by John McEnroe
The guests that evening were actor and comedian Tom Arnold (who used to be married to Roseanne Barr), New York comedian Todd Barry, and Éric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin, the three-Michelin-star restaurant here in Manhattan. It all went well with the American guests. But when it came to Mr. Ripert, a proud Frenchman, I admit I may have mentioned somewhere during the interview—because let’s not forget, this was not long after 9/11—that the French weren’t exactly supporting the Americans in the war on terror. I’d hardly called them cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but as far as Mr. Ripert was concerned the atmosphere deflated as fast as a soufflé in an ice-box. During the taping, I didn’t particularly notice and thought the show went well, but Éric Ripert never forgot. Over the years he seemed to get more and more pissed about it, until it reached a point where he was asked in an interview, “Who is the one person you wouldn’t serve in your restaurant?” And he named me. Can’t say I didn’t feel like shit about that. (Luckily this feud was laid to rest after Patty found herself sitting next to his wife at a charity lunch and they overcame some initial awkwardness to discover that they got on really well.)
After taping the show, it was still early evening, so I was able to go on to a benefit evening for an autism charity that Adam Sandler supported. There, riding high from my supposed success, and still running on adrenaline, I bumped into Jon Stewart, who had not long before started his Daily Show—which went on to (deservedly) become an incredible success, until he stepped down in February 2015. But when I told Jon what I’d just done, and bearing in mind how big The Late Show was, he couldn’t help himself: “You mean you actually hosted The Late Show?” Did I detect a note of sheer incredulity in his voice? Jealousy even? “Yeah, I agree, Jon, how the hell did I get the gig?” I nearly replied. It was a legitimate question, and no, I didn’t have a good answer.
In November 2003, Andy Roddick—also known as A-Rod—was at the peak of his Hall of Fame career, ranked number one in the world, having won what turned out to be his only Grand Slam title by beating that year’s French Open champion Juan Carlos Ferrero in the US Open. This qualified him for an honor that I have never been able to attain: hosting Saturday Night Live, the late-night satirical sketch and comedy show. That show had incredible ratings, it’s been running for forty years, and it’s always hosted by someone—an actor, comedian, athlete, whoever—who is riding high in popular culture at the time.
I’d long wanted to do it, but whenever I’d been asked back in the 1980s, when I was the top player in the world and had a certain, let’s say, notoriety, I’d always said no, either because I was too busy or because my dad—who handled my financial affairs in those days—thought they weren’t offering enough money. No, actually it was me who thought they weren’t offering enough, but in retrospect I realize that wasn’t the point—dumb-ass! It was a bad call on both our parts, because once I was no longer so hot, I wasn’t getting asked anymore. And the show went on to have all sorts of athletes like Michael Jordan and Chris Evert as hosts, so I would have been in good company.
From the start, Saturday Night Live has mostly been produced by a good friend of mine, Lorne Michaels. Lorne and I were at a Yankees baseball game together when he told me that Andy Roddick was going to be hosting the show. “What? Wait a second now!” “Yeah, but he’s going to need a bit of help and it would be great if you could be, like, his sidekick.” “Thanks a lot!” I felt like saying. But I figured it might be the nearest I got to the gig, so I told him, “Sure,” trying to sound pleased.
At the start of the show, the host always does a monologue to camera, so Andy had to say, “Good evening, I’m Andy Roddick, you may know me from winning the US Open this year,” or words to that effect. I was sitting in the audience and had to interrupt him with, “Wait a minute, why are you hosting it? I’ve won seven Grand Slams, you’ve won one!” “Ah, McEnroe it’s you,” Andy replied. “What are you doing here?” And so on. OK, so I didn’t get to host it properly, but I was still involved in several of the sketches and it was a fun thing to do. Maybe TV might have something for me after all.
