You Cannot Be Serious (35 page)

I had never cried so much in my life—I would start thinking about everything, the tears would come, and I wouldn’t be able to stop until I had cried myself out. In early February, Arthur Ashe died, and the news only seemed to add more weight to a burden I could no longer bear. Arthur and I had had our differences, even our clashes, but I’d had a huge amount of respect for him as a man, a black man, and a positive force for world tennis. I realized too late that he was the greatest ambassador our sport had ever had, and I was determined to try to do better myself.

Almost as soon as I’d returned from Germany in December, Tatum had gone to make a TV movie—reinforcing the appearance that I’d been the one holding her back from her career. She’d insisted on taking one-and-a-half-year-old Emily with her for virtually the entire two-month shoot. I thought it was a huge mistake, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Kevin and Sean and I all slept in the same room together the whole time: Sometimes one of them would wake up and see the tears on my face. Then, one morning, Kevin said, “I don’t want to see you cry anymore, Dad.”

I
WALKED OUT
into the fresh air of 1993 and began my new life. Now that I was no longer touring, I had a lot of time to devote to ventures I’d begun earlier. One of them was broadcasting.

At the 1991 U.S. Open, a couple of rounds after the match where Michael Chang had topspin-lobbed me to death, I had stopped by the USA Network’s broadcast booth to visit my buddy Vitas Gerulaitis, who’d begun a promising new career as a tennis commentator. At the time, I’d thought Vitas was head and shoulders above almost any of the tennis broadcasters out there—which wasn’t saying a lot, since I felt (and still largely feel) that most of them stank: Virtually without exception, they were arrogant, dry, pompous, or just plain boring—take your pick.

Vitas, on the other hand, was anything but boring. It wasn’t just that he knew pro tennis inside and out—he had the wonderful gift of being himself on the air, Queens accent and all. He had a conversational style and a funny, irreverent personality that simply drew you into the match.

Jimmy Connors was playing a lanky young Dutchman named Paul Haarhuis in a quarterfinal that night, and though Jimmy had been wild-carded into the tournament at the astounding age of thirty-nine, he was giving Haarhuis one hell of a match. Vitas was doing the commentary, along with Ted Robinson, and, not knowing enough about broadcasting to be afraid, I fell into a natural give-and-take with the two of them. At one point in the match, Jimmy started throwing up lobs at Haarhuis, Haarhuis kept hitting smashes—and Jimmy kept running each one down and throwing up another lob. This happened several times in a row, until Jimmy ended the point with an incredible running winner, which drove the Flushing Meadows crowd into a frenzy. That was the greatest point I ever saw at the U.S. Open.

It wasn’t just a hell of a match (Connors wound up winning in four), it was a hell of a match to begin my commentating career with. USA liked what I’d done so much that they offered me a contract. We signed a deal in 1992, based on my availability, since I was still playing at the time. I also signed with NBC to broadcast the French Open and Wimbledon. With each network, the agreement was that I could start broadcasting as soon as I had been eliminated from the singles in the tournament. Unfortunately, my availability was increasing all the time!

Now, in 1993, my schedule was wide open. I re-upped with USA. I had once told myself that after my playing career was over, the two things I would never do were commentary and Seniors tennis. Never say never.

Early that year, I also briefly considered coaching Andre Agassi, but I worried that it wouldn’t give me time enough with my kids—who I was actually getting to see for weeks at a time, now that I was no longer touring. It became a moot point when Andre hired Pancho Segura (I would later learn, after brief fiascos with Sergei Bruguera and Boris Becker, that being a traveling coach was not my cup of tea. I’m good at putting on diapers, but not with people over eighteen.)

Another new venture was music. All through high school, I had been an impressive (to me) air guitarist, and from time to time I inflicted my singing voice on friends who had put together rock bands. When I started on the tennis circuit, however, and suddenly found myself with hours and hours to kill in hotel rooms all over the world, it occurred to me that I should actually try taking up the guitar.

Way back in 1981, I had bought a black Les Paul, which I broke into pieces in frustration the first week I owned it, after seeing Buddy Guy play at the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago, where I’d been taken by my friend Gary Fencik. Next I bought a 1962 white Fender Stratocaster formerly owned by Elliot Easton of the Cars. I managed to figure out a chord here, a song there, and pretty soon I could play a little. Very little.

