by John McEnroe
It was a challenge at the start. I always tell a story, which John’s son Kevin loved the first time he heard it, about when we started dating. Very early on, in the first couple of months, John asked me to go with him to the French Open. I got on that plane with him, thinking it was a big step forward in our relationship, and he didn’t say one word to me for the entire flight. He didn’t talk to me or even look at me, because that’s how he travels: he goes into his own world. He was on the road all the time then, and this was his way of dealing with it. But I didn’t know what the problem was, so I was like, “Oh, my God, I’ve made a terrible mistake—this is horrible, who is this person?”
I was so mad by the time we got there that I started shouting at him—“You didn’t say a word!”—and he had no idea that he’d done anything wrong. He was totally unaware. That was a big thing, in the beginning—John being oblivious. So there’s definitely been an element within our relationship of it being an educational process. But one of the great things about him is that he will take direction. He always wants to be better at everything—better at tennis, better at being a father and a husband, and just a better person in general. That’s part of his DNA, wanting to learn, and I find that very attractive in him, because a lot of people aren’t like that, especially as they get older. And I have to say that John has taught me a lot as well.
If you asked me something about him that could be improved, it’s that even now, he’s a little self-centered. When I first met John, his immediate instinct was always to think about himself, and that’s been a hard habit to break. He’s way better than he used to be, but it’s still there—even spatially. He’s such a space-hog. I guess it’s a sports thing, in that winning at tennis is all about controlling the space of the court, but when he’s walking across a room, he’ll physically barrel past you. I’m like, “Hey, man, you can’t give me the right of way in our kitchen?”
It gets me mad sometimes, but he’s just not thinking. He doesn’t mean any harm by it, and he does try to put these things right. Nowadays he’ll open the door for me in the car, though sometimes he doesn’t. Or if I’m putting my coat on, he might remember to help me, or he might not. I often wonder about that, and I think maybe he didn’t get taught certain basic things about manners by his parents. He was so young, emotionally, when he went out into the world that it’s taken some of those things a long time to evolve.
I’m a huge Gladys Knight fan, and Gladys is a huge John McEnroe fan, and the reason John knows all the lyrics to “Midnight Train to Georgia” is because it contains his all-time favorite line: “I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine.” He loves that, because it’s basically what he was asking me to do. What he was saying was: “I want you in this world, it’s my world, and I want you in it, I want you to be happy in it, I want you to take care of me, and I’ll be taking care of you.”
2
“Good news. I fed my anger monkey a banana this morning and he’s feeling much better”
Adam Sandler as Dave Buznik in Anger Management
Was I planning to kick-start 2002 in the way I did? No. But this opportunity fell firmly into the category of “the kind of challenges I do not pass up.” Over the previous couple of years I’d had a lot of meetings with TV people. They’d noticed that my commentary was going down well, and that I was never short of an opinion. So some of these guys were tooting my horn and telling me that I could become more involved in television, possibly even with my own show if the right vehicle could be found.
These things take a long time. Out of ten meetings, one or two might lead to something. I was looking forward to spending the holidays quietly with family and friends when, right in the middle of what was meant to be an away-from-it-all Christmas vacation, I got a call from LA: did I want to host this game show, which ended up being called The Chair, to be aired on ABC, shooting to start early January? Of course I was interested. Game shows can be popular, and this one was being talked up as a potential big deal. The concept had originated, I believe, in New Zealand. From what I understood, it could be in the wheelhouse for me. But did it have to be so goddam urgent? Yes, apparently so, for the simple reason that Fox was about to start with a rival show, called The Chamber, and no, ABC did not want to lose out to them.
So in the space of a week, I found myself signed up for this show and flying back to LA a couple of days after New Year. At that stage, I’d been thinking that, outside of the commentating, the TV thing wasn’t going to work for me. I’d had so many meetings to discuss so many ideas that never seemed to happen that I wasn’t exactly holding my breath over a career in TV. If it happened, great; if it didn’t, I knew tennis was always going to be a big part of my life.