I’d been having meetings on and off for a couple of years with various people about the possibility of hosting a talk show of my own. Patty has always described me as a loquacious athlete—meaning, I guess, that I like to talk—so I thought it could potentially be an interesting option. Sometimes it was with the Letterman people, sometimes I was talking to David Hill, the legendary Aussie producer from Fox, who was talking me up and offering me a once- or twice-weekly sports show, though it was not clear to either of us in exactly what format. Then a producer named Douglas Warshaw approached me at a party thrown by a mutual friend and said he was putting together a talk show for CNBC, a cable network belonging to NBC. They were looking to get some new viewers in an evening slot where the station had traditionally performed poorly (CNBC’s well-heeled viewers almost always switched off when the stock market closed). They were opening the door to people and he had these grandiose ideas: “Wow, it would be great if we did this together, it’s gonna be incredible, we can do anything, come on in with us, John”—that sort of thing.
I’d been in the game long enough to know that this kind of talk was meaningless until a contract was on the table. But all the same I was seduced by the idea of a talk show—different guests, music, comedians and a chance to go broader than just sports, just tennis. This was something I thought could be new and exciting for me. So I sat tight and waited, hoping the offer would turn into a reality. And it did. In January 2004, the contracts were signed for a commitment of forty-two weeks of shows, 168 episodes, starting in July, right after Wimbledon. In theory, the show was to run indefinitely, like Letterman or Leno. Jay Leno was kind enough to call me, welcoming me to the talk show hosting club and wishing me luck. As it turned out, I was going to need it.
During the next few months, we got down to planning the show. Who knew there were so many things to think about? Should there be a desk? Should there be a backdrop? A sofa? An armchair? Should it be straight talk, even political? Funny, reverent, irreverent? All of these things? None of these things? The discussions rumbled on endlessly. Should we have a co-host? Should the co-host be a woman? Should it be an athlete? Should it be an unknown? A comedian?
We met with a number of people before Doug suggested John Fugelsang, a guy who’d hosted a late-night political talk show, Politically Incorrect. He did seem the best of the bunch, but I wasn’t convinced, and strongly felt we should meet with some more people before deciding. But Doug was telling me again and again that this was gonna work, no problem. Meanwhile, we were getting nearer and nearer to the first show and we still weren’t agreeing on a whole lot. Plus I had to go off to work the French Open and Wimbledon for two weeks each, so time was running out.
The first show was scheduled for July 7, 2004, because CNBC was trying to capitalize on me being in the public eye during Wimbledon. The problem was I arrived completely burnt out after two weeks of long hours in the commentary booth. Nonetheless we started taping the creatively named McEnroe. There were to be four shows a week, Monday to Thursday. These would be filmed in front of a live audience, even though it soon became clear that it wasn’t easy to get people out to where we were taping in New Jersey, so the logistics weren’t working.
Despite me managing to get Will Ferrell as my first guest, and Patty writing a great theme song, things didn’t start out too well. It was obvious to me that my co-host John Fugelsang and I had no chemistry. Early on, he ended up missing a show because something unfortunate had happened—an unexpected death or something—and then the plane he was on had engine trouble. At the start of the next show, I got on him a bit, just kidding—“Hey, you didn’t even turn up for the show. Nice!” It was meant to be tongue in cheek, but he took it personally and, in retrospect, I don’t blame him.
Then there was the station itself. This was a business cable network that was all about talking stock markets, so we were hidden away upstairs in a separate of
fice, far from the main action. We stuck out like sore thumbs. One time, for example, the reggae band Toots and the Maytals came in and Toots was smoking so much weed you could smell it from a mile away. There were all these buttoned-up business people running around and then all of a sudden here was this reggae legend who was preparing in a different way than the suits were used to, which I thought was sort of funny. Judging from their faces, the CNBC executives absolutely did not see the humor in it.
Being McEnroe on McEnroe wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds. For a start, there was the problem of who came on the show. CNBC was not exactly a natural stop-off for celebrities, actors, musicians or those strutting their stuff. The studio being in New Jersey didn’t help either. So I had to work extra hard to get the guests. It may have been naive of me to think that part would be easy, but as I said, this was a business cable network and it soon became apparent that it was extremely difficult to get the right kind of people, because if you looked down the list of talk shows, the pecking order of the ratings decided whether a publicist brought an A-lister on. George Clooney? Brad Pitt? Are you kidding? I didn’t want to be constantly calling in favors from famous friends—“Hey, come on my show”—but that was what I ended up doing. How else would I have managed to get Elton John and Tom Hanks, even if I had to interview Tom in a hotel room in between Good Morning America and the other big shows he was doing. And boy, did we milk that interview, cutting it into segments and making it into the entire show.
