But Seriously

by John McEnroe

  Here I was, playing in front of the biggest crowd I’d ever had, and the New Yorker in me loved how much I was getting under their skin. I was pretty pumped up, let me tell you, and I was desperate to keep this incredible run going, knowing I’d be the first qualifier to get this far in the tournament. When I shook hands with Dent after coming through in five tough sets, it felt both crazy and natural that I should have won. I remember thinking, “Either these guys are a lot worse than I thought, or I’m a whole lot better.”

  Clearly, Jimmy Connors, my semi-final opponent, was going to show me how wrong I was by crushing this total upstart. Having made it into the quarters, I’d finally been moved into the main locker room, the one reserved for the top players. This was a big deal. Getting ready before my semi-final, I spotted Connors in a corner. By then he and Borg were the two superstars of the tour, and I was in awe of him. Despite that, I decided I’d try to say “hi” because I’d never actually met him. The long and short of it was that he literally did not even acknowledge my existence or my attempt to introduce myself in any way. Connors was in no mood to give me an inch in either the mental or the physical matches that we were about to play.

  He won both battles, and looking back I think that was probably the best result for me too. Getting this far in my second ever major tournament changed my life enough as it was, but if I’d actually got to the final? Or won? I would have missed out on going to college completely to turn pro right-away, which would have put me even more in the glare of the media and built a potentially unbearable pressure of expectation.

  I don’t mind admitting that by the time I came back to New York after getting to the Wimbledon semis in the summer of ’77, the whole thing had gone a bit to my head. I’d left for Europe that spring as a promising junior. When I came home a few months later, I was suddenly someone who people knew a little bit. It wasn’t just me who’d changed either. My relationships with some of my old school-friends faltered, because they didn’t know how to treat me anymore. There’s a good line in that song “One Headlight” by Jakob Dylan’s band, the Wallflowers—“I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same”—that summed up how I felt.

  I know that Borg won his first major, the French Open, at eighteen and Boris Becker won Wimbledon at seventeen. But they hadn’t come from nowhere. They didn’t win those titles as qualifiers. For my part, I’m glad in retrospect that I didn’t have to cope with a situation that I didn’t feel ready for. Still, I managed to get a set off Connors, and even if he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge me back in the locker room, I’m pretty sure what I did on court that day was enough for him to notice me.

  Our relationship since then has had its ups and downs, to put it mildly. But when I rejoined the Snow Tour ten days after the Bryan brothers match, I was actually happy to find myself playing Jimmy again almost forty years on—in a funny way, I’d almost missed him. Our match in Nashville, Tennessee was the first time we’d met on court since I’d beaten him 6–1, 6–0 at Royal Albert Hall fifteen years before. He stopped playing for a while after that, had an incredible three hip replacements and since then had bailed on a few occasions when we were supposed to play. He was sixty-one now, so I thought there was no way he was gonna show up this time either. But to my surprise, he did.

  Connors walked onto the court wearing long pants and a sweater, looking like someone out of the 1920s—Bill Tilden. We started the match—or rather, the set we were scheduled to play—and he kept the clothes on. “Jimmy, are you going to take off your pants or your sweater at any point?” “No,” he replied. Sure enough, he stayed totally covered up until the end. Maybe he was keeping his muscles warm, because his movement wasn’t too great. Maybe he didn’t have any muscles. Although he could still hit it and he was still Jimmy Connors, he was somewhat on slo-mo.

  Looking back from the other end of my own career to the experiences I had as a boy on the brink of manhood, I’m not proud of the fact that I acted like a jerk more times than I’d like to remember. Was that because I was too young when everything hit me? Too spoiled? Did I feel guilty about my success? Did I think I didn’t deserve it? Soon after I turned pro, my dad, who looked after my finances at that stage, told me that I’d earned more in the previous year than he’d earned in his entire life. My dad, who’d worked his way through night school to become this successful lawyer, was now out-earned by his teenage son? Even I—cocky as I was—could see how insane that was (and sometimes I wished he hadn’t pointed it out).