The Chair’s concept was that contestants—sitting… wait for it… in a chair—would have to answer seven multiple-choice general-knowledge questions, winning increasing amounts of money with each correct answer, up to a total of $250,000. However, they could only answer if their heart rate was below a certain threshold. As host, I was the one asking the questions, visible to the contestants in two ways: first, I was standing above them, and second, if they couldn’t bear to look straight at me, they could see a huge image of my face projected on a screen above my head.
The chair which gave the show its title was surrounded by a ring of lit torches to up the temperature and, hopefully, the contestants’ already-racing heart rate. If their heart rate red-lined, going above the permitted level, they were not allowed to answer, and any money they had earned would be reduced by $100 a second while they waited for their heart rate to drop. In addition, there would be two “heart-stopper” moments of fear or surprise during the contestant’s appearance, “guaranteed” to set their heart racing even faster.
In theory, it all sounded like an entertaining and original concept: trying to get your heart rate down, maintaining a semblance of calm in a tough situation. We can all relate to that feeling—God knows I’ve had it in enough tennis matches, that moment when you get sweaty palms, your legs feel like lumps of wood and even breathing becomes difficult—so I thought it would make good TV. And in case you’re wondering, I was assured by the producers that the contestants would be thoroughly checked over in advance for any heart problems, to make sure that coming face to face with me would not bring on a heart attack!
The doubts began to creep in almost immediately. To me, it seemed obvious that a lot of the things planned for the show weren’t going to work. Some were gimmicks that seemed doomed to total and utter failure—for example, having me look down on the contestants from this giant screen like some evil wizard, yelling and screaming at them. In the first few shows, the producers kept telling me, “Scream at them. You know—‘You idiot, you moron!’ that sort of thing!” to which I really did reply, “You cannot be serious! That’s such a dumb-ass thing to do.” I mean, what a cliché, right? Plus, it clearly wasn’t doing the contestants any good: they were already wound up so tight, sitting in that hot seat in front of a live audience, that every time I said “hello” to them, their hearts would leap out of their chests.
We started filming in early January with the first show going out less than two weeks later. At first, the majority of contestants failed to get below the right heart rate. One after the other they were eliminated as time ran out (the $5,000 they were given as a starting amount would drain away in, well, fifty seconds) before they could manage to bring their rate down from a pounding 140, 150 beats per minute. There was a lot of “Bring on the next contestant!” cheeriness on my part, but it was clear to me the show wasn’t working. It got to the stage where I was even saying to them, “Hey, calm down.” Me, of all people!
Some contestants were downright cocky when they came on but soon got the smile wiped off their faces. On one episode, this poor guy had as one of his big selling points—and I guess it was the reason he was picked to go on the show—that allegedly he was very sexy. Talk about setting yourself up for a fall! When I pressed him as to why
exactly women found him sexy, I watched with a mixture of pity and amusement as his heart rate shot up and he lost his ability to speak. He lasted fifty seconds before having to take the walk of shame.
Another guy came on and immediately started to act all tough, trying to cut me down to size, like I was too big for my breeches. “Hey, I’m cool,” I answered back jokingly, not rising to the bait. “Nah, you’re pretty wound up, John,” he countered. “Well, if I’m so uptight,” I replied, “why is your heart rate 175?” Truth was, I felt sorry for this guy with his faux-bravado. The fact was he could barely breathe, he was so nervous.
As contestant after contestant failed to make any progress, the producers freaked out. Eventually they scrapped the time limit and told me that we could sit there for as long as it took until people calmed down enough to have a question thrown at them. In the broadcast version, they would edit this dead screen-time, but from then on during shooting we would literally sit there, waiting, waiting, sometimes as much as twenty minutes. “Jeez,” I’d be thinking, “what am I doing here? This is so bogus!”