Jeff Koons came on, who as I mentioned earlier is one of the biggest artists in the world. I loved the idea of having guys like him on the show. “Artists suck,” I was told. Terrible for ratings. Plus, Jeff wanted to bring in this contraption—one of his pieces—but it cost money, and that pissed off the producers. I was given seven minutes with him—seven minutes!—because apparently no one knew who Jeff Koons was, even though I thought (and still do think) he’s a much more interesting interviewee than most of the people I ended up talking to. I should’ve put my foot down and done what I wanted. I didn’t know what the hell Jeff was talking about that day, but I loved it, and I should’ve had him on for half an hour—hell, why not? No one was watching anyway.
I have a special appreciation for artists—and stand-up comedians—because, like tennis players, they’re out there by themselves. That’s part of the reason I love art, because I realize artists have to expose themselves to criticism, just like we do on a court. There’s always the potential to embarrass ourselves, and we have to learn how to deal with that. For tennis players, it’s not about who hits the tennis ball better, because a lot of people can do that. It’s about getting over jet lag, getting over the nerves, getting over fear of failure—and actual failure—among other things, because very rarely do things go the way you want them to.
For artists, there’s this constant process of appraisal and rejection, especially with abstract or conceptual art—“What the hell is that? It sucks. My kid could do better.” That sort of stuff. So I respect them for putting themselves through that, I admire them for having the guts to put themselves and their work on the line, and as a result I’m interested in them as characters. But the producers on the show saw things differently.
Most of the time I felt the guests were people the network needed to promote. The interviewing wasn’t easy, either. I didn’t want to dump on guests who were, let’s face it, doing us a favor coming on the show by putting them in an awkward position or prying into their lives. But I did want to ask more than the standard superficial questions. For me, Letterman was a great example of how it should be done. If you were doing well, he’d let you go on, but if you were doing badly, he’d try to pick you up or help you out. That’s the key, but often it wasn’t easy to do.
For one thing, guys like Letterman have fifteen or twenty writers helping them, whereas McEnroe was quite a low-budget show, so I didn’t have any writers in the beginning. Yeah, I had segment producers, and they were talented, but they were already trying to do too much with too little. And despite the best efforts of everyone who worked on the show, it was an uphill battle.
All too often, the conversation I’d script in my mind—the one I wanted to happen—didn’t materialize. I remember one guy who came on to promote his new show and as I interviewed him, I thought, “This guy’s giving me nothing. It’s like getting blood out of a stone.” He didn’t care. If the audience could have heard the conversation I was having with myself during that dull-as-hell interview, there would have been a very different vibe in that studio. “Hey, you’re fifty pounds overweight—have you ever thought of working out? If you had the energy to work out, you might have some energy to answer my goddam questions!” Better it stayed all in my mind, right?
Because it was my show and I was the one coming up with the questions, I could ask anything I wanted. Well, that was the theory anyway. When I asked Amy Poehler and Will Arnett—both of whom I’m still friendly with, by the way—about how tough it was to be married while one of them was living in LA and the other in New York, I didn’t think I was doing anything horrible. They’re professionals so they answered the question—or questions, because I threw in a few follow-ups—but I heard they were pissed afterward and Patty told me I’d gone too far. As it happened, they got divorced five or so years later, citing those east-west problems, so I’d obviously gotten too close to the bone. But it wasn’t like I was trying to break them up or anything.
Who knew being a talk show host was so hard? I guess TV is the same as sports—the professionals make it look easy. I have to admit, most of the time I was bored listening to people’s answers. I wasn’t a natural at the interviewing, but I was getting better, and with a bit of guidance maybe I could’ve at least learned to seem interested in the stuff my guests were telling me. But that kind of firm but gentle hand to push me along the right road was exactly what the show lacked.
