But Seriously

by John McEnroe

  When I look back on what my parents achieved, they have definitely lived the American Dream. My dad was a real striver—the son of an Irish immigrant, he worked his way through night classes at law school and wound up as a partner of one of the biggest New York law firms. Dad was always an upbeat sort of guy, and once my career was up and running was often seen (and heard, “Come on, John!”) at Grand Slam tournaments, wearing his trademark white hat, watching from the stands as I played. He was always smiling and telling jokes, and loved to have people around.

  My mom, Kay, is a quieter sort of person, but still a badass. She was an operating room nurse by profession—so there was a real edge of steel to her—who then devoted herself full-time to her family when she had me and my two younger brothers.

  Here’s a story that kind of sums up my parents. Soon after I was born (in Wiesbaden, Germany, where my dad was in the Air Force) my parents moved back to the US, to an apartment in Flushing, Queens, near LaGuardia airport. By day, my dad worked as an assistant office manager at an advertising agency. By night, he went to Fordham University School of Law. When he’d finished his first year there, he proudly told my mom that he’d come second in his class. “See,” she said, “if you’d worked harder, you could have been first.” The next year he was.

  My brother Mark, who is three years younger than I am, is a corporate lawyer, and is now also my personal attorney, so he handles my legal business, as well as the administrative side of things. I trust him and he’s smart as a whip, which is useful when you’re working with someone like me and stuck between two tennis-playing brothers (never mind taking over running my business affairs from my dad, which it would’ve been very hard to get anyone outside of the family to do).

  Patrick was born four years after Mark and had a successful tennis career, mainly as a doubles specialist, but he was also a US Open singles quarter-finalist and got to the semis at the Australian Open. (I didn’t play in the tournament that year, and the other semi-finalists were Becker, Edberg and Lendl, so when Patrick was asked how he felt about getting that far, he said words to the effect of “What do you expect? The semi-finalists are Becker, Edberg, Lendl and McEnroe,” which I still think is one of the best responses to a journalist’s question in tennis history.) Patrick took over the US Davis Cup captaincy after me and, as well as being a regular commentator for ESPN, he would later become the head of the USTA’s junior development program for seven years. Unlike me, Patrick’s great at dealing with bullshit, which is why he was able to carry on in a set-up where I would have bailed out long before. On top of all that, Patrick and I regularly make up a fear-inducing doubles team on the seniors tour. Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves.

  Both my brothers are married with kids, one living in New York, the other in Connecticut, and we see each other regularly, so that’s a good thing. As with any group of siblings, there are the usual ups and downs, but looking at how we’ve turned out, I think you could say my mom and dad didn’t do a bad job of raising us.

  We were all brought up Catholic, because religion was something that had meaning for my parents. It still does—for them, but not for me. Maybe it’s the whole guilt thing that the Catholic faith seems to be so good at, but religion had long been a turn-off for me, even before the strange conversation with my mom that I’m about to describe. She called me up one day out of the blue, and we got talking about this and that. Then she finally explained why she’d called.

  Did I remember Father Byrns? she asked. Sure, I did. He was our parish priest for years at St. Anastasia’s where we used to go to church every week and where I went to kindergarten and first grade. He was this good-looking guy—the girls in particular seemed to love him—and everyone thought he was a great example of what you’d want a priest to be. So much so that when Tatum and I got married, he was the priest my parents wanted to marry us, so I agreed.

  “Well,” my mom announced, “you should go online and have a look, because it seems he’s been arrested and accused of pedophilia.” I was totally shocked. He was one of the last people I’d have thought would be doing anything close to that sort of thing. We talked about it some more, but I guess it just goes to show that you never know. Anyway, my mom was about to hang up at the end of our conversation, when she suddenly came out with what had really been bugging her: “Did he ever do anything to you?”

  No, thank God. I can’t explain away my tantrums by blaming my unsuppressed rages on the crimes of Father Byrns. I was lucky enough to have no such grim excuse for having sometimes behaved like a jerk, though God knows what might have happened to me if tennis hadn’t saved me from becoming an altar boy!

  My parents’ Catholicism has occasionally been a bone of contention in the McEnroe family, especially when it comes to Patty and me bringing their grandchildren up outside the church. My mom took our oldest son Kevin to be baptized in secret, to save him from burning in hell—or so she told me twenty years later! You can imagine the heated discussion which took place when Patty and I found out about that, though we decided not to have her charged with religiously motivated kidnapping.

  I must admit that as the years have gone on and my sons in particular have struggled to settle on a direction in life, I have at times wondered if I went too far in keeping religion completely out of their upbringing. Not because I think either of them would’ve been likely to embrace Catholicism—not with our genes—but at least the strictness of religion would’ve given them something else to push back against apart from Patty and me.

  The notion that work was vital was instilled in my brothers and me from a very young age, and the fear of being short of cash was one that was deeply ingrained in my mom, in particular. For example, when I took the first half of 1986 off because I was burned out and I wanted to spend time with Tatum and my newborn son, Kevin, my mom’s first words to me after I told her I would be rejoining the tour in early August were: “Thank God! Now you can buy some diapers for Kevin.”

