You Cannot Be Serious (23 page)

It was meant to be mine—even though the French is on slow red clay, which favors baseliners like Borg and Lendl, even though I’m a serve-and-volley player, and my best surfaces were always grass and hard-court, where my serve came off the ground fast and I had that extra fraction of a second to get to net and punch the volley. On red clay, the ball bites into the surface, and you lose that fraction, even with the fastest serve: The receiver gets extra milliseconds for a passing shot if you come in.

But I was at the top of my game that spring, and my game plan was this: Don’t change a thing. Serve and come in. I knew my volley was the best in the business. I knew I couldn’t lose. Peter Fleming was planning a victory party even before the match began.

The day of the match, I saw a caricature in a French newspaper. In the picture, I was on one side of the net, pointing a gun at Lendl, who stood in the corner on the other side, shivering, sweat pouring off him. I loved that picture.

The French fans evidently felt the same way. When I was introduced on Center Court at Stade Roland Garros, I got the greatest hand I’d ever received at the start of a match—a huge roar! And by the end of the match, in my own inimitable way, I had somehow managed to get the entire crowd against me once again….

I
HAD NOT ONLY WON
the first two sets, I was ready to take over the third. Everything was perfect—it was astonishing how well I was playing—and then it happened. A very loud noise started coming from the side of the court. An NBC cameraman had taken his headset off, and it was sitting there, squawking, while I was trying to play.

Maybe someone else wouldn’t have noticed it. Maybe, on another occasion,
I
wouldn’t have noticed it. It wasn’t as though you could have heard that headset squawking from the top row of the stands. At that moment, though, that’s how it sounded to me.

I’ve told you how the doubts can come storming in, piling one on top of another. I was playing beautifully, but this was also the surface on which I was most uncomfortable. It was hot out. It had been cloudy and unusually cold in Paris—in the fifties, in late May!—for the first eleven days of the event, but then, the day I played Connors in the semis, the sun had come out for the first time.

I ran through Jimmy pretty easily that day, but the heat stuck around for the final, and that worried me. What if I did lose to Lendl? It’s not a great excuse to offer at a post-match press conference: “It was just too hot out there today.” That’s right up there with “Yeah, I had a hangover,” and “I didn’t sleep well last night”—wink, wink.

It might’ve been better if I had been up breaking training, because the fact is, I
had
slept terribly the night before. Out of the blue, Stella had decided to phone me.

We hadn’t talked for two or three weeks, and I don’t know why she was calling. “Bunny!” she said—she used to call me that—“I miss you!” “I miss you, too!” I said. We talked for a while. “But we’re not getting back together,” I told her.

When I hung up, I thought, “Wow! That’s just what I need.” (Never mind how it might have affected
her.
) It sent me into a tizzy, completely threw me off, because it made me think, and the last thing you need to do the night before a huge final is think. I spent the night tossing and turning.

That phone call was lodged somewhere in the back of my mind, and then this headset at courtside started blaring, and it was hot, and suddenly what had been in the back of my mind flooded into the front of my mind, and the doubts started creeping in:
I’ve been playing so amazingly,
I thought.
How can I keep it up?

I know the squawking headset was an innocent technical glitch—it wasn’t as if anybody had said, “Let’s screw McEnroe up,” but that’s how I took it—and, just like that, my concentration was shot.

I got very angry, because nobody was dealing with the situation. On the changeover, I went over to the headset and screamed into the little mike,
“Shut the f*** up!!”
(Whoever was on the other end is probably still deaf to this day.) Then, as I went over to my side, I thought, “What the hell am I doing?” If you start lashing out when things are going well, you may be letting your opponent think that you’re not as sure of yourself as you seem.

Usually I didn’t mind if my opponent saw me get upset. Some people thought I played better when I got angry—which was sometimes true and sometimes not—but it didn’t bother me if others believed it. Even if the guy on the other side of the net didn’t buy into the myth, everyone has doubts. If he sees me upset, so what? He gets upset sometimes, too. I can still overcome it and win.

