You Cannot Be Serious (34 page)

There would be no controversy this year. As in certain key matches in the past, I would need all my energy for playing. In the end, I was simply unable to find the answer to Agassi’s blistering returns of serve, and to his big groundstrokes: He seemed to take the ball on as short a rise as I ever had in my prime, and to hit it twice as hard.

The final score was 6–4, 6–2, 6–3. I gave young Andre a hug at the net, and said, “Why did you listen so well?” A couple of weeks earlier, I had given him some grass-court tips, and I now saw that he had been all too astute a pupil. He was still so wet behind the ears that I had to remind him to bow to the Royal Box on his way off the court. Here was a kind of sweet poetic justice: In my final Wimbledon singles match, I was teaching manners to the next generation!

Andre would win his first Grand Slam title the next day, beating Goran Ivanisevic in the final.

The sweetness wasn’t over for me yet, though. Two days later, Michael Stich and I won the darkness-delayed doubles final against Jim Grabb and Richey Reneberg, 5–7, 7–6, 3–6, 7–6, and 19–17. It was the longest Wimbledon final ever in terms of games—eighty-three!—and the energy of the crowd, which had been let in for free on the extra day, made me forget how tired and stiff I actually was.

Not too shabby for an old man.

I
T WAS MY LAST HURRAH
. My Wimbledon result had lifted my ranking from 30 in the world to 17, but I had to face the fact that I wasn’t winning tournaments anymore. That summer, I told Tatum, “If I don’t win a big one this year, I’ll stop playing. I’ll step back and allow you to step forward.”

She couldn’t let go of the idea of rekindling her acting career. In September of 1992, an interviewer had asked her about her dream for the future, and she said, “I guess it’s that when John’s tennis career is finished, he takes care of the kids while I make two pictures a year and get to pick my scripts and work with whomever I want, and that our kids go to great schools and live happily ever after.”

I wanted to help Tatum feel fulfilled, but we should have talked about that dream for the future and tried to get on the same page. It was close to my own dream, I guess—I certainly wanted a lot more to do with taking care of our kids than I had had to date—but she had overlooked the restlessness of my soul. My years as a touring tennis professional might have been coming to a close, but I never wanted to stop
doing
things, and if that meant travel, then so be it. Once that bug is in your blood—once you’re used to moving around the world and feeling important—I don’t know if it’s ever possible to come to a full stop.

I would learn to appreciate staying at home—once I had a happy home. But my home wasn’t happy now. From this distance, the anger and desperation between the lines of Tatum’s dream are painfully clear.

Between my frustrating quest to rekindle my own career and the huge pressures that having a third child had put on our marriage, we had grown impossibly far apart. Too often, when we were together, there was anger and distance instead of intimacy. If she was angry enough, she’d tell me to just go and do whatever I wanted. Well, that
wasn’t
what I wanted.

Then, with things between us completely unresolved, I’d have to go off to events for weeks on end. It had been fun when I was young and single, but now I felt a wrench in my heart. I was agonizingly lonely—it’s not an excuse this time, but a fumbling toward an explanation—and I did things I wasn’t proud of.

And I never knew just what Tatum was doing back at home, or who she was spending time with. I mostly tried not to think about it.

In October, I was in Australia, playing the Sydney Indoor tournament. At this point, my tennis focus was wavering more and more: I’d have flashes of my old flair, then I’d lose to people for whom I had little respect. By now I barely had respect for myself. I lost to Edberg in Sydney, in the quarterfinals. A decent enough result—but just decent.

One night, Tatum called from New York (once Kevin and Sean had started preschool, we’d decided to move back east, keeping Malibu as a West Coast base) and, in the course of the conversation, mentioned that she was planning a fund-raising event for Bill Clinton. It would be held at some artist’s studio, and Stephen Stills was going to play…. “Uhhuh,” I said. “That sounds nice.” I was half-listening to the usual music of a domestic conversation, when suddenly Tatum spoke three words that changed my life forever. “You’re not invited,” she said.

Now I was paying full attention. “I’m not invited?” I asked. “Why not?”