I would eventually get private guitar lessons from my friends Carlos Santana, Eddie Van Halen, Stephen Stills, Alex Lifeson, and Billy Squier, among others; bass lessons from Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones; and piano lessons from the legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb. I would also get to jam with the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy, Joe Cocker, and Lars Ulrich of Metallica (whose father, Torben, had played on the tennis circuit and for the Danish Davis Cup team). I would love to say that some of the brilliance of these amazing musicians rubbed off on me, but I can’t go that far. I will say that I advanced from miserable to…mediocre.

Now that Tatum had moved to my other apartment on East 90th Street, I sometimes had my whole place to myself when the kids were with her, or at school—all four floors, including an incredible two-story tower penthouse with a 360-degree view of Manhattan. I turned the penthouse into a music studio. My musician buddies, both great and unknown, would frequently stop by to jam, and I began to try my hand at writing songs. I even sat in on a few of my friends’ gigs at downtown clubs that spring and summer.

Restless character that I am, I also branched out in an entirely new direction. Mary Carillo hadn’t known what she was starting when she took me to those Paris art museums back in the spring of 1977. One Saturday afternoon in 1980, I’d gone gallery-hopping in SoHo with Vitas, who was collecting photo-realist paintings at the time. We wound up at the Meisel Gallery, where he bought a number of pieces, and what I saw there excited me. Part of me was tempted to emulate Vitas and buy a canvas, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on something I didn’t completely understand. As a result, for the next year or so, in every city I played, I stopped into galleries and museums, slowly educating my eye.

I found myself most attracted to modern American painters—people as diverse as Alice Neel, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, and Agnes Martin, as well as much younger artists such as Eric Fischl and the graffiti-influenced Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. I bought a photo-realist canvas by Tom Blackwell, and gradually began to make some other purchases.

As I approached the end of my tennis-playing career, it had scarcely occurred to me that someday I might want to open a gallery of my own. I liked the idea of going into business, but I didn’t know if I wanted to be in the business of buying and selling something that could appreciate significantly in value—but could also drop like a ton of bricks. In 1992, I’d bought a residential loft in an old cast-iron building on Greene Street in SoHo. After my separation, I began to consider converting the big loft into a viewing space.

As with buying paintings, however, I knew I couldn’t go into the art-gallery business half-cocked. I now knew a little bit about art, but I didn’t know much about buying and selling it. And so, at the end of 1992, Larry Salander offered me a nonpaying job at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries on the Upper East Side. You can’t learn the guitar without learning the basic chords, and you can’t learn the art business without knowing the nuts and bolts.

But I was often lonely. I dated a bit after Tatum and I separated, but it gave me a terribly hollow feeling, and, at the same time, I really wasn’t ready for anything more serious. Even dating was tricky, since the last thing I wanted was publicity while I was getting divorced. That would be a long and very messy process: twenty-two months–plus, to be exact.

O
VER
C
HRISTMAS VACATION
that year, I took my kids to stay at the Malibu house for a couple of weeks. It’s hard to beat Manhattan at Christmastime, but it was a moody holiday for me that year, and I felt we all needed some sun and fun.

Not long after we arrived, I got a phone call from Lily Gross, a beach friend from Malibu. Lily told me that Corky Grazer—the former wife of Brian Grazer, the movie producer—who lived in North Malibu, was having a party on Christmas Day for her friends and their kids. Did I feel like bringing my brood along?

Sure I did, I said. It sounded like fun.

“Patty Smyth’s going to be there, with her daughter,” Lily said, in a significant, slightly teasing way.

Well, that was interesting. I had loved Patty Smyth’s band, Scandal, in the eighties—her big hit “Goodbye to You” was one of my favorites—and I knew she had recently released a solo album that had sold a million copies. I thought her voice was tough and sexy, and I had seen her videos….

This was interesting.

The party was a mob scene, full of noisy kids running around a Christmas tree placed, slightly surreally, near a big picture window overlooking the sun-sparkling Pacific. As usual, there were lots of Hollywood people, a number of well-known faces, but I was intrigued by Patty, who didn’t seem like anyone else there.