All the big players had their shtick. Connors worked the crowd. Lendl looked like a scary robot: He’d hit a missile at you if you came in on his drop-shot. Borg never changed his expression. Ashe was the same way. You could never read what they were thinking. It can be a weapon.

Becker was a big guy with a huge serve; he was deliberately intimidating. He always walked around with his chest stuck out, like “Oh, you’re lucky we didn’t win World War Two.”

My shtick, of course, was getting upset. Did it help me more than hurt me? I don’t think so. Ultimately, my father was right—I probably would have done better if I hadn’t ever gotten into that. But I could never rest easily on my talent—or on anything. If I was ahead a service break, I liked to try to make it two—or three. I was always a better front-runner than a comeback player, because I could keep the doubts at bay when I was ahead, but they tended to seep in when I fell behind. I haven’t made a lot of amazing comebacks. I’ve won the great majority of my five-set matches—I’ll stack my five-set record up against anyone’s—but I didn’t win my first match from being down two sets to love until 1990, late in my career.

In a way, that’s a good statistic. It means that I didn’t get down two sets very often. All told, I won a lot more matches than I lost—my career singles record was 82 percent—but I didn’t have a lot of stirring come-from-behind victories.

That was a disappointment to me. I’d always thrilled to the stories about how Laver was down a couple of sets when he won the Slam.
My
story is that I would have won the Slam had I not blown a two-sets-to-love lead against Lendl.

I went from two games to love in the third, to losing the set 4–6. But then I was up 4–2 in the fourth, serving at 40–30.

And that, to me, is where I really lost the match.

Tony Roche had been coaching Lendl for a while, and they had worked on how to play me. They knew my left-handed slice serve in the ad court was a killer for most right-handers—the guy would be in the stands before he got his racket on it. Even Lendl, as good as he was, couldn’t drive that serve back.

So he and Roche determined that whenever I served wide to his back-hand on the ad side, he was just going to chip it crosscourt. The ball would be sinking, with backspin on it, and I’d have to hit my volley up instead of punching it deep. That let him stay in the point and try to take back the offense with his big groundstrokes.

That was his plan, and I knew it. So I served wide, and sure enough, he chipped crosscourt, and I was right there.

My first inclination was to hit a drop-volley and go for the winner, but then I decided,
no, no, just play it a little safe,
because even though I’m known as someone with pretty good hands, a soft touch, the drop-volley is a low-percentage shot. I decided just to float the volley deep, make him pass me. I went against my gut.

And I missed the volley. I pushed it the tiniest bit, and it floated out.

I don’t remember the points after that. It goes by in a blur. It’s now eighteen years ago, but I’ve never watched that match once. I can’t bear to. So I can’t tell you the exact details of what happened next. It’s too sickening to me.

I do remember the crowd started to boo me. Some of it was just the French, because they’re bizarre, they switch gears, and some of it was because if I won, the match was going to be over in an hour and forty-five minutes, and they wanted to see more tennis. I can understand that. I was upset, though, that when I really needed them at the end, when I was fatigued and tight and feeling this whole thing slipping away from me, I got nothing. Nothing.

And yet I think I’ve got to be given credit for my own demise. Good sports fans can always sense when you’re giving them something they can respond to. There’s a way to win them back to your side when they’re all against you—which, as I’ve said, is a talent Mr. Connors had that I didn’t. There are countless other examples of it—the L.A. fans booed Gary Sheffield, Mr. “I want to be traded; I will never play as a Dodger again!” Then he hit a home run, and it was “Yayyy!”

But I wasn’t giving that French crowd anything. I wasn’t able to let them know that I really needed the help. When people boo, I have a hard time not taking it personally. It’s one of my biggest problems. I feel isolated out there in the first place, but if anyone’s against me, I find it incredibly difficult. The crowd can be for me 99 percent, but if there are a couple of hecklers, I get bent out of shape. Not my finest trait.

My Dad and others have always said: The great majority of people are on your side. At times, in a semi-serious way, I’ve wondered about going into politics. In politics, if you win 60 percent of the vote, that’s great, even though there’s still 40 percent of the people who think, “This guy stinks!” That would toughen me up in a hurry.