To make things worse, the so-called “heart-stopper” moments were about as frightening as a dog wagging its tail. One idea involved an alligator being let loose near the contestant. Scary, right? The poor beast was so tied up he couldn’t move—in fact, he could hardly breathe—and was freaking out more than the contestant. Then there was the swarm of bees—a thousand bees were shot down from the ceiling. Scary? You’ve got it. Of the thousand bees, I swear, nine hundred and ninety-nine were dead.
We soldiered on despite growing misgivings, and shot thirteen episodes in total, spread over three weeks. The show was due to go out weekly, Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on ABC. Unbelievably, the first week we had about 12 million viewers and 15 percent higher ratings than Charlie Sheen’s Spin City, which was the show we were replacing because it was on a hiatus. And when one review proclaimed The Chair “a huge hit,” I nearly fell over. Ratings soon started to come down, but we were holding up well, because the show was broadcast at a time when parents were watching with their kids. But after about four weeks, the men in suits told the producers that we were being moved to 9 p.m. against Everybody Loves Raymond, the number one show in the country at the time, no less. I thought: “Wait a minute, this is supposed to be a family show, but young kids are in bed by that time. Why don’t you just have us walk the plank?!”
In the end, they only aired nine out of the thirteen shows we’d taped, even though the numbers we were getting on the last episode would be considered amazing nowadays, enough to give us a top-ten show. Maybe I was crazy, but I believed in this show and thought it could be a hit if done properly, so when I was offered the chance to take the show over to Britain later that year, I figured it was worth one last try. I’d been something of a hit the previous summer when I’d joined the commentary team at Wimbledon. My supposedly “brutally honest punditry, combined with a surprisingly laid-back manner” apparently made me a suitable person to bring a new dimension to quiz shows on the esteemed BBC.
In this less extreme British version, the “heart-stopper” moments were eliminated, the emphasis placed on the more intellectual and psychological aspects of surviving the chair. My opening remarks “keeping the lid on your heart rate means the difference between winning and losing, something I should know a bit about” were followed by a montage of me acting up on court—boy, was this tedious for me—which the live audience never failed to enjoy. How long, I wondered, was this going to define me? Or, more to the point, how long was I going to let it define me? Did I want to stop doing that angry shtick or should I simply accept that it was a part of me, for better or for worse? To be honest, at that stage I still hadn’t figured it out.
I was surprised at the amount of time that was wasted on set in the BBC version of the show, with people who were supposed to be working seeming to spend hours doing not very much at all. I’d walk around asking what was happening and find half the crew in the bar because union rules said they had to have a tea-break—and let me tell you, they were not drinking tea. Eventually, I thought “to hell with it,” and had a beer or two with them. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? Plus I figured they might be on to something: so what if we weren’t working the whole goddam time—why not relax a little?
The fact that for days the chair itself wouldn’t even work—it didn’t go up or down—was a bad omen from the start. The show saw out its ten-week run but seemed to have no prospect of coming back. On the plus side, I learned a lot from the experience, in particular that it was best not to take everything so seriously or else I’d end up tearing my hair out. I must have taken that lesson on board, because fifteen years later I’ve still got a bit of hair left on my head.
The Chair had been no walk in the park, but there were some things about making my first TV show as a host that I’d really enjoyed on both sides of the Atlantic: the buzz, the adrenaline of the shoot, the response of the audience. Some aspects of it reminded me of tennis. I liked the way you had to improvise your responses in the moment because there was a limit to how much you could prepare. The main difference for me was that on the court—or in the commentary box—I had a clear idea of what I was doing, I knew my trade. The game show format was new to me, so I was learning. OK, it didn’t work out; but as an athlete, I’ve had to learn to view that sort of situation not as a failure but as a chance to improve.