I’m a New Yorker, and I can always tell a fellow New Yorker, and I could see and hear in an instant that that was Patty. She had grown up in Queens, she told me. So had I, I said. She had moved to the Coast the year before, she said, as her daughter, Ruby, was starting first grade. Patty had been divorced from Ruby’s father, the musician Richard Hell, “forever.” She had come west not just because she was making the album with a Los Angeles producer, but because life as a single mother of a six-year-old in downtown Manhattan was becoming just a little too colorful. She had witnessed a shooting and a stabbing in her neighborhood, and she’d had to punch a guy in the face after he touched her on the street—while she was holding Ruby’s hand.

She had all of a native New Yorker’s reservations about L.A., she said—the endless flirtation and lack of sincerity drove her crazy—but she had a little house up in Topanga Canyon, and her own washer and dryer, and a car, and her daughter was happy in school…. Things could be a lot worse.

I liked her right away. Over years of being famous and infamous, I had developed very sensitive antennae for when people were overimpressed by me, or were trying to get something, or thought I was a jerk—and Patty was up to none of that. She was real and cute and sexy, but she was a woman, not a girl; someone who had lived life and knew the score. And as an aspiring musician, I was impressed by
her.

So I told her about myself, simply and directly. I knew she knew who I was, so instead of talking about my history, I told her about a couple of my new ventures. I said that the interior of my SoHo loft was almost refurbished, and that I was going to open my gallery there in a few weeks. I told her about the end of my career and the end of my marriage, about sleeping in the same bed with my kids, about Kevin telling me it was time to stop crying. I wasn’t trying to impress her (or depress her); I was just speaking from the heart.

One of my kids ran up and interrupted us. We both smiled. I knew, and knew she knew, that we had made a connection. But at the same time, we both knew that the last thing (and on some deeper level, the first thing) either of us was looking for at that point was a serious relationship. It was all too complicated. Even our smiles were complicated. The party, and the children, pulled us off to different corners of the room. Awhile later, I saw her smiling and talking with a man I didn’t know—and already didn’t like. I pressed my lips together and shook my head.

As the party began to break up, I couldn’t just let her go. I made my way through the parents and kids and put myself in front of Patty. “Can we get together sometime?” I asked. “I’m out here for another ten days.” I gave her my best boyish grin. “I’m not doing anything New Year’s Eve.”

She sighed. “I’m going to Florida tomorrow,” she said. “Key West. I really don’t want to go, but I have to—I promised a friend.”

“So don’t go,” I tried.

She shook her head. “I wish it were that simple,” she said. We looked at each other for a second, trying to figure out what to do. I wasn’t sure how to read her signals—or if there were any signals. “Listen,” Patty finally said. “I go to New York a lot. I’d really like to see your gallery—maybe I’ll stop by sometime.”

That was my cue, I realized afterward. That was the moment I should have looked for a pencil and paper, scribbled down my phone number, and handed it to her. But I was scared; I was frozen; I was not a fully operating human being at that point in my life. So I smiled and nodded. “That’d be great,” I said.

She smiled back, then took Ruby’s hand and walked out the door.

13

I
F THERE WAS ANY DOUBT
that my ATP career was over, I dispelled it in February of 1994 with what turned out to be my final tournament, in Rotterdam: I lost in the first round to the then-tenth-ranked Magnus Gustafsson of Sweden. The real disappointment, however, came when Boris Becker went through the motions in our semifinal doubles loss. Had I won that match and the next, I would have broken the all-time doubles record held by the Dutchman Tom Okker (and, interestingly, would have had to beat two other Dutchmen, Paul Haarhuis and Jacco Eltingh, in the final to do it).

I was now thirty-five, officially old enough to play Seniors events, and I kicked off my Seniors career soon afterward with my first trip to Russia, for a four-man event with Borg, Connors, and Vilas in St. Petersburg. It was a depressing, slightly eerie trip: The tone was set right away when the lights inside our Aeroflot plane flicked off as we landed. I was sobered to find St. Petersburg’s great art museum, the Hermitage, heatless and dilapidated, and to see that the lobby of my hotel was crawling with prostitutes, who seemed to be even more interested in finding a way out of Russia than in making a few rubles. The tournament itself was no less strange: The organizers didn’t seem to want to admit anyone but family and friends, and refused entry, to the people waiting outside who could afford to buy tickets. Sadly, not many could afford them. We played in front of nearly empty stands.