  At the time I was mad at her—“How much is enough? Tell me. How much money do I have to make before you don’t have to say things like that?!” But looking back I can see that part of the need I have to keep working, to keep earning, comes from the way my parents were about money, and believe it or not I am grateful for that. Their work ethic, along with the strength of their marriage and their faith in the value of education, was part of what gave my brothers and me such a secure foundation to build on.

  My kids have been brought up in a more relaxed atmosphere in financial terms, but Patty and I have worked hard to prevent them from taking their family’s good fortune for granted. The whole tough love thing is called that for a reason, though: it’s tough. Not just for the kids, but for the parents too. Telling your kids “No, you can’t have that,” is something we’ve struggled with over the years, and I know we’re not alone in that in today’s affluent Western society. So many kids today seem to suffer from affluenza, and I don’t know what the cure for that is. As parents, all we can do is our best and what feels right at the time.

  From the moment I took that six months off from the tour when Kevin was born, right up to present times with our youngest, Ava, my role as a dad has been central to my life, and I’ve made it a priority to be at home as much as my crazy tennis life has allowed me. As difficult—even impossible—as it’s sometimes been to figure out the juggling of different schedules, I hope all my kids feel like they’ve been able to count on me being there for them when they’ve needed me.

  When my brothers and I were growing up, my parents were incredibly supportive and encouraging of us. They loved sports and loved playing tennis, so they’d come and watch us play the whole time. Too much, I sometimes thought, especially once I was on the tour, because I felt there was this additional pressure. My dad could be pretty demonstrative when he watched me play—I guess that’s not surprising, given what I sometimes was up to—but my mom was always more reserved. Either way, their presence didn’t necessarily help. Although I’ll admit th
at, when I was younger, I used to like having my mom there because if I lost, I could put my arms around her and cry, something that was no longer an option once I started playing Grand Slams and was supposedly a grown-up.

  At the other end of my career, I’ve had to balance my desire to keep on playing for as long as I can enjoy it with not wanting to overstay my welcome. When I played and won that doubles tournament in 2006, it wasn’t a case of seriously believing I could keep up with the younger guys, but it was a good feeling to know that I could still compete with them as an equal, at least on the doubles court. I’ve said many times that the doubles game nowadays is for the guys who are too slow to make it in singles. Deep down, even the top doubles guys know that, whatever some of them might say to the contrary. After all, if a forty-seven-year-old and a thirty-four-year-old can win an ATP doubles event, what does that say about the rest of the field?

  Another American former world number one was taking his final bows on the main tour in 2006. Where I’d kind of passed on the whole public farewell circus when I quit Grand Slam singles, Andre was very clear about the fact that he was retiring, and this gave him the opportunity to go out with the crowd behind him, supporting him, cheering him on. To be honest with you, I’m not sure which is the better way to do it.

  In any event, at Wimbledon Andre made it safely through the first couple of rounds. It was then that he came up against Nadal. Rafa had just won his second consecutive French Open, so he was without a doubt the top clay-court player in the world. But it didn’t seem like he had the game to dominate on grass. In the past, the Spanish contingent of clay-court specialists, guys like Carlos Moyá or Albert Costa, tended to give Wimbledon a miss, or if they played, they’d get mowed down in the early rounds. I remember wondering how the hell Rafa was going to play on grass. He’d gone out the previous year in the second round, he took those huge swings at the ball, so I figured he’d probably be lining up for another early exit, like so many of his countrymen. Just goes to show what I—and all those other so-called experts—know about the game.

  Andre also seemed to think he had a good chance against Rafa. And guess what? He was wrong as well. Totally. In his own autobiography, Open (which is a very good read, by the way), Andre remembers Rafa being “a brute, a freak, a force of nature… he annihilates me. The match takes seventy minutes.”

  What was interesting for me was that afterward Andre said that playing Nadal on grass was a total nightmare. Although I’d called the match for the BBC, watching Rafa was clearly not the same as having to return his shots, and at that stage I’d never hit with or played against him—that pleasure was yet to come—so I’d never have imagined it would turn out to be as one-sided as it was. OK, so he had that huge amount of topspin, but on grass it doesn’t have the same impact as on clay, it doesn’t jump up quite as high. He also had that incredible forehand, which caused Andre major problems, his movement was great, and he was so competitive on every point, as if every point was a match point, which all added up to a really tough package to handle. But Andre was always very smart about tactics, he analyzed the game very carefully, sized people up well, and knew what to do on a court. So when he said that it was a total nightmare to play Rafa on grass, not just on clay, it made me sit up and think, “Maybe I’d better look at this guy more carefully, he’s obviously not a one-surface player, and he is even better than we all realized.” If Andre, with all his skill and experience, couldn’t handle Rafa on grass, then this guy was the real deal. And he proved it by going right through the draw and straight into his first Wimbledon final, where it took all of Roger’s formidable talent to beat him in four sets.

