by John McEnroe
Nowadays, people ask me all the time how different the game would’ve been for me if the challenge system had been around when I was on the tour. Truth is, if I’d been able to challenge bad calls, I would probably have been a 20 percent better player but a 40 percent more boring one, because at the time I absolutely 100 percent sincerely believed that these people—the umpires, the line judges—were screwing me. That was part of what gave me my edge.
And by the way, did it ever occur to me that, by sheer probability, I sometimes got calls that worked in my favor and my opponent was getting screwed over? Yes, sure. But my view on that was always that if my opponent wasn’t strong enough to stand up for himself, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do that for him. I mean, it was tough enough out there without fighting for the other guy as well. Others—like my Davis Cup captain, the late, great Arthur Ashe—used to tell me that mistakes even out.
There’s never been a full-on equivalent of me, or Connors, or Nastase in the women’s game—a player who would give the finger—but Serena Williams certainly put a marker down in her semi-final with Kim Clijsters at the 2009 US Open. Serena had already gotten herself a penalty warning when she was foot-faulted on a second serve at a set down, 5–6, 15–30 which was unfortunate, to say the least, because that put her at 15–40 and gave Kim two match points. There’s certainly a question of whether that sort of call should have been made at that key moment, given that it hadn’t happened all match. But once it did, Serena went crazy at the line judge, dropping the f-bombs big time, not letting go. In the end, the umpire gave her a penalty point, which then gave Kim the match.
It’s highly unusual to see one of the women behave like that, but it was certainly memorable. Given how big that match also was, that was the one time I consciously remember thinking, as I sat in the booth commentating, “Jesus, did I ever do anything this bad?” The short answer is: “I don’t think so, at least, never in a Grand Slam semi,” although my overall body of work certainly eclipses Serena’s in this area. Nice try, Serena—close, but no cigar.
13
“I watched you on TV and I don’t like what I’m seeing. Your serve’s off and your return, you need to move into it…”
Tony Palafox
In the summer of 2009, I got one step closer to achieving a long-held ambition when I sealed the deal to set up a tennis academy. I’d spent years searching for a way to set up a tennis program that would allow New York kids—and the idea was always to have kids from all kinds of backgrounds—to train regularly but still live at home and continue their education, like I did when I was growing up. It’s important to me that kids have a choice in their tennis training. It shouldn’t just be “go to Nick Bollettieri’s or forget it,” though I have to hand it to Nick, his academy has turned out quite a few champions over the years, so it must be doing something right.
It was shocking to me that not a single leading male player on the circuit had made it out of my home town since my brother, almost a quarter century before. I wanted to help change that, so I’d been talking to the USTA for years about setting up a tennis academy at the National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadow, but they looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. Former CEO Arlen Kantarian was very much in my corner, but he wasn’t in a position to pull the trigger on the money and he needed the USTA board’s approval, which perhaps had one too many ex-umpires or players that I’d had run-ins with over the years!
When they built this whole new $75 million indoor tennis facility which opened there in December 2008, I thought that would have been the ideal time to set up an academy with my name on it, considering I grew up in the borough, considering I won there four times, played and captained the Davis Cup, and now commentate there. Anyway, for whatever reason, it never happened. Maybe I wasn’t enough of a politician for them, I don’t know. Instead, in 2008, they appointed my more diplomatic brother Patrick as head of the USTA’s junior development program, so at least they got one McEnroe on the payroll.
Patrick’s new job meant that he had to resign as director of tennis from another tennis facility in New York. It was on Randall’s Island, north of Harlem but about as close to Manhattan as you can be and still have that kind of space. It’s also got very good facilities, which I’d say are arguably as good as the USTA’s. The club itself is part of a group owned and operated by Claude Okin. Claude is one of those guys who is just crazy about tennis, and has the luxury of being able to finance what I call his addiction, to the extent that he even paid through the nose for years to have me and others turn out in empty stadiums for his New York TeamTennis team. Thank God there are people like him around, is all I can say!
That summer, we had several meetings about what my role might be at the club, how the finances would work if we had a John McEnroe Tennis Academy based there, and in the end, we were able to cut a deal pretty fast. I was fired up to be involved with a program that I felt could help New York kids. Not only because I like working with young people and was excited about the idea of having some kind of legacy and giving something back to tennis, but the specific location of the academy was one I felt a real connection with.
Randall’s Island was a place where I used to play high school soccer. It was really run down back then, the baseball fields became a place for drug addicts to leave their needles, and there seemed to be broken glass all over the place. Most adults and a lot of the schools stopped going there. Fortunately, Mayor Bloomberg—who, by the way, is one of the richest men in the world—saw the potential to expand his own legacy and set up a foundation—now called the Randall’s Island Park Alliance—whose mission was to redevelop the site. He put a lot of his own money in, and with the help of other private investors, including Claude Okin, the new tennis facility was built alongside all the baseball and other fields.