Over that spring, I had meetings with various people including Brad Grey—founder of Brillstein-Grey, one of Hollywood’s biggest agencies, and later head of Paramount Pictures and a major player in Hollywood—who approached me at a party. My own agency assigned me a TV agent, Chuck Bennett, and at one stage we heard that ABC—who had the rights to the NFL Monday Night Football, one of the highest-rated programs on TV—were looking to add someone who was not an American football specialist to the mix. They wanted a “personality” who knew a bit about football, which sounded perfect for me. What made it even more appealing was that initially they talked about using three or four different people to do four games each over the course of the sixteen-game season, which would have allowed me to keep up with my other commitments.
But the next thing I heard, comedian Dennis Miller, who happens to be a good friend of mine, got the job all to himself. As it happened, he only lasted two years, so maybe it was just as well I didn’t get the gig—even though I was pretty pissed when I found out.
I read the news that he’d got it in the morning paper before playing an exhibition match with Jimmy Connors. As we were in the limo on the way to the arena I called Chuck and asked if he’d actually put my name forward to ABC. Chuck hemmed and hawed and said, “You wouldn’t have gotten it anyway, John, they were looking for someone in entertainment, not sports.” I fired him soon afterward, and from then on Gary Swain became my TV agent too. I don’t think Chuck is losing too much sleep about this now, after running IMG Models for more than twenty years and leaving the company with a payout of tens of millions. You don’t have to thank me, Chuck!
Monday Night Football soon went back to an all-football booth, and I carried on keeping my ear to the ground for the next opportunity. That’s the thing: you go knocking on doors, you try to make sure your name is being considered, you wait for the callback, and in the end, so much of it comes to nothing. You have to keep putting yourself out there.
I didn’t have to wait too long for my next chance to stand in front of a camera. I’d had a cameo role in Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds, which had recently come out and was a big hit. Obviously blown away by my one, scene-stealing moment—throwing eggs at passing cars—the producers got down on their hands and knees and begged my agent to allow them to cast me in his next movie, appropriately called Anger Management.
OK, what really happened was that because of the success of Mr. Deeds, I thought it would be cool if I could be in the next one, especially as none other than Jack Nicholson would be starring. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have the opportunity to sho
ot a scene with such a legend? I’d enjoyed my previous experience of filming with Adam, and it had turned out well, so when I next ran into him, I joked, “Anger Management? I gotta be in this movie. It’s right up my alley. Come on, man, you can’t even think about doing this movie without me…” And as he’s such a nice guy, he agreed.
It wasn’t easy to find a time when I was free to join the shoot in LA and film my scene with Jack Nicholson. We finally managed to find one right at the end of May. What made it a little tougher was that I had to fly out there from New York, and the following day I was contracted with NBC to commentate on the French Open in Paris. This was quite a lot of traveling to take on so I told Adam, “Listen, don’t force it, if this is going to be a pain in the ass, don’t worry about it.” “No, no, it’ll be great,” he reassured me, and sent me the script.
In the film, Adam was playing a mild-mannered guy who has to have anger management counseling following a huge argument on a flight—something that I’ve come close to doing a few times, especially when I’ve been seated next to one of those people who the moment the plane lands yell into their cell phone that they’ve landed.
Once on set, I realized that a lot of the writing was getting done at the last minute, or that Adam was improvising there and then. He told me to go see Jack in his trailer. Jack was playing the anger management counselor, and it soon became clear to me that he hadn’t even looked at the script and that he too would be winging it on set. It gave me a lot more respect for these guys, seeing the way they can turn up and ace it, no matter what.
In my scene, I’m cast as myself, I’m in an anger management help-group and end up shouting at Jack Nicholson: “I play tennis, you dumb-ass!” “I think we’re going to need another session or two, Johnny Mac. You’re back in the group,” responds Jack, calmly. “Are you insane, Doc? You said I was out!” I shout right back. “You’re in!” he explodes. “Out!” And so on. You get the picture. It was fun, going face to face with Jack, both of us red-faced and screaming at each other. It hadn’t even taken me long to learn my lines!