Against most other guys, I would have won that French anyway. I have to give Lendl (grudging) credit for being who he was, and for being fit enough to be able to get better as the match progressed. It’s the only match in which I ever felt I was playing up to my capabilities and lost.

But he didn’t beat me. I beat myself. Lendl got his first major, and I took his title, Choker-in-chief, away from him.

Temporarily.

S
OME PEOPLE TALK
about my 6–1, 6–1, 6–2 destruction of Connors in the 1984 Wimbledon as my greatest match ever, but the truth is—between you and me—I thought Jimmy was just a little flat that day.

I was also having one of those days when everything seemed to be going almost too right. I got out of bed in the morning feeling great, and in my practice session, the ball looked as big as a cantaloupe. Since I always manage to worry when things are going well, I stopped the session early—I was afraid of leaving my best stuff in practice.

But it just kept getting better.

In fairness, Connors had had a tough semi against Lendl, a four-set slugfest on a very hot afternoon, while I had won in three against that feisty Aussie whippersnapper Pat Cash. Cash was a tough serve-and-volleyer in that great Down-Under tradition, still a little green at nineteen, but a great athlete and a fine tennis player. I thought he was a comer—especially after he shouldered me on a changeover during the second-set tiebreaker! That, I felt, was a very interesting move: Here I was, number one in the world, a two-time Wimbledon champ, one of the game’s grand old men at twenty-five…

This kid’s got the right attitude,
I thought.

Meanwhile, my attitude had utterly changed. I had wasted too much energy at the French by getting angry, I realized; from the first match at the All England Club that year, I was determined not to do anything that would derail me from avenging Roland Garros—my only loss in fifty-two matches so far in ’84—and winning my hat-trick Wimbledon. I was on a five-match winning streak against Jimmy, and I felt confident I could make it six.

I just didn’t know it would be so easy.

The heat wave had continued, but I was hotter than the weather that Sunday afternoon. From the start, Connors just couldn’t find his rhythm, while I was serving unbelievably well—slicing it wide, popping it up the middle, doing whatever I wanted. I hit 74 percent of my first serves in the match, with ten aces and no double faults. I had three
—three—
unforced errors in the match.

“That’s the best I ever played,” I said in the press conference afterward. It was also the best I’d ever acted at Wimbledon: The London tabloids dubbed me “Saint John.”

Actually, as I look back on it now, I had done just as well, if not better, that past March, in Brussels, where I sustained that kind of play over an entire
tournament.
I had done it all—sliced and diced, basically ate people up: I lost no more than three or four games in any match. It was incredible how good it had felt. Now here I was on the same high plateau. And I didn’t want to let it go, didn’t ever want it to end.

N
INETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
was also the year that Arthur Ashe decided he was finally going to push hard to get Connors to play Davis Cup. Donald Dell was Jimmy’s manager, and he was also Arthur’s agent, and that was how it all came together. Dell thought Jimmy should have Davis Cup as that final notch in his belt, as he made his big transition to corporate life—they’d planned it all out. I always thought that was a load of nonsense, by the way: As his career wound down, I remember Connors used to say in interviews, “I’m a businessman.” And I’d be thinking, “What business is he in? He’s in the business of endorsing products!” I’d think, “Hey, I’m a businessman, too!”

Anyway, Arthur said, “Look, we’ve got the two best players in the world, Connors and McEnroe; it’s a slam-dunk; let’s put them together.” So Jimmy came on board, for his one and only year while I was on the circuit. It was a big deal; the USTA was very excited. They took a picture of us together: McEnroe and Connors, the Dream Team.

The only problem was that things between Jimmy and me continued to be edgy at best. We’d simply gotten off on the wrong foot in the Wimbledon locker room in ’77, and we’d butted heads ever since. It made for some great matches, but the tension was always there.

The year we were thrown together as teammates, the tension was at its peak. Our first tie, in February against Romania, had gone all right, but then I’d beaten him pretty badly at the French Open, and we’d had a series of trash-talking confrontations on the changeovers (“You’re acting like my four-year-old son,” he told me; I told him what
he
was acting like) and I destroyed him at Wimbledon. By that point, we were no longer speaking to each other.