by John McEnroe
As it was coming up to Christmas I did the last two weeks so that the crew would get paid. Those turned out to be some of our best shows—or at least the most fun—because we were winging it, and we actually had a couple of writers by then. The one with actor Ryan Reynolds where we had tequila during the show really pissed the producers off. They threatened to pull us the next day, so we calmed down and finished as rowdily as we could but without the alcohol. It wasn’t pretty, but funnily enough, given that we had a death sentence hanging over us, there was real life in those final shows.
The cancellation of McEnroe was a blow. We all want to be successful at what we do, but though I was upset, I was also relieved. The reason I’d taken the show was because I thought I’d be able to pay my dues for a couple of years and learn my trade. If I’d got the hang of being a talk show host and enjoyed doing it, then I might’ve been ready for the next step. Kind of like Jimmy Fallon. Don’t get me wrong, he’s way more talented than I am, with his impressions and his natural wit, but even he took some time to figure it all out. Now he’s at the top of his game. He’s like the Federer who won his first Wimbledon and then all of a sudden he’s Roger Federer.
If I’m honest, the talk show was a full-time job that I wasn’t doing totally full-time—either in reality or in my mind. I tried to work nine to five, whereas the production people lived and breathed it. They would look at me, like “What’s wrong with you? You’ve got to be here from eight in the morning until nine at night.” But as far as I was concerned, I was already doing more than enough—I always seemed to be reading some book or checking out some movie that had to do with the next person on, and by the time the show ended I was completely drained and needed a break.
Alongside the chance for some much-needed time with my family, one of the big upsides of the end of McEnroe was being able to go back to having a level of variety in my life that a forty-two-weeks-a-year talk show was never going to allow me. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the talk show game. I felt I’d done the best I could, and if that wasn’t good enough, well, so be it. Better to try and fail than not try at all. I’d just have to find a different way to bounce back.
7
“Champions keep playing until they get it right”
Billie Jean King
In the summer of 2003, I’d been back in the commentary booth at Wimbledon. No one knew it at the time—least of all me—but as I watched Roger Federer win the first of his seven Wimbledon titles, I was watching the dawn of a new era. What’s incredible—with hindsight, and given who he has become—is that back then no one was totally convinced about Federer. Sure, people had been talking about him for a while as the next big thing, especially after he’d beaten Pete Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001. But by this time he was almost twenty-two, and in the Slams he hadn’t gotten further than the quarters, so there was a question mark over whether he was ever going to get it together enough to win one Grand Slam title, let alone eighteen (at the time of this writing!). No one was jumping up and down shouting, “This guy is going to be the greatest player, just you watch!” Even so, I believe the expectation of what he might be capable of was getting to him. Yes, I know, Roger Federer!
I remember watching the match he played in the round of sixteen, against Feliciano López, a solid, talented Spaniard. It was out on the old court number 2, which used to be called “the graveyard of champions” because it had been the scene of so many upsets. Roger seemed to be having back problems during the match, and it looked like he may even quit. I think part of it was the stress, but to me he definitely had that look in his eye as if he might throw in the towel. At the time some people thought he was a bit soft, both physically and emotionally. But then, he suddenly seemed to decide that he wanted to hang in there: he found another gear mentally, and he somehow gritted his teeth and got himself through that match. I could see him digging deeper, finding that something within himself, a way to want it more, and he ended up winning in straight sets and racing through the rest of the tournament without dropping a set, beating Mark Philippoussis in the final. For me, that was the turning point in his career. It was after that match that he started becoming the Roger Federer we all know, perhaps the greatest player that has ever lived. If he hadn’t won? Who knows.
Winning your first Slam is always a game-changer for a player—both in your own head and in the way other people see you. Suddenly you’re on another level from the other pros, a potential title contender wherever you go. My own first Grand Slam title win was at the US Open in 1979. I was twenty years old, and up against my fellow New Yorker Vitas Gerulaitis, who was four years older than me. This was the guy who had taken me under his wing and become my friend and mentor, and I was feeling uncomfortable about having to play him now in what was the biggest match of either of our careers. The crazy thing was, here we were, two guys from Queens, and we actually got booed by the New York crowd. Why? They’d wanted a Connors–Borg final and we’d gone and spoiled it for them. Too bad. I didn’t care. I’d had a great run in the tournament, I’d beaten Connors easily to get to the final, so I felt like it was my year.
On the day, I was able to put my relationship with Vitas aside and ended up beating him in straight sets. Now I had taken my place at the top along with Connors and Borg. Vitas could’ve held that against me, but he never did. In fact, he even took me out with him on the night I beat him. Straight after the final he asked me, “What are you doing later?” I replied, “What are you doing?” Because I knew whatever he was doing was going to be a hell of a lot better than what I might have planned! I guess there’s more than one way to be a winner.