She hastily tried to put a better face on the situation. “You can come, but I’m sure you wouldn’t even want to,” Tatum said. “It’s just a bunch of people you wouldn’t be particularly interested in—I’ve only invited a couple of friends of mine, from acting class.”

Friends from acting class—
the phrase stuck in my head. Now I was thinking about things I didn’t want to be thinking about.

Then, almost absurdly, she mentioned that her mother had been in a car accident, and had lost a couple of fingers.

I started laughing. I couldn’t help myself. It all sounded so crazy. Her poor mother, Joanna Moore, had had such a sad and disordered life that almost no possibility seemed too strange. “What’s the
next
thing you’re going to tell me?” I asked.

Tatum got furious—I can’t say I totally blame her. “How dare you be so insensitive?” she shouted.

I tried to smooth things over, but I sensed it was far too late for that.

When I flew back from Australia, I rented a car and drove to Palm Springs, where Tatum’s mother lived. Joanna had indeed lost two fingers—to this day, I’m not sure it had anything to do with a car crash. The story was that she had gotten off at an exit, gone through a guardrail and over an embankment, and plunged twenty feet to the bottom of a gully—and that she’d been completely uninjured except for the loss of the fingers.

As I sat with Joanna, the talk turned to Tatum and our difficulties. “Tatum is going through something, but you’ve got to stand by her,” Joanna said. “You’ve just got to stand by her—it’s going to be OK.” She seemed to know a lot more than she was saying—certainly a lot more than I knew. I left feeling profoundly unsettled.

We spent the rest of October in chilly silence: Tatum had clearly made up her mind. At the end of the month, we decided to separate officially—I couldn’t stand the thought of a divorce, even though I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that there was no other next step.

I was devastated.

The real killer was that, for the short term at least, I had to go on with my tennis life. I was committed to three more tournaments, the Paris Indoor, Antwerp, and the Grand Slam Cup in Germany, as well as the Davis Cup final against Switzerland, in Fort Worth.

It was the end of my marriage and the end of my tennis career, both at the same time, and almost nobody knew about it except Tatum and me. I felt as though the bottom had dropped out of the world. I couldn’t go on, but I had to go on.

In Paris, I was literally crying on the changeovers. I would put my head in a towel and fake being angry. It was an easy enough deception—I was always worked up about something, anyway. I couldn’t have told the truth and asked for sympathy: I think I would have fallen over if I’d done that. What saved my life in Paris was the presence of Patrick, the one person there whom I could begin to talk to about what I was going through. We played doubles together at that tournament, for only the third or fourth time in an ATP event. And significantly, though I lost in the second round of the singles—and though Patrick and I hadn’t done especially well together before—teaming with my brother at that moment gave me the strength to play on. We won the tournament!

Then I went on alone to Antwerp, and lost once again in the second round. I would barely be able to function for the next six months.

My final Davis Cup tie, in Fort Worth, was a brief, strange respite. I had brought along a support group: my parents, my brothers, all three of my children, a nanny, and my agent, Sergio Palmieri. I needed every one of them. A few days before, I had been staying at Andre Agassi’s house in Las Vegas, telling Andre, “I don’t know if I can do Davis Cup—I just can’t function.”

The news of my separation had leaked to the press—a couple of photographs of Tatum out kicking up her heels with new friends had fanned the flames—and it was all the reporters wanted to talk about. I spent the days before my first match (I was there to play doubles with Pete Sampras) trying to practice and spend time with my kids as I dodged inappropriate questions.

The strain showed when I finally got on court to play. The atmosphere inside the Tarrant County Convention Center was the kind of chaos I’d once loved in Davis Cup—American fans waving flags and sounding boat horns at lederhosen-wearing Swiss fans chanting and rattling cowbells—but now it felt all too much like the chaos inside me. I double-faulted at set point in the first-set tiebreaker, then dropped my serve again at 5–4 in the second set, which Pete and I went on to lose in another tiebreaker.

I felt furious and humiliated. This was my final Davis Cup; I couldn’t go out on a loss—to the Swiss! (It was the first time they’d ever made it to a final.) I began yelling at Pete, trying to psych him up; trash-talking at Jakob Hlasek and Marc Rosset, the Swiss team. Somehow we managed to hang on and take the third set, 7–5, but by the time we went into the locker room for the ten-minute break, I was in some kind of altered state. All my fear and anger and frustration and sorrow had built up to the point where smoke was practically coming out of my ears.

