John McEnroe: Tempestuous Tennis Prodigy
JOHN McENROE was born in 1959, and raised in Douglaston, Queens. He won 77 singles titles in his career, won 78 doubles titles, won the U.S. Open at age 20, won the U.S. Open three more times, and won Wimbledon three times. He’s one of the very greatest tennis players in history, and his duels with Bjorn Borg were as compelling as tennis can be.
McEnroe was a magician with a tennis racket. Jimmy Connors once caught McEnroe approaching the net too soon, and hit a superb lob that went over McEnroe’s head and landed very near the baseline. Realizing he couldn’t get back in time to hit an overhead, McEnroe ran back, observed the ball falling inside the line and then, at the very last moment, unleashed a scorching blind backhand which went very low over the net and fell deep in the far corner of the court, an unreturnable shot from a guy who looked like he might not even get his racket on the ball.
McEnroe also made doubles more popular, and did a great deal to raise interest in the Davis Cup, the premier international team tennis event. He played Davis Cup tennis for twelve years.
Still, you could argue that McEnroe hurt the sport of tennis. He was infamous for his angry outbursts.
The writer Paul Theroux went to see McEnroe play in 1979, and was struck that this slightly built 20-year-old not only had his opponent intimidated but had the referee “so rattled he was gibbering.” Theroux noted that even “most of the linespeople were nervous wrecks” and that the crowd, too, seemed afraid of McEnroe, that the silence as McEnroe was serving was somehow fearful rather than hushed with a sense of drama. If McEnroe heard any conversation in the stands, he might scream, “Who’s talking right there?”
Once when a heavyset lady in the stands distracted McEnroe by being out of her seat, he yelled, “Hey, lady, if you’d lose some weight, you might get to your seat on time!” He was visibly annoyed when people in the stands walked around as he was playing, or took flash photographs of him, or even clapped at the wrong time, such as after a double fault.
In McEnroe’s mind, it was fair for him to rebuke the crowd for being rude, but not for the crowd to rebuke him for being rude. Some tennis fans, especially older ones, thought McEnroe should be drummed out of elite tennis circles until he’d learned some manners. They wanted their virtuosos to be virtuous.
Other fans saw what McEnroe could do with a tennis racket, and said, ‘You have to make allowances for people that gifted.’
In a 1981 match with Tom Gullikson at Wimbledon, the most conservative and prestigious tennis tournament, where players dress only in whites, McEnroe bellowed at one tennis official, “You can’t be serious. You cannot be serious!” And “You guys are the absolute pits of the world!”
He was only 5'11" and 165 pounds but he had superb reflexes, saw the court very well, knew instantly where he wanted to put every ball and hit the ball cleanly and hard. He loved the fact that the dimensions of the court and the rules of the game never changed — yet each match was different than any other. Every shot was fashioned as a last-second reaction. There was a freshness, a novelty to it.
Because he had such a dominating presence on a tennis court, it was curious for journalists to find McEnroe after a match, scrawny and slouching, tugging at his mane of frizzy hair, scowling, mumbling — or squinting at questions as if they were hard to understand. He could appear almost meek under the scrutiny of a direct question — or he might bark out an obscenity.
He was a perfectionist like his father; the McEnroe family saw nothing wrong with perfectionism. John was an excellent soccer player as a boy, loved basketball too, and always preferred team to individual sports. But everyone could see and feel this extraordinary gift he had for tennis, and by the age of 12, he was focused on tennis.
How that narrowed focus happened, how the other sports fell away was something of a dispute between McEnroe and those close to him as a boy. What his parents and friends saw was an intense, phenomenally competitive boy, who couldn’t accept losing, a boy whose expectations were so high that the world could never meet them. They saw a tennis prodigy who made tennis his obsession, and they supported this, feeling tennis was a way for John to channel his passion and anger into something productive, at which he would almost never lose.
Whereas, McEnroe himself felt he’d been sucked into tennis, that his ability outstripped his interest, that team sports were more healthy. He was involved in tennis much more deeply than he’d ever intended. But how could he walk away from tennis when he was winning tournament after tournament?
Especially playing singles, he put a lot of pressure on himself, and there weren’t a lot of outlets for that pressure. So he yelled on the court. The tantrums made this young man seem even younger.
He went to college for a year, won the 1978 NCAA singles title, then turned pro. McEnroe would not admit to having missed out on a “college experience.” He claimed to have learned more about life in one year of pro tennis than he would have learned in four years of college.
Asked what he’d learned, McEnroe replied that he’d learned how many people are phony, and what kind of deceptions they try to practice. He seemed to assume that many successful people were hypocrites with secret agendas.
Bjorn Borg of Sweden was McEnroe’s polar opposite in temperament, and it was fascinating to watch Borg and McEnroe play each other. Borg wore his blond hair long, and was handsome and unflappable. He bounced around the court, never seemed to tire, and hit the ball with ferocious top spin. Ilie Nastase lost a match to Borg and said, “We’re playing tennis; he’s playing something else.”