Pete Sampras, one of the great American champions, had gone out of tennis in a way few athletes in any sport do—right at the top. In what turned out to be his last match on the main tour, he beat his great rival Andre Agassi to win the 2002 US Open. Even Pete knew it was special to have won that one, his fourteenth Grand Slam title, saying it “might take the cake,” which was about the most emotional thing he’d ever done on court. Until the next year’s US Open, that is, when there was an on-court ceremony on the first evening to commemorate his retirement. Pete is the best fast-court player ever, in my opinion, and ranks alongside my all-time idol Rod Laver as one of the true greats of the game. So I was honored to take part in the ceremony, along with Jim Courier and Boris Becker, and to say a few words about him in front of a full house at the Arthur Ashe Stadium. I even got a laugh out of Pete by thanking him for “kicking my ass every time we played and taking away all my records,” and he displayed some very un-Sampras-like emotion by shedding tears as he was given a standing ovation.
Champions come and champions go, but the game goes on forever. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what the qualities are that make a great one, but you almost always know them when you see them. The next few years after Federer won that first Wimbledon would see the emergence of three more.
In October 2004, I flew to London for the inauguration of Superset tennis, an eight-man knockout event played over one set or eight games, winner takes all. The organizers encouraged crowd participation, the coaches (for those who had one—I didn’t) were allowed courtside for thirty seconds at the change of ends, wired up so the crowd could hear them give their advice, and the players were encouraged to call for Hawk-Eye on close line calls, which would then be played in slow motion on large plasma screens. Perfect for me, right?
Pretty much, as it turned out. Tim Henman was injured, so the seventeen-year-old Andy Murray was put in his place. And in front of a noisy crowd of ten thousand fans at Wembley Arena, I found myself—age forty-five—playing this youngster on whom so many British hopes were pinned. God knows, every time I used to set foot in Britain, I’d get asked if I thought Tim could win Wimbledon. I was too diplomatic to say so at the time, but if I’m honest, I didn’t think he’d ever lift that trophy. Yes, he was a very good player—you can’t reach the Wimbledon semis four times without being that. But Andy? I could tell straightaway that he
was going to be a champion: he had a lot of natural skills, all he needed was a little seasoning. It’s impossible to say how far a player is going to go because you don’t know what’s going to happen with the mental or the physical side, and Andy wasn’t as strong then on either of those as he is now. But I’d started to hear good things about him, so that day I wanted to see what he had to offer.
Those teenage years are all about learning, and I’d like to think my 6–1, twenty-four-minute win did Andy a favor by showing him there was still work to do. Or maybe I’m kidding myself and he was being kind to the old American guy. According to the British press, I served up my volleys with “cold eyes,” but what I did to Andy was the same thing I keep expecting people to do to this day: attack the second serve, which was much weaker then than it is now. Since that time, he’s improved his defense and also added a bigger variety of shots. He’s in great shape, he’s strong, and his game is still improving—particularly his offense—which is how he got to be number one in the world at the end of 2016. In any event, that was the only time I’ve ever played Andy, and hey, I’ve got a 1–0 winning record against him, which I can’t say I’m unhappy about.
The next spring, Rafael Nadal played his first ever French Open at Roland-Garros. And won it. He was a few days over nineteen years old. You could see right away that he was the best clay-courter around. It was that obvious. He’d been injured in 2004 with a stress fracture to his left ankle, so he hadn’t been able to play. Otherwise, he probably would have won that year too.
I’d heard about Rafa but I hadn’t really seen him play, and not on clay, but as soon as I saw him, I was like, “Whoa!” His build was amazing for a teenager because he already looked like a grown man. The last player I’d seen like that had been Boris Becker when he took Wimbledon by storm in 1985—only seventeen but with those great tree-trunk legs. But Rafa was different—he was so upper-body developed as well. We were advised not to have too much muscle up there (this was easy advice for me to take, because I never had any muscles), but he was the opposite. And the clothes he wore made that even more evident, with his sleeveless shirts that showed off those bulging biceps, and the pirate-style shorts. What with the sweat pouring off him, the fist-pumping, the cries of “Vamos!” Rafa had this unique warrior look about him.
So now tennis had Roger Federer, with his effortless, quiet, graceful game that was dominating grass-court tennis and looking pretty unbeatable elsewhere too. The arrival of a guy whose grunting, physical, sweat-drenched style was clearly going to dominate clay-court tennis for a while initiated what will be looked back upon as a golden age of men’s tennis. Over the past dozen or so years, I’ve been lucky enough to witness, commentate and give my opinion on some of the most incredible matches ever to be played by two of the greatest players ever to pick up a racquet. It was like the Beatles and the Stones—take your pick. It’s a win-win.
These two monumental talents could not have had more contrasting styles. In the space of a couple of years, we’d gone from having no particular player dominating the sport since Pete Sampras in the 1990s, to having two guys who would take the game up to another level, who were going to dominate it and represent it in an impressive way for another ten years. Here were two totally contrasting class acts and it was exactly what tennis needed. Novak Djokovic and, to some extent, Andy Murray caught up with them eventually, but the influence of Roger and Rafa on the world sports stage, especially because they came along at more or less the same time and were so different from each other, would be a blessing for the sport.