“We’re going to go out and kick some ass!”
I screamed, at Pete and Jim Courier and Andre Agassi.
“We’re going to go out and kick some ass!”
I repeated. I screamed it over and over, like a war chant, until my voice was hoarse.

And when Pete and I went back out, that was exactly what we did. Every time we won a point, Agassi and Courier would shout, “Answer the question!”—a little phrase I occasionally used to shout at umpires. Pete—imagine it; Pete Sampras!—was shouting, pumping his fist. The fans in the stands were going crazy, the boat horns drowning out the cowbells. We won the last two sets, 6–1 and 6–2. When it was over, Pete hugged me. “I love you, Mac,” he said.

I rested up my voice that night, then screamed it hoarse again the next day as Jim beat Hlasek in four sets. When it was all over, I took a big American flag from courtside and ran around and around the court, waving it high from both hands, as the crowd went nuts. It was as happy as I’d ever been.

Then I went right back to being the saddest I’d ever been, all over again. I returned to New York with my parents, my brothers, and my kids—and then, the very next day, flew to Germany for the Grand Slam Cup. I could hardly imagine playing tennis: I was barely putting one foot in front of the other.

Before I got on the plane at Kennedy, I went to a newsstand to get something to read for the flight and divert my mind from the only thing I could think about. And there, staring me in the face, was
People
magazine, with Tatum and me on the cover, and the caption, “End of the Love Match.” I picked up a copy in spite of myself—I couldn’t help it—and read the article. I can’t even remember the piece, it made me so angry: The thrust appeared to be that the end of the marriage had mostly been my fault, for holding Tatum back from her career.

A
BOUT A MONTH
into our separation, Tatum and I went to the premiere of the movie
Malcolm X,
in Manhattan. We were still living in the apartment together, with the kids, even though we weren’t staying in the same room. It was a very strange time, I didn’t know which end was up, and so when she suggested we go together, I said, “Why not?” I suppose that, just as I’d once harbored a secret hope, a decade earlier, that Borg would return to the tour, some hidden part of me held a tiny hope that Tatum and I would get back together.

I regretted going as soon as we got to the theater. What had I been thinking? There were cameras everywhere, titillated reporters shouting questions. For reasons only she could understand, Tatum was absolutely glowing that night, while my smiles were as fake as could be. As soon as the lights went down in the theater, the floods started again—I sat there weeping, thinking,
Why aren’t we together?
And,
Why doesn’t she feel bad, even if she does believe this is the right thing to do?

After the movie was over, Tatum looked at me with something almost like sympathy. “Someday you’ll thank me for this,” she said.

I wondered about that for a little while. Then I understood what she’d meant. I think she’d realized she was such trouble, and so incapable of being the wife that I wanted, that eventually I’d be happier with someone else.

At that point, though, I couldn’t imagine being with anyone, ever again.

I also resented the way she’d said it. While I was falling apart, she seemed to be feeling better about herself than she had in a long time, and so her words conveyed a certain superiority. It was almost as if she was drawing power from my weakness.

The last thing I felt like doing was sticking around while Tatum went through her latest phase of self-discovery. I wanted to try to work things out, or split for good.

After returning from the Grand Slam Cup, I told her I was staying in my apartment, and that if she, in fact, wanted to separate, she would have to move out. She did. It was over.

I
T’S ALMOST HARD
to understand from this distance, but at the time, I was shocked and devastated by how suddenly it had all happened. I did feel responsible, but at the same time, I felt furious at Tatum—how could she have made this decision when I had already told her I was going to stop playing so she could work more?

However, the question I kept asking myself over and over was, What had I been thinking in the first place? If it had all been meant to come to this, why did I ever think we could really function as a couple? I felt dumb, and it hurt. Love is blind, they say; now I really knew what they were talking about. I’d thought Tatum was a diamond in the rough, that I was going to be the guy to polish her up and help her shine. Now it all just seemed idiotic.