  At that September’s US Open, I watched Andre make his emotional goodbyes to the home crowd and shuffle off court for the last time with that pigeon-toed walk of his to join the ex-pros on the dark side of that dividing line, the one where you have to find your own path, where it’s often unclear where you should be going, and where many former athletes stumble and fall. A month later I played what turned out to be my own very last main ATP tour doubles event—with Jonas Björkman at the Stockholm Open. I had one of those light-bulb moments—right in the middle of our match against third seeds Todd Perry and Simon Aspelin, as it happens—when I realized, “You know what? I’m bored by this.” That’s when I knew, “OK, enough is enough. Stop.”

  Unlike Agassi at his last match at the Open, I felt no emotion as I left the court for the last time as a regular tour player. I just had no desire to be out there anymore. I still loved to compete, but I’d done what I’d set out to prove, so now I could let it go. Actually it was a good feeling to quit in that way, because it involved a conscious decision on my part, and I knew that rather than masquerading as an occasional doubles player on the main tour, my future lay in competing in singles as well as I could, and for as long as I could, on the seniors circuit. So that’s what I continued to do.

  The best part of the whole year for me had nothing to do with tennis. It was filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David. If truth be told, I hadn’t watched much of the show up until then. I like stand-up comedy; I really admire comedians who put their neck on the line each time they get up there on their own and hope for some laughs. When I was younger, I loved to go out to the comedy clubs and see all the greats of the time perform—David Letterman, Chris Rock, even Jerry Seinfeld, who I thought was great (he lives one floor below me in our New York building now, so he’s not done too badly). I remember seeing Larry David then as well, but to be honest, he was terrible. At that point, he was what’s known as “a comedian’s comedian,” which basically means his peers liked him more than the crowd did. To me, he just wasn’t funny, and I don’t think I was the only one who felt that way, because he would come off stage all bent out of shape and go, “They don’t understand me, they’re a bunch of assholes,” in that typically Larry David kind of way.

  Anyway, fast-forward thirty years and Larry’s the toast of the town, the great comedy writer/performer who co-created Seinfeld and then came up with the semi-autobiographical HBO hit Curb Your Enthusiasm. My three oldest kids were huge fans, so when I got asked if I wanted to be in an episode in series five, they told me, “Dad, you’ve gotta do it!”

  I’d met Larry a few times but I didn’t really know him. When he called me up with the offer, it was already mid-December and I was finishing up a long year and was exhausted. Unlike other offers of film or TV work, where usually they say it’ll be the following month or even later, Larry told me we’d be filming in a couple of days. And the shoot involved me flying out to LA. Now, most people would be dying to do a Larry David show, right? But my first reaction was, “Who pulled out?”

  Larry never told me. “John, it’s not bad to be runner-up,” he shot back. “Hundreds of people would want this job.” Which was true. But what was also true was that it meant filming Friday, Monday and Tuesday, so I figured I’d be stuck out in LA for a weekend with nothing specific planned only a few days before Christmas. I felt I needed to at least create the impression that I was helping Patty get ready for the holidays, so I tentatively tried asking if there was any way they could film my scenes on three consecutive days, say Monday to Wednesday, because I knew that going off for yet another trip, this time at the very last minute, would not go down well with Patty when it seemed like I’d only just got back from a trip. It turned out, though, that Larry had had to get permits for two of the places we were filming—LA airport and the Staples Center—and those permits allowed for filming at specific times only and they couldn’t be changed.

  So I agreed—slightly reluctantly—and flew out to LA the next day. In the end, thankfully, Patty came too, so at least we got to spend some time together in the days before Christmas. My episode was called “The Freak Book.” There was no script, just an outline of what Larry wanted, so rather than me having to learn a ton of lines, we were sort of winging it the whole time, which I enjoyed. After reading the outline I found myself thinking, “How the
hell does he even come up with these ideas?” It was unbelievable—hilarious.

  At one stage, for example, I was in the back of a limo (playing myself—as usual; they never want me for Chekhov), with Larry as my driver, and he was questioning me about all these crazy things, which started to anger me, because I wasn’t prepared for half of them. But it worked. Between takes—and we only did a couple for each scene—Larry was going, “Yeah, I think we’re on to something.” So he obviously knew what he wanted and what he didn’t.

  In the Staples Center scene, I’d supposedly been driven by Larry to a Paul McCartney concert where I’d been invited to a pre-show party, which Larry then invites himself to. I’m like, “You’re the limo driver, you can’t come and meet Paul McCartney.” But eventually he talks me into it and I do invite him. Once inside, we’re looking at this book about freaks together and I say something like, “Oh my God, what a freak!” At that point everyone goes quiet because this is the exact moment when Heather Mills—who has only one leg and was Paul McCartney’s wife at the time—walks in. Of course Larry and I get thrown out of the arena and have to miss the show, and we’re yelling at each other outside: “Fuck you!”, “No, fuck you!” You get the picture.

  It was a lot of fun, and the whole thing ended up being one of my most enjoyable experiences of filming and a great way to end the year. The funny thing is, along with Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds, that episode of Curb remains one of the things that a lot of people most know me for. Not the tennis. Not the commentary. Just those two short moments on screen. Go figure.