When I was growing up, tennis was not the coolest sport to play—some people say it became cooler because I played it! To be fair, it was already changing as I came through—Connors and Nastase and most of all Björn Borg were laying the groundwork. Before long, more clubs were popping up, more public courts were being built, and most importantly more people seemed to be playing. The sport was exploding, and I was a part of that. It was amazing, to the extent that we’d be on the front page of the sports section all the time, which tennis rarely is now, even though the greatest player that ever lived is playing—possibly the two greatest, Nadal and Federer.
If people ask me who I think edges it out of those two, I usually say that there have been times when Nadal was better, but overall I think Roger is the better player. Of course there’s an argument the other way, because Nadal’s record against Federer is so much better. I think Roger’s probably been more consistent over time, but then Rafa’s been injured more often… In the end, playing on anything medium to slow, I’d pick Nadal, but on a fast court, I’d pick Federer.
Djokovic has now given them both something to think about, and for a long time watching him struggling to break through reminded me of how it felt for me, trying to get up there with Connors and Borg. But Djokovic has taken it past what I did—he’s really shaken it up. The irony is that, even though he’s probably become a better player than I was, and than Roger and Rafa are now, they’re still way bigger than him.
In their own world, all three of these guys are giants—Mount Rushmore guys—but that’s not reflected in the sports pages, at least in America. These days the coverage has been reduced to a few lines, “Nadal beats so-and-so,” or “Federer loses.” The lack of American contenders definitely hurts on the home front. When Murray won Wimbledon for the first time, all of a sudden the BBC ratings were double what they had been when Nadal played Federer in the greatest match ever. That hometown (or home country) player thing makes a huge difference. Thank God for Serena and Venus, and hopefully there are some new American champions just around the corner in the men’s game.
8
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”
Groucho Marx
As I’m lucky enough to have been friends with a few musicians over the years, I’ve attended a number of ceremonies when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although the actual Hall of Fame is located in Cleveland, Ohio, these events generally took place at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, because I guess it’s more convenient for a lot of people to get to (me included).
In March 2005, it was the turn of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, so I went along to support her—not that she needed it. What I found interesting was that Chrissie wasn’t too happy about the Hall of Fame thing. She thought it was bullshit, and I’m sure she still thinks that. At the time I told her to try to enjoy the ceremony and celebrate the fact that she was now a Hall of Famer, but I think she disagreed with the whole concept of what it said about people as musicians: that one was supposedly better than another—who the hell were these people to decide? Although she did still show up, so it can’t have been totally meaningless to her, right?
Chrissie’s not alone in feeling ambivalent about these events. I subsequently went to Rock and Roll inductions where the people they were honoring weren’t even there. One of those was the great rock band Van Halen in 2007. I’d known Eddie Van Halen since the mid eighties. He had coincidentally—because I wasn’t yet with her—asked Patty to join the band as the singer after David Lee Roth left (she turned him down—luckily for me, or we might not be together). To me, Eddie is the greatest living guitar player, so I thought it was a no-brainer that the band was being inducted. The problem was that Eddie and his brother Alex, the band’s drummer, were locked in a bitter dispute with Sammy Hagar, the singer they’d gotten in instead of Patty—so they didn’t show up. They were also still feuding with David Lee Roth, so the only people who ended up being there were Sammy Hagar and the bass player, Michael Anthony. It was too bad neither of the guys who gave the band its name showed up. In fact, it was ludicrous, but that’s rock ’n’ roll for you.
It’s not that unusual to have no-shows in Rock and Roll inductions, and that probably says a lot about the difference between creative people and sports people. With sports, you can measure success. You know if one person is better at something than someone else, because they run fast
er, win more, or whatever. You can then decide to put them into their sport’s Hall of Fame in a fairly objective way. As a result, people in sports tend to appreciate when that happens to them and to at least look like they’re pleased. With creative careers—whether it’s the movies, art or music—to some extent it’s a matter of judgment. What does an Academy Award or a Grammy really say about you? Does it mean you’re superior to the guy who didn’t even get nominated? It’s hard to argue against an Olympic gold or a Wimbledon trophy and say it’s all meaningless bullshit. But if you disagree with the whole concept of handing out awards for something that you can’t measure, and which therefore feels arbitrary, then why show up to the ceremony?
Also, the Hall of Fame concept for sports has been going for a long time and it’s more fixed in our collective minds as something to be proud of than the rock ’n’ roll version. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, for example, was established back in 1954 at Newport, Rhode Island—incidentally by the founder of the tie-break, Jimmy Van Alen—and it’s officially sanctioned by the sport’s governing body, the International Tennis Federation.
So it feels like it’s a legitimate way to honor those who have done something for the sport, as happened when a feisty old lady named Dodo Cheney was inducted in the summer of 2005. For those of you who might have missed her career, Dodo was the first American to win the Australian Open, back in 1938. She reached the semis in six major singles tournaments, including the French Open and Wimbledon in 1946, and that same year had been number six in the world. An amazing competitor, always beautifully dressed, she was still winning tournaments at eighty-seven years old, which I loved. She’d once told Bud Collins, the veteran tennis journalist, “The more I played, the more I loved to win.” Sounded a bit like me. Is it any wonder that I’d long championed her induction?