Borg was fiercely competitive, too; his ex-wife reports that after a loss Borg often wouldn’t speak for three days. But none of that passion was visible on Borg’s face. People called McEnroe and Borg “Fire and Ice.” They played just 14 matches against each other on the pro tour; Borg won 7, and McEnroe won 7.
McEnroe never had a single outburst in any of those 14 matches.
Borg made an annual ritual of winning Wimbledon, winning it in 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980. The 1980 Wimbledon final, Borg against McEnroe, is one of the great tennis matches of all time. McEnroe stormed to an early lead, winning the first set. Borg came back and won the second and third sets. McEnroe won the fourth set, staving off a series of match points to do so, and winning a tie-breaker, 18–16. Borg took the fifth set.
McEnroe disliked Jimmy Connors and hated Ivan Lendl; to this day, mention the 1984 French Open, and McEnroe looks queasy as he recalls the way Lendl beat him, after McEnroe had easily won the first two sets. But McEnroe hugely admired and liked Bjorn Borg. He finally unseated Borg at Wimbledon in 1981.
But this great victory came at a cost; Borg found himself strangely unmoved by the loss, played just one match in 1982, then retired. McEnroe both publicly and privately urged Borg to keep playing but the Swede, only 26 years old, had lost his passion for the game. Perhaps he, too, had been sucked too early into professional tennis.
In 1984 and early 1985, McEnroe considered himself not only the best tennis player in the world but the best tennis player who’d ever lived. Many veteran tennis fans agreed. In 1984, McEnroe played 85 matches and won 82 of them, a single-season record never broken in modern tennis. He darted and sped around the court, a beautifully-mapped kingdom but an awfully small one for a restless king.
He was impetuous, and he wanted the world, its players, umpires and fans to be as good at what they did as he was at tennis. This thin-shouldered young man with frizzy hair and gorgeous reflexes seemed stunned by the world’s mediocrity, and to feel there was something spiteful about those who ran tennis tournaments and made and kept the rules.
The contrast between his gorgeous reaction to very difficult shots and his inability to handle the much easier matter of politeness and good manners was fascinating — and appalling. In watching McEnroe vs. his opponent, we also got McEnroe vs. McEnroe.
Phil Knight, the owner of Nike, paid McEnroe handsomely for the use of his name and image, and Knight loved the outbursts. Knight used to call McEnroe and say ‘Keep doing it!’ Phil Knight grasped right away that the problem with marketing tennis was that too many people saw it as a rich man’s sport, two guys dressed in formal whites, hitting a little ball back and forth across the net.
Knight loved the passion, the fire in McEnroe, the sudden eruptions. Knight knew what even casual sports fans could relate to McEnroe having a tantrum. It made up for the formality and remoteness of classic tennis strokes. It closed the gap between the athletes and the baser impulses of the audience. It was “great TV” which meant more people watching, which meant more people buying Nike tennis shoes.
McEnroe and Knight argued over the catch phrase “Just do it.” Phil Knight thought it was a great motto for Nike; McEnroe found it incredibly lame. A couple of decades later, McEnroe would shrug and say, ‘That’s why Phil Knight is a multi-billionaire, and I’m running a tennis academy.’
After Bjorn Borg retired, even the big tournaments seemed a little hollow to McEnroe. Without Borg, there was a void in the game. McEnroe began losing to up-and-coming players like Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. Agassi seemed able to skillfully return any shot, and Sampras was like a machine — a tall, youthful machine. McEnroe tried weightlifting, yoga, using a different tennis racket. Nothing seemed able to get him back on top, where he felt he belonged.
In 1988, he married the actress Tatum O’Neal, and together they had three children. McEnroe has always enjoyed kids — loved how direct they were about what they wanted. No secret agendas. He was patient about signing autographs for kids who approached him at tournaments. He expected to retire from tennis and take care of the kids, and Tatum could do more acting.
But then in 1994 his marriage broke up at the same time as his tennis career ended. In that very rough period, he was touched by the support he got from his brother Patrick, and from Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. Sampras stunned McEnroe by saying, “I love you.”
McEnroe’s second wife, the musician Patty Smyth, was hot-tempered. Everyone assumed she had to soothe and calm her tempestuous husband, but he’d insist it was the reverse. They married in 1997, and had two children together.
McEnroe is worth about 100 million dollars. He dislikes “rehashing” his old matches — not enough novelty. He concedes that Novak Djokovic of Serbia, Roger Federer of Switzerland and Rafael Nadal of Spain have probably played better than McEnroe, even at his peak. The game moves on; the players keep improving.
McEnroe looks back over his career, feels love for Bjorn Borg and wishes they’d been able to play more than 14 matches. McEnroe does perceptive tennis commentary on television, and runs his tennis academy.
But he urges young tennis players to play other sports, too, especially team sports, so the pressure to win won’t sit too heavily on their shoulders.