The John McEnroe Tennis Academy now has twenty courts—ten clay, ten hard—most of which can be indoors or outdoors, depending on the season, and there’s a public–private ownership set up whereby we lease the land from New York City and a proportion of our profits go back to them. My personal charitable foundation then tries to raise money, either through some of the exhibitions or clinics or fundraisers that I do, or by having some of the tour’s good guys like Djokovic or Nadal play an exhibition at the academy itself. That then allows us to offer subsidized lessons and even free training for as many kids as possible who couldn’t otherwise afford to play.
There’s no doubt that tennis is still too expensive. It’s a hard problem to tackle and one that applies to a lot of sports, but in tennis it seems that privilege is built into the very infrastructure of the game. One example is the way ranking points are given in the junior game; the system favors rich kids whose parents can pay for them to travel round the country over the local and minority kids who don’t have that backing. We’re doing our best to help them, but there’s a long way to go, and those are the kids we most need to encourage.
It’s a numbers game. For every ten kids you provide help for, nine won’t make it, for whatever reason. So you need a bigger pool to choose from in the first place. For that to happen, the game has to be not only more affordable but sexier, more inclusive, and even possibly have a team element, like in TeamTennis, so that kids aren’t out there all alone, playing in isolation.
We’ve had some success. One of our prize pupils, Noah Rubin, won Junior Wimbledon in 2014, and is now successfully working his way up the rankings; another student, Jamie Loeb, won the NCAA college singles title in 2015 and turned pro; and we’ve had numerous others—boys and girls—who’ve received full tennis scholarships into division one colleges, so that’s really exciting.
In the meantime, I try to show kids at my academy a way of playing the game that I hope will help them get the best out of tennis, at whatever level they end up playing. So right from the start, I came up with a wish-list, called the John McEnroe Ten Commandments, which I would repeat to them in training sessions (these kids, unlike my own, were forced to listen
to me—Larry the Lecturer rides again). The commandments are:
Thou shalt not beat thyself
Thou shalt never give up until the last point is played
Thou shalt not make excuses for poor performance
Thou shalt try to be mentally and physically fit to maximize performance
Thou shalt try to chase down every ball
Thou shalt respect every opponent but fear none
Thou shalt enjoy the game of tennis and try to stay positive
Thou shalt not throw thy racket
Thou shalt not curse
Hang on a minute, is this me talking? I’m so distracted I can’t think of the tenth one.
One of the other things I really believe in, and which I try to emphasize not only to the kids at the academy but to their parents, is that they need to play other sports—ideally until the age of at least fifteen or so—and not just focus on tennis alone from the age of eight or ten years onward. Studies have now proven that it helps kids reduce the risk of injury if they do different sports at an age when their bodies are still developing and strengthening. Throughout my childhood, I was playing all the team sports going: basketball, football, soccer and baseball were my favorites, with basketball at the top of my list. My parents encouraged me, as well as my brothers, to keep them up. In fact, at age twelve, I probably wanted to be a pro basketball player more than a tennis player, and I continued on playing until I was sixteen years old, in the eleventh grade, when the Trinity school basketball coach at the time, Dudley Maxim, didn’t think much of my abilities, so I decided not to try out for the team and end up collecting splinters on the bench. Thanks for not believing in me, Dudley. As a result of your shrewd judgment, basketball’s loss ended up being tennis’s gain. But I will say this: playing basketball and soccer not only improved my movement on court and my hand-eye coordination, they also helped me understand what it was to be part of a team, to enjoy the camaraderie, to have others there to share my victories and defeats. Plus, for someone like me who was shy—hard to believe, but true of me then—being on a team was a good way to develop friendships.
As well as playing a variety of sports, the other thing promising young tennis players should also do, if at all possible (though there have been some early-maturing exceptions like Becker and Nadal, and no doubt such freaks of nature will emerge again), is go to college. I would strongly advise all kids that get the chance to do that—whether for reasons of emotional or physical development—and I’m proud that my foundation’s fundraising exhibitions and events have already helped quite a few kids get tennis scholarships to college which, whether or not they end up taking the sport any further, has helped their education and future life prospects.
The subject of tennis clubs brings up all sorts of potentially tricky issues to do with class, race, accessibility and money. Luckily for me, the club where I started playing tennis—in Douglaston, Queens—had no stuck-up members, and it was peopled with aspiring, young middle-class families just like mine. Back in the sixties, tennis still had that country-club image from the past, but the new professional middle classes such as my parents wanted a slice of the pie, and the Douglaston club was perfect for them. It was still all white, though, and I don’t know how warm a welcome a New York version of the Williams sisters would’ve gotten.
I hate the idea that kids who are not white or rich might not feel that they belong in tennis. That elitist image—which is sometimes a reality—kills talent and stops those kids from choosing our sport over, say, basketball and football (American football), which is currently the way the best athletes tend to go. I get a sense that it’s still somewhat the same in England. A lot of those private clubs don’t reach out in the way they should, in my opinion. And let’s face it, unless I’ve missed something, Wimbledon itself is pretty much the ultimate white upper-middle-class enclave.