  As I’ve watched my own kids battle to find their own way across the threshold into adulthood, I’ve seen how the very advantages that my success has brought them have put pressures on them that I never had to deal with. The McEnroe name follows them everywhere they go, and that can be tough to live up to, because they’re scrutinized the whole time and it’s hard for them to establish and maintain their own identities.

  For example, if my daughter Emily tries to get a waitressing job in LA, she’ll get asked, “Hey, if you’re McEnroe’s daughter, why are you waitressing?” As if it’s not a decent way to earn some money, and as if I should be bankrolling her for everything. If she’s willing to earn her living while pursuing an acting career, it shouldn’t matter what work she does, and people should respect her even more because she’s not too proud to do that sort of work. Overcoming the obstacles that growing up in the public eye presents is every bit as much of a challenge for my kids as it was for me to gain the renown that put them in that situation in the first place.

  A sad marker of the way our family dynamic was changing as we drew nearer to the time when Ava would move away came when our little white part toy poodle, part Maltese, Lulu, passed away in June of 2015. She had been with us since August 2002 and from the minute we got her, we all fell in love with her. All four of my girls and Patty had wanted a dog for a while, because they all loved animals. I’d been much less enthusiastic because, truth be told, I’ve had some bad experiences with dogs. And the larger animals downright scared me. Plus, I knew what would happen when we got one. As much as the kids loved that dog, none of them was exactly asking to walk her at seven in the morning. They dropped the ball pretty fast on that and, guess what, I got stuck with that task.

  Luckily, Lulu turned out to be the friendliest and most low- maintenance dog in the world, and soon I found myself in a routine: after getting the kids up for school and before sorting out their breakfast, I’d set off with her on our early morning walk, nodding hellos to everyone else out there with their dogs. I hadn’t realized that having a dog was such a great ice-breaker. There was just this one little Napoleon-type guy I never said hello to. He lived halfway down our block and had a crazy pit bull-like beast he always seemed to be hanging on to for dear life as it snarled its way down the sidewalk. I swear to God, I was afraid for my life and for Lulu’s whenever we came across that animal. Every morning, I’d be going, “God, please, I don’t want to run into this dog,” and my heart would be jumping out of my chest as he approached. I had the whole story worked out: the guy was a nut, he lived on his own, was totally miserable. In the end, of course, having built this whole thing up, I finally plucked up the courage to say “hi” to him, and he was perfectly friendly and seemed like a nice guy. His dog was still out of control, though.

  Lulu was a lot easier to handle—she’d roll on her back and let herself be cuddled by everyone. The funny thing is, if you’ve got a dog like that, people think its owners must be like that too. Once people got used to seeing me around the place with Lulu, they started looking at me differently. “Here’s this guy with a cute, fluffy dog. Maybe he’s like that too. Maybe he is human after all.”

  Lulu was part of our family life the whole time that the kids were growing up. She was small, so we’d take her with us whenever we flew out to LA. We’d stick her under the seat and she was a great traveler. But when Patty and I got back to New York between the French Open and Wimbledon in 2015 she noticed Lulu wasn’t herself and was having trouble breathing. Lo
ng story short, Patty took her to a hospital and they sent us home saying it was early diabetes. Four hours later she went into respiratory distress.

  Patty took her to a different hospital but, as it turned out, it was too late. None of us thought she was that sick, which is why it was such a shock. I came over at once, along with Anna, who was in tears, and we were just deciding whether to operate—my main concern was that she shouldn’t be in pain—when a nurse knocked on the door and had a quiet word with the veterinarian. He disappeared for a few minutes while we were left on our own. Lulu was elsewhere in the building so we didn’t know what was going on. Five minutes later, the doctor came back and told us that he was sorry but she had passed away. “Would you like to see her?” So they brought her back in, wrapped up in this little blanket, and put her in my arms. And that’s when I cried. Yes, I admit it, I did. Maybe I’ve got to thank Roger Federer for that, but I’ve become more of a crier now in my old age.