I should have seen the warnings. I’d run into trouble early on. Laird Hamilton—who’s also a good friend of mine—was on. He’s one of the greatest surfers of all time (his mother gave birth to him in an experimental salt-water sphere, and he’s been in the water ever since) and one of the few people I know who’s as competitive as I am. My good friend Marshall Coben tells a story about the time he got caught in the crossfire of a fitness duel between the two of us and barely made it out alive.
Laird’s whole thing is to ride the biggest waves in the world—if there’s a hundred-foot wave, he’ll be on it; this guy is nuts!—and he was promoting his latest documentary. So it was all set up to be a really good segment. Unfortunately, right before the show started, I’d had a fight with the producer about wearing an earpiece. I hadn’t wanted one in the first place—I told them “Letterman doesn’t wear one, Leno doesn’t wear one”—but they insisted it was necessary, because they wanted to use it to feed me questions or tell me to cut guests off who they thought were boring. So I’d be sitting there, trying to get a conversation going, while a voice shouted in my ear: “Get these people off!” I knew that wasn’t going to happen with Laird, but to make it even more of a party I’d decided to bring Patty out—she’s also a good friend of his. She’d come on the show a couple of times already, and because she’s got a good sense of humor, she’d been more help to me than my co-host. Patty was waiting in the wings as I turned to the audience and said, “Hey, I’m going to bring on my wife here,” but right as I said it, I heard them say into my earpiece, “Don’t do that. Don’t bring her on!”
Later, they claimed it was because she wasn’t miked up, but I was seriously pissed. At the end of the show I went up to Doug Warshaw and told him, “If you ever say that to me again, I’m going to punch you in the mouth.” I was as angry as I’ve ever been—and that’s saying something. I was so angry, I asked the men in suits to get rid of Doug, but the guy in charge said, “Listen, John, Doug is going to be here, we’re not going to fire him.” So I went home, calmed down, and returned the next day. As soon as we finished filming, the head of CN
BC brought me into his office: “I just fired Doug.” “Are you fucking serious?” I thought. “You told me yesterday you were keeping him.”
Was I right to have behaved in the way I did? Maybe not, but if there’s one thing I’ve always done it’s speak my mind. It’s got me into trouble in the past, as everyone knows, but at least people know what I’m thinking. I’ve always been like that because it’s how I was brought up. We were a noisy family—three brothers, parents who had opinions—we argued, we were straight to the point, and everyone learned to speak up. I know I’ll always be like that, even though, believe it or not, nowadays I do sometimes try to count to ten.
Anyway, to replace Doug Warshaw they hired Woody Fraser, who I was told was an experienced talk show producer. Yes, he was, but that was in the seventies, and now he was a hundred years old. He seemed like a nice guy, but I sure wasn’t convinced by his ideas to turn the show around. “Throw it against the wall and see what sticks. Do dumb-ass tricks,” he told me (or words to that effect). “Put yourself in idiotic positions.” We still had guests, but now I’d have to go outside the studio and do stunts, throwing baseballs with a pitcher to see how fast I could throw them, or get in a car and do some stupid thing with the driver. Some people found this funny, but to me it felt lame. Obviously, I’ve been wrong a few times in my life and subsequent events suggest I was wrong about this, too. Hey, Jimmy Fallon, thanks for stealing the act I didn’t want!
The whole thing came to a head in early December. By then the ratings were shockingly low. And the rest of my life was still going on around the show. I had to make a decision about the Australian Open, because if I didn’t commit to commentating on the next one, they were going to get someone else. That someone else turned out to be Jim Courier, who I have to admit has done a good job. So I lost that gig and then, guess what? A couple of weeks later, I was at London’s Royal Albert Hall playing the ATP Champions Tour when I got a call from Jeff Zucker, head of NBC. “We’re canceling the show,” he told me. It was two in the morning, my time, so you can imagine how well that went. He gave me an option to do the last two weeks or “it can end right here and now.”