You Cannot Be Serious (12 page)

It was at Forest Hills, at the 1971 or ’72 U.S. Open. He would have been fifteen or sixteen; I was twelve or thirteen. I thought he was incredible-looking—the long hair, the headband, that little bit of scruff on his face that he’d get from not shaving for a couple of weeks. And the Fila outfit—the tight shirts and short shorts…I loved that stuff! I would trade anything, back then, to get a Fila striped shirt; a jacket was a really big deal. (As a matter of fact, I did once trade about half the contents of my suitcase for a Fila jacket, and it almost fit!)

I remember Vilas bulging out of his clothes, and sweating…and Nastase. Those guys looked incredible. The quality of tennis clothing was so much better in those days. I think the baggy shirts and shoes you see now are horrible; and these sneakers that look like rocket ships…don’t get me started.

But Borg was the one who impressed me the most. I thought he was magical—like some kind of Viking god who’d landed on the tennis court. I can’t explain, exactly. It certainly wasn’t his personality, that’s for sure: You’ve seen the interviews. He didn’t have much to say, on or off the court—but then, he didn’t
have
to say much. The way he looked—long, tan legs, wide shoulders—and the way he played, the vibe he gave off, all that was more than enough. Even before he won Wimbledon, when he was just fifteen, there were hundreds of girls around him: tennis groupies, like the Beatles and the Stones had! That had never happened before in the game; it’s never happened since.

Some people compare Sampras to Borg. In my mind, there’s no comparison. Even though Pete is one of the greatest players, maybe the greatest player, of all time, Borg, by his presence alone, gave a lot back to the game. His story was incredible, too: Who could ever have imagined such a player coming out of Sweden, a country of only eight million people, with a sub-Arctic climate?

He was the best athlete I’ve ever seen on a tennis court—I don’t think people realize how good an athlete he was. And the fact is, he had to be, because his game was bizarre, in a way: running back and forth, well behind the baseline, hitting ball after ball after ball until an angle opened up or the other guy missed. It was so side-to-side, compared to my forward-forward-forward, but Bjorn was so fast he could make up for it. Even today, at forty-five, he’s faster than all but a couple of guys playing tennis!

The first time we played—in the semifinals at the Stockholm Open in November of ’78—was a perfect scenario for me, because it was on fast indoor tile—yes, tile!—which wasn’t well suited to his game, particularly against me. I also think he felt pressure playing me in his hometown, in front of a Swedish crowd who’d gotten excited about the game because of him.

I actually won the match pretty easily. No matter what happened, though, Bjorn always had a beautiful way about him—he never got mad. I think, too, that he was influenced by his coach, Lennart Bergelin, who was also a beautiful man. He’d walk into the airport carrying fifteen of Borg’s rackets and sweating, but wearing a huge grin on his face. He was such a positive personality, and he truly loved Bjorn. (At one stage I actually thought about working with Lennart—and in retrospect, I wish I had—but I didn’t, because I thought it might make Bjorn unhappy.)

The win in Stockholm was a huge victory for me—I was the first player younger than Borg to beat him—but it didn’t make me think one bit less of Bjorn. I just felt that I was with the big boys now—and this was the official coronation.

The night I beat Borg, I remember going off to one of the incredible discos they used to have in Stockholm: Everywhere you looked, there was a good-looking girl. At four or five in the morning however, it suddenly struck me that while I may have reached the apex of my career so far—I still had one more match to play.

I panicked. I thought, “I can’t beat Borg and lose to Tim Gullikson!” The good news, fortunately, was that in Sweden they didn’t start matches until five
P
.
M
., so I figured (I was young!) that all I had to do was get out there and finish it in one hour, before the fatigue set in. And one hour was all that I needed: I won 6–2, 6–2.

I ended the year blazing hot, number four in the world on the computer, and returned to Davis Cup for the finals against England at Rancho Mirage, California. I played singles this time, and lost only ten games in six sets against Buster Mottram and John Lloyd. I was thrilled to be able to help take the U.S. to a 4–1 victory in the tie, and to our first championship since 1972.