  I’ve got to be careful not to overstate this, because Patty has accused me of using my emotional reaction to the loss of our first dog as a way of stalling on us getting a second one, but I never thought I was going to love that dog quite so much or that her death would affect me quite as badly as it did. It was horrible. Within two minutes, though, someone came into the room and went, “How are you paying for this, Mr. McEnroe?” As in, “Will that be Visa or American Express?” “Do you think we could talk about this tomorrow?” I suggested. Welcome to America.

  23

  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

  approximately one million viewers of the BBC’s early evening Wimbledon highlights show, 2015

  A few days after Lulu died, I flew to London for the start of Wimbledon. I love that time of year and I’ve been staying in the same hotel in Chelsea Harbour every June for the last twenty years. One of the things I like about it is that it’s got a great pool and a good gym. I’ve got my routine all set: I either swim or work out every morning, or both if I can, then head down to SW19 and the All England Club to start my day’s work.

  I never know until the night before which matches I’m going to be calling or for which broadcaster, because it depends on the following day’s schedule and the draw. If Murray is playing, the chances are the BBC will want me. Currently we don’t have an American equivalent of Murray; there’s no big-name draw. But if we had, say, an Agassi or Roddick, the Americans would want me for that and they’d take priority over the BBC. The producers on both networks get along well, so they talk and sort it out between them, which I appreciate. Believe it or not, I mostly do what I’m told.

  For the last ten years or so, I’ve also done a once-weekly phone-in, 606, on the BBC’s Radio 5 Live early evening drive-time slot. They’ve recently put Tim Henman with me because he’s a good foil and has got that dry sense of humor. Andy Roddick and Boris Becker have been on with me a few times too, and we end up with a fun, relaxed type of show. I don’t know which questions are going to come through, but to be honest they don’t tend to stray too far from the fairly predictable. It’s not as if I’m being asked to comment on anything out of left field. The people who phone in also tend to be fans, which is a whole lot better than if I had total assholes coming on. Or no one phoning in at all.

  The evening Wimbledon highlights show at the BBC has changed over the ten years or so that I’ve been involved. It used to be fronted by John Inverdale, who I’ve always thought was really good at his job. We don’t have the sort of relationship where I’ve ever gone to dinner with him, but I’ve been impressed by what he does. I don’t know what happened exactly for him not to be doing it in 2015 because he clearly knows his tennis. What’s sure is—and I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise when I say this—the show we used to do with him was way better than the train-wreck 2015 show, lamely called Wimbledon 2Day.

  As bad as the title was, the show itself was even worse. If you’d said to me, “We’re thinking of doing it with a live audience,” I would have thought, “OK, potentially that could be cool.” But it turned out not to be cool at all because I swear the audience looked like mannequins. I don’t know who came up with that idea but it didn’t work. Then I was told we’d be trying a new set. Turned out it was way over somewhere in the parking lot, nowhere near the media center where we used to be.

  How the hell would that make it any better? Particularly given the phony set, with its fake ivy and grass and this pathetic tiny table we were supposed to stand around. Because let’s not forget the worst bit of the total disaster: the idea that we’d all be standing up for the entire show. I was told that Clare Balding, the new host, liked to move her hands a lot, so was more comfortable standing. I went, “Well, I move my hands a lot as well, but, guess what, you can move your hands when you’re sitting down.” Clare Balding is obviously a very good, experienced commentator, but she seemed nervous and it felt like she was in a bit over her head.

  When I did the first show, I thought “Oh my God, what is this?” We were standing around this dumb awkward set, huddling around this ridiculous table, and they kept having us do all these embarrassing things. It reminded me of the stupid stuff I’d had to do on my own talk show all those years before. Those ideas never work. The whole thing was wrong from the start.