When I won there the first time in 1981, they were practically choking on their cucumber sandwiches at having someone like me, the mouthy kid from Queens (we’re talking the New York Borough here, not the exclusive tennis club in West London), become a member. They were scared as hell at the thought of me propping up their bar. Don’t worry, guys, I’d rather have chewed my headband than show up for a beer in SW19.
One thing I was happy to do was go back to our old family club in Douglaston in October 2009, especially because they’d finally decided to name their main court after me. I know what you’re thinking—“about time,” right? No, hang on, that’s what I was thinking. It was a fun day because my band got to play after the ribbon-cutting ceremony and the dinner that followed. There were old childhood friends there, such as Doug Saputo and Andy Broderick, who I’d grown up with and known since we were kids, so almost half a century (did I really write that?). It was a great evening of music, tennis, friends and nostalgia. I don’t go in for a whole lot of that, but I’m not averse to going down that road now and again. It’s good to remember where you came from, even when you’re constantly trying to move forward.
The opening of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy was finally announced in May 2010, and we formally opened our doors soon after that year’s US Open. I’d actually been working there since the start of the year so that we could figure out what all the plans for the coaching would be and what exactly we were going to offer. I knew we’d have to hit the ground running if we wanted to give a new generation the kind of first-class coaching that I was lucky enough to receive when I first came into the game.
I started playing when I was eight, and soon I was beating kids who were a lot older than I was. I loved any sport that involved a ball but was always best at tennis—I had good hand-eye coordination and a feel for the ball on the strings of the racket. That also helped to make up for the fact that I was small for my age and would never win a point through my strength of shot. I was a touch player, I was fast, and by the time I was twelve, I was ranked number seven in the country in my age-bracket.
By then I’d moved on from the Douglaston club to the Port Washington Tennis Academy, about twenty-five minutes’ drive from where we lived, which had been founded as a non-profit tennis facility and had a big junior development program. That was where I began to develop as a tennis player after coming to the attention of two major figures in my life—Antonio (Tony) Palafox and the great tennis captain from Australia, Harry Hopman.
Tony, who was head coach at Port Washington, had won doubles titles at Wimbledon and the US Open so had been a really good player. At first, I wasn’t seen as one of the big prospects there, but things started to pick up once Tony encouraged me to take the ball on the rise, with hardly any backswing, to get up to the net as soon as I could and create angles wherever possible.
That’s pretty much how I still play, even if my journey to the net is now a lot slower. The funny thing with Tony Palafox is that he hasn’t lost his eye when it comes to my game. He called me up on the phone not too long ago. “I watched you on TV,” he said. “I don’t like what I’m seeing. Your serve’s off and your return, you need to move into it—” “Hey, Tony,” I interrupted him, “tell me something I don’t know.” Once a coach, always a coach, I guess.
Harry Hopman—who was the inspirational leader at Port Washington when I arrived—was a tennis legend (although I didn’t know it at the time); an ex-Aussie player, he’d made his name as their Davis Cup coach, and inspired a whole generation of great Australians, including Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad, all of them legends in their own right. Rod “the Rocket” Laver, the only guy ever to win two calendar Grand Slams, is still my absolute tennis hero: he was a lefty like me, and he had an incredible touch. I idolized him so much when I was young that I had a poster of him on the back of my bedroom door. I spent my time on court trying to play like him, and my time off court frantically exercising my left forearm in the hope of building up muscle to the Popeye level that Rod had.
When I opened my academy, what I wanted above all was to try to model myself, in some small way,
on Harry Hopman. And if I ever manage to inspire a kid to anything approaching the same degree as he inspired me, I’ll consider myself satisfied. “The Hop” was known to work his players hard, off court as well as on it, but he saw that I hated all the drills, the exercises and the stretching, so he was a bit softer on me. Maybe he realized that I already moved well on court and had an intensity about me that made up for the fact that I was small for my age and not as fit as some.
Either way, his approach worked for me, and so long as the John McEnroe Tennis Academy follows in the footsteps of Harry Hopman and Tony Palafox, it won’t go far wrong. Today’s young players need all the guidance they can get. The amount of money that’s swimming around in the game now adds extra pressures, and kids don’t always get the best advice from the people who are closest to them. I’d seen this first hand over the years leading up to the academy opening, when I worked in an unofficial capacity with a few young prospects who were coming up through the ranks that my agents, IMG, wanted me to have a look at.
For me it was fun to see who was out there and potentially interact with the stars of the future. And hopefully the kids were happy to get the chance to play with me before I totally deteriorated. I remember how thrilled I was to be on the same court as Laver and Rosewall when I was young, so hopefully it was a win-win situation. It was certainly an eye-opener. And talented youngsters like the American Donald Young or the Australian Bernard Tomic definitely faced a few extra pitfalls beyond the ones I had to avoid.