IF THERE IS ONE person I have always liked in tennis, it is Mary Carillo. To begin with, she is as bright, funny, and entertaining as anyone I’ve ever known. She is also a born reporter in an ex-jock’s body, which is why it is almost remarkable that she has not only survived in television but thrived in it and on it.

  She’s much too honest for tennis and for TV. Especially ESPN, as she proved when she walked away from the network in the middle of the 2010 U.S. Open. “I had to do it,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep at night. That’s not a healthy way to go through life.”

  The first time I heard of Carillo was during the 1977 French Open. I was just starting my summer internship at the Washington Post and Barry Lorge was covering the French. He kept filing notebook items about these two kids from Long Island, Mary Carillo and John McEnroe, who were making their way through the mixed doubles draw. McEnroe was eighteen, Carillo was twenty. Every day Barry had another story about their latest win, and it always had a funny quote from Carillo—clearly the spokesperson for the duo.

  They ended up winning the tournament. A few weeks later, McEnroe exploded onto the tennis scene when he reached the Wimbledon semifinals as a qualifier and got into all sorts of trouble with umpires and line judges along the way. Lorge kept going back to Carillo throughout for McEnroe quotes.

  Carillo ended up on the same plane home from London with John and his father, John Sr. She was in coach, the McEnroes in first class—John McEnroe Sr. was a big-shot New York lawyer. At one point Mary walked to the front of the plane to talk to John for a minute.

  “He was asleep,” she remembered. “His dad was sitting there with all the London tabloids on his lap, the ones that had headlines like ‘McBrat’ and ‘Baby Mac’ and ‘Worse than Jimbo.’ He was sitting there with tears pouring down his face. Regardless of how John Jr. behaved, it was his son they were talking about. I felt awful for him.”

  Having grown up with McEnroe, Mary saw a different side of him. Her memories of that Wimbledon didn’t focus on him yelling at umpires but his reaction when Dennis Ralston hit her with a volley during the mixed doubles semifinals.

  “John had just lost to Connors in the semis,” she said. “We were playing Dennis and Martina [Navratilova] in the mixed semis. At 8-all in the third, Dennis hit me with a volley. John thought he’d done it on purpose and wanted to kill him. He tried to hit him back on several occasions. We ended up losing 12–10.”

  I first met Mary in 1980 when I was caddying for Lorge on the final weekend at the Open. Knee injuries had forced her to retire by then (she had been ranked as high as number thirty-four in the world in singles) and she was working for the USTA escorting players from the court to postmatch interviews.

  “Who is that?” I asked Lorge when I first spotted her.

  “Mary Carillo,” Lorge said.

  “That’s Mary Carillo?” I said. “I didn’t know she was that good-looking.”

  We became friends when I started covering tennis regularly in 1985. Here is why you had to love Mary. She had started on TV working for USA and had become the first woman to do commentary on men’s matches for the simple reason that she was better than any of the men. In 1988 CBS finally realized this and hired her for the Open. When Frank Chirkinian, the great CBS golf producer, heard that Carillo was going to be working for him during the Open (he also did tennis back then), his comment was, “Mary Carillo? She’s strictly cable.”

  Throughout that tournament Mary wore a badge that read “Mary Carillo… Strictly Cable.” She had taped the last two words over the spot that originally read “CBS.”

  Mary has been a shooting star in television for years now. When HBO started its show Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, Mary was one of the first hires as a correspondent. Dick Ebersol asked her to do long-form essays and features for NBC’s Olympic coverage beginning in 2000, and added her to the network’s Wimbledon coverage—much to McEnroe’s dismay. John likes the spotlight squarely on him.

  Often, players get angry with her because she’s just too damn honest. When she criticized Andre Agassi for not playing Wimbledon in 1990, he refused to do postmatch interviews with her because she might, you know, ask him a real question. Others, including the Williams sisters, have gotten huffy with her because she refused to do the “we’re all in tennis together” routine that most TV announcers, including both McEnroe brothers, tend toward.

  It was Mary’s honesty that led to her leaving ESPN. She simply couldn’t take the pandering to the players anymore. It all came to a head on the third night of the 2010 Open. Mary was already upset because ESPN had refused to let her discuss the Serena Williams foot-fault controversy of 2009 in its Open preview show.