  “This is pitiful, you’ve gotta change it,” I told the producer early on. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one. About a million other people complained too and, credit to the BBC, they realized pretty quickly it couldn’t stay like that and quietly moved the show back to a decent studio in the grounds and a format more like the old one: a highlights show, with a lot of tennis, for people who’ve come back from work and just want to see the best parts of the matches they’ve missed plus some expert analysis, not some dumb-ass clips of babies playing tennis that had nothing to do with the tournament.

  The good news for John Inverdale was that he was sent to the commentary booth instead, and he turned out to be a natural. In fact, he was so good that he called the women’s final. That’s amazing for his first year. I did that match as well—along with Lindsay Davenport, and as it happens I think the three of us did fine. For John, I guess it was the icing on the cake. He was even gloating a little, because he knew people were missing him as the face of the evening round-up show, plus he’d shown he could do the commentating really well.

  It’s more or less normal now both for the BBC and for American networks to have men and women calling each other’s matches. I’d gotten myself in trouble in the past by saying that there were certain things about men’s tennis that only a man could know and the same for women. Partly because if you’ve been in that locker room, you potentially have that insight into the players’ mindset and what goes on behind the scenes that an outsider wouldn’t have. But I now realize that it’s more important to be a good commentator. If you’re terrible, you’ll still be terrible, whatever match you’re calling.

  The 2015 tournament started a week later than usual—at last the powers that be had decided to listen to players’ pleas for an extra week to recover between the French Open and Wimbledon—so it was the first time in all the years we’d been together that Patty’s birthday didn’t fall during Wimbledon itself, so I could finally do something a bit different on her birthday, rather than just having a drink in the hotel bar.

  A couple of days beforehand, I had an exhibition match to play against Yannick Noah at the British Embassy in Paris, but right after that I flew down to the South of France to meet Patty and Ava on a friend’s yacht for a few days as it sailed around the Mediterranean, and we went to Portofino on the actual day. I was a bit nervous about it, to be honest; for a guy who gets seasick, spending his first night on a yacht was always going to be a challenge. Poor me. Luckily I managed to keep my dinner down, and I was hoping that would make up for a few of the terrible birthdays Patty’s had to put up with, but I nearly spoiled it all because beforehand she’d told me, “Under no circumstances give me my presents in front of everyone.” So what did I do? E
xactly that. I guess I’ve still got a bit to learn.

  Patty and I have always had an intense relationship but we talk a lot, and we’re definitely best friends—I used to think that would be the end of our romance but she said we could have both, and that is the way it turned out. When we met, I think she had lost the belief that true love can last, but I hope I proved her wrong. And being totally loyal and faithful to each other is everything to us. She often says that I wore her down with my love for her, but I think she accepts now that, as much as I need her in my life, she needs me too.

  Patty has always been incredibly supportive of whatever I’ve wanted to do—even music. Well, she told me that I should stick to tennis, but she’s kind enough to put up with my incessant guitar playing in the house. So now that she has more freedom, with the children needing less of her time, I’m pushing her to do more of the songwriting, recording and performing that she loves and excels at. Not long after we first got together, she had an Academy Award nomination for a song she’d co-written. In the end, it was Elton John who won that year, so when he came on my talk show a few years later I reminded him that he was responsible for my wife not getting an Oscar.

  Patty has written tons of good songs over the years, and whereas I can’t move like I used to when I was twenty-five, she can still hit the notes. She proved that when she went out on tour in the summer of 2014, and a year later released her first album since we’d been together, which happened to be a Christmas album. She donated the proceeds to an armed forces mental health charity, because her dad was in the army, so she knows how much psychological support veterans often need and how much work still has to be done out there to destigmatize these problems. The good news is that there’s a whole lot more stuff she wants to be doing now that she has some time to do her own thing again. The bad news is: however hard I practice, I know I’ll never be part of her band.