It was there that I was asked once again, not about the Davis Cup victory, but about Jimmy Connors’s absence and our growing rivalry. My reply, which came to be one of my most famous quotes, appeared on the cover of the
New York Times
magazine a couple of weeks later: “I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth.”

I wasn’t kidding, but I wouldn’t have to go that far. In January of 1979, I went to the Masters, at Madison Square Garden, and beat Connors for the first time, although he didn’t finish the match. I was up 7–5, 3–0, and he retired, claiming a bleeding callus on his foot. He
did
have a blister, but I still felt gypped: I knew he simply didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of beating him. (I also noted that, though Jimmy cited doctor’s orders that he take off two weeks for the blister, he played in Philadelphia the following week—and won!)

I’m sure Jimmy didn’t like the fact that I was coming on. In retrospect, I can’t say I blame him. My beating him was a big deal, and in those days, the Masters was a huge event: Only the top eight singles players in the world, and the top four doubles teams, could play. The crowds in the Garden were amazing—there was all the electricity of a championship boxing match. I was really excited to have beaten Connors in front of my hometown crowd, in Madison Square Garden: On my way off the court after the match, I raised my arms in victory, and the crowd went wild.

In the finals, it was the nineteen-year-old upstart McEnroe against the wily thirty-five-year-old veteran Arthur Ashe. Since the Masters had a round-robin format, I had already played Arthur once, drubbing him 6–3, 6–1 in the first round. However, he was ready for the finals, and to tell the truth, I was a bit overconfident after that first round. Arthur came out very determined, and he started giving me a lot of off-speed stuff, the same kind of slicing and dicing he’d used in his big upset victory over Connors in the 1975 Wimbledon final. That kind of slow pace didn’t bother me the way it did Jimmy, but suddenly, in this round, the equation was just different. After we had split the first two sets, Arthur took a 4–1 lead in the third. I battled back to 4–all, but he held his serve to go to 5–4, and then he started finding the range on my serve.

It didn’t matter what I did, he rifled it back. The score went to 15–30, then 15–40—double match point against me. I jammed him on the backhand side, and he netted the return—30–40, still match point. Then I remembered Tony Palafox’s image of throwing a knife, and snapped a wide-breaking serve to Arthur’s backhand. Arthur leaped at it and blasted an unplayable return past me…

And then the linesman called my serve out.

Arthur dropped his shoulders—for him, the equivalent of a ten-minute tirade. He walked up to the umpire and asked if he was sure the serve had been out. The umpire nodded. I know Arthur disagreed with that call until the end of his days, but it stood. On my second serve, he went for a forehand winner, and hit the ball just long. Deuce. I held on to win the third set 7–5, and I had my first major title.

To make things even sweeter, Peter Fleming and I won the doubles, against the legendary team of Stan Smith and Bob Lutz.

It was one of those historic moments that become clear only later: What had happened, in a very short span of time, was nothing less than the changing of the guard.

I
ARRIVED ON THE SCENE
at a combustible moment for professional tennis. The Open era had brought personalities into the game, and personality was generating media exposure, which was generating more money, which in turn guaranteed more media exposure—which in turn drove in even more money. Where money and publicity meet, there’s always excitement, but good behavior is rarely a part of the mix. Manners are the operating rules of more stable systems.

I got caught up in the rising excitement of pro tennis—in some ways, I was the personification of that excitement—and yes, my behavior got away from me. That’s a big subject. At the beginning, though, it often felt as simple as this: Week by week, I was rising to new heights, and when you ascend that quickly, and at such an early age, the oxygen doesn’t always flow to your brain.

At the same time, I must say, I did have an idea in mind: I thought tennis had had enough of manners.

To me, “manners” meant sleeping linesmen at Wimbledon, and bowing and curtsying to rich people with hereditary titles who didn’t pay any taxes. Manners meant tennis clubs that demanded you wear white clothes, and cost too much money to join, and excluded blacks and Jews and God knows who else. Manners meant the hush-hush atmosphere at tennis matches, where excitement of any kind was frowned upon.