  Serena had been playing Kim Clijsters in the semifinals when, serving down a set and 5–6, 15–30, she was called for a second serve foot fault. That pushed the score to 15–40 and match point. Serena went ballistic. She walked menacingly in the direction of the woman who had called the foot fault, holding the ball she had not served in her hand.

  “I swear I’m going to f—ing take this ball and shove it down your f—ing throat,” she could be clearly heard saying to the woman. Appearing frightened, the woman walked to the chair umpire and reported what had been said. Brian Early, the tournament referee, was called on court, and after a further consultation, Serena was given a point penalty—since she had already been given a warning for smashing her racquet earlier in the match.

  The point penalty ended the match, a bizarre and ugly way for the defending champion to bow out of any tournament, much less the U.S. Open. Afterward, Serena was less than contrite. She said her temper wasn’t nearly as bad as it once had been and didn’t think she owed anyone an apology since “lots of players yell at line judges and umpires.”

  The incident was, clearly, the story of the tournament. And so, in looking back at the 2009 tournament during ESPN’s 2010 preview, Carillo thought it important that the incident be discussed. She had already ripped the Grand Slam Committee of the International Tennis Federation when it fined Serena but didn’t suspend her in the aftermath of the incident and non-apology. (Serena ended up grudgingly issuing a written semi-apology later under severe pressure to do so.)

  ESPN didn’t want to touch the story. Carillo was convinced it was because they were negotiating with her and her various reps—including her idiotic agent, who had actually put a hand over a CBS camera moments after the Clijsters match had ended, making it look as if her client was doing some kind of perp-walk—to come on ESPN during the middle weekend since she was injured and not playing.

  The end though came on the third night of the tournament. Carillo was in her hotel room watching the matches on TV when Andy Roddick was called for a foot fault.

  “One thing about me is that I actually do watch tennis for fun,” she said. “I still love the damn game. I like to watch doubles, I like to watch kids I’ve never heard of, I’ll stop in a park to watch kids just having a hit. I love it that much.

  “So I’m in bed, under the covers, watching the match because ESPN has so many people working for them that I’m no
t doing any night matches. It’s John and Patrick. Roddick foot faults and he gets into it with the line judge. He’s not as bad as Serena was, but he’s very cranky because he’s losing and he’s being obnoxious.

  “I’m waiting for them to show the tape of Serena because God knows that’s the time to show it. Nothing. I mean not a word, nothing. Apparently it never happened. I’m not sure if I’m angry or if I’m stunned or both.

  “The next morning I go in and I find the executive producer—a guy named Jamie Reynolds—and I say, ‘What happened there, where was the Serena tape?’ He says something about not being able to find it. Please. This is 2010. They could have gotten it up there in about ten seconds if they wanted to.

  “I asked Patrick, who was doing play-by-play, why he didn’t mention it at all. He said, ‘It never crossed my mind.’ I’m like, whaaa? The funniest thing though was when I saw John and I started ranting, ‘How could they do this, this is outrageous.’ On and on. John looked at me and said, ‘You know, I just don’t get as upset about these things as you do.’

  “That’s when I thought, ‘This is what my life has come to? John McEnroe is the cool head?’

  “I went back to the hotel that night and couldn’t sleep. I finally got out of bed at three o’clock in the morning and wrote to my agent [Sandy Montag] and told him I was resigning, that I couldn’t do this anymore. He called me at about seven o’clock and said I need to rethink this. I know that’s what he’s supposed to do as an agent. I also know he has a lot of other clients with ESPN and he didn’t want to get into a pissing match with them. But I was done. I went in that day [Friday] and told them I would work that day on the matches I was assigned and that would be it.

  “I was working for CBS on the weekend anyway, and the following weekend they had plenty of people—hundreds of people—to work the matches. So that was it. I was done.”

  What was amazing was that no one noticed, which is more a reflection on the fact that ESPN does employ hundreds of ex-players and on the fact that not that many people are watching all those ex-players. I mean, how do you not notice the absence of Mary Carillo if you’re paying attention?