At my first Davis Cup match in Chile, I’d seen the stands filled with the kind of fans who might attend a World Cup soccer match. There was rhythmic cheering, free expression of emotion: If the crowd didn’t like what was happening, they threw coins and seat cushions. I thought that was a step in the right direction. Nobody in South America seemed to feel that tennis was a sissy sport.

Why shouldn’t North America (and England) be the same way? Why couldn’t the game be more accessible to the average person? Why shouldn’t tennis get the same kind of treatment—and interest—as baseball, basketball, or football?

In the late ’70s, it was starting to feel as if we could actually get there. The characters who dominated tennis then weren’t country-club types: There was Connors, who’d been taught by his mom; Borg, an incredible story, a man with rock-star charisma who’d exploded out of a small Scandinavian country; Vilas, who wore P.O.W. bracelets and wrote poetry; Gerulaitis, a brash guy who
also
looked like a rock star and talked with a New York accent.

At the same time, there weren’t many inner-city kids playing tennis at the beginning of 1979. The major events were getting pretty good TV ratings, but the sport wasn’t exactly threatening football or baseball. Call me presumptuous, call me egotistical (and believe me, you wouldn’t be the first), but I thought that maybe I could do something about all that.

M
Y FATHER HAS ALWAYS
told me, “Look, you don’t need to yell—in fact, you’d be a better player if you didn’t. Just go out and play, and you’ll win.”

I’ve never been totally convinced of that, I suppose, or else I would have worked harder at it. And I admit, there have been many times when I’ve answered Dad, in my head:
Yeah, sure, what do you know? You’re not out there playing.

But ultimately, I think that he was right—that I probably would have done better had I been able not to lose my temper:
Been able
being the key words here.

People tend to forget the genuinely lousy level of officiating that was prevalent in professional tennis when I came along. That’s why, with my parents’ words echoing in my ears—
tell the truth; be honest at any cost
—I felt I was (don’t laugh) on a kind of quest to get things to improve. There’s another thing, too. It’s important to point out that my playing career had two distinct periods: For the first few years, I almost never spoke an obscenity to an umpire or a linesman. I said plenty of other things, but in what I like to think was almost a lawyerly way, I avoided dirty words.

Then, at a certain point, I went over the line. There were reasons for it—reasons, not excuses—and I’ll talk more about them later. But here’s the thing: Once I began to go over the line, I should have been defaulted. In fact, I was only defaulted twice in my career—and once was for being late for a doubles match.

It’s not putting the blame on anyone else, but on the way up, I noticed that the better I got, and the more money I made (for myself and for the events that were selling tickets and television rights), the more that lines-men, umpires, referees, and tournament organizers had to put up with from me. The more that professional tennis’s money depended on me, the more that things seemed to be under my control when I got on that court.

Except when they were out of control.

People have always said that I was the one person who could actually lift his game by getting angry. That’s true—to an extent. Sometimes when I was mad, I could serve aces. Sometimes it threw me off, as it would anybody else. A lot of times, it meant that I was starting to choke.

I’ve heard people say it was deliberate—that I blew up on purpose to throw off my opponent. That isn’t true. I always felt, “Look, if you can’t handle my having an outburst, then you shouldn’t be in the profession.” First of all, I was mainly hurting myself by stopping a match. Second, if by questioning a call for whatever period of time an umpire allowed, it threw off my opponent’s game, I simply felt, “That’s too bad. That’s not winning or losing points. That’s what goes on between the points. If you decide you’re going to sit there and get hot and bothered because I’m doing this, then you’re allowing yourself to be psychologically affected. It’s your job not to be.”

Some people on the tour decided I was just crazy—they would look at me in a certain way, and I knew that was what they were thinking. Other guys, though, would get annoyed. One time, playing doubles, I rubbed Hank Pfister and Victor Amaya the wrong way, and Pfister said, “I’m gonna kick your ass after the match.” Now, Hank Pfister was six-four, and Victor Amaya was six-seven! I said to myself, “I picked the wrong guys.”

But cooler heads usually prevail in tennis. It’s rare that you ever hear of an actual fight between players, on the court or in the locker room. I’ve seen a push or a shove once or twice, but I can’t recall a single actual fist-fight, with punches thrown and landed. It’s not like hockey, where that’s par for the course.