You Cannot Be Serious (39 page)

I said, “Is that true, Steffi?” Steffi said yes.

I said, “OK, let’s play, but let’s do it under two conditions—let’s try our hardest, and let’s finish what we start.”

It seemed people were excited about watching us play. Our early-round matches were packed with enthusiastic crowds, and we did well. In the quarterfinals, we played Venus Williams and Justin Gimelstob, who had won two Grand Slam mixed-doubles titles in the previous year. In the first game, I served, and I noticed that Venus was standing inside the baseline to receive. I was amused. I hit three unreturnable serves in that first game—one at her body, one out wide, and one up the middle. I could tell she wanted to swing hard on the returns, and I encouraged her on the changeover. “I like where you’re standing,” I told her. “Why don’t you move in a little closer next time?”

Now Steffi was amused. Our relaxed state, along with the enthusiastic support of the packed Centre Court crowd, helped us advance to an easy straight-set win.

In the semifinals, we were scheduled to meet Jonas Bjorkman and Anna Kournikova. Everyone was coming up to me, people I knew and people I didn’t, excited about the match. At five-fifteen that afternoon, I walked out of the NBC booth extremely frustrated at what I had thought was one of our more lackluster broadcast efforts that day, but I told myself, “Hey, forget about it. Just think about winning two more matches in the mixed doubles at Wimbledon.” Just then, Bob Basche, a production assistant, handed me a note. “Call Steffi,” it said.

I phoned her from the locker room. She sounded subdued. “John, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too much, and it’s too late in the day—I’m defaulting.” She had to save herself for the final tomorrow, she told me. For one of the few times in my life, I was speechless. I sat there for five minutes, silent. Then I started to get angry.

It was the end of the day, and only two people were left in the locker room besides me. I turned to them and said, “Can you believe what this [blanking] bitch did to me?”

The two people were Andre Agassi and his coach, Brad Gilbert.

It turned out there was a lot I didn’t know at that moment. I later discovered that others may have known about Steffi’s decision to pull out of the mixed before she informed me. What was more, Andre and Steffi had already begun seeing each other secretly, and had planned to have dinner together that night. I’m not sure if her desire to see Andre outweighed her desire to play our match, but—now that they’re married and parents themselves—I forgive them.

O
N
J
ULY
10, 1999, a glorious early summer day in Newport, Rhode Island, I stood before a crowd of some 4,000 people on the big back lawn of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and felt elevated and grateful beyond belief. It was the day of my induction into the Hall, and, because I’d always had such a sharp sense of the game’s history, it was a day that meant as much to me as any in my career.

They asked me to speak for about four or five minutes that afternoon. As I had so often done in the past, I ignored the advice of the officials. Once Dr. Eric Heiden, the great Olympic speed skater (and a friend through my old college buddy Kenny Margerum), introduced me with the immortal words, “He’s probably the most controversial player in modern tennis. He took whining to the next level—I think we ought to hold off on that induction until John apologizes,” I was off and running. For the next forty-five minutes.

“Is it true that I have to apologize?” I asked the crowd.

“Nooo!” yelled four thousand people.

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “To hell with them!”

My parents were out there on the green lawn, and Mark and his wife, Diane, and their three kids, and my brother Patrick. Patty was there, looking beautiful in a white dress, and holding baby Ava, and Ruby, looking beautiful, too, and Kevin and Sean, handsome in their blue blazers, and lovely Emily and Anna. A lot of other people who meant something to me were on hand, too: Peter Fleming; former New York mayor David Dinkins; Doug Saputo, Tony Palafox, my old Stanford friend Bill Maze.

I thanked my parents, for getting me started in this great game and encouraging me every step of the way. I thanked Rod Laver, for inspiring me. And I mentioned everyone, alive or dead, who had meant something to my tennis career, from Tony to the late Harry Hopman to Gene Scott to Tony Trabert to the late Arthur Ashe. I mentioned the late Frank Hammond, and stated my belief that
he
should be in the Hall of Fame. I called Peter Fleming “the perfect partner for me, and the perfect friend to have.” I acknowledged my great rivals Borg and Connors.

I even mentioned God. “If you believe in someone up above,” I said, “that person, for whatever reason, wanted me to play tennis…. Believeit or not, I think God had an enjoyable time watching my tantrums…. I think my emotions were on my sleeve. I think that my drive and intensity were on display. But ultimately, I don’t think people would have given a hill of beans if I hadn’t been able to play.

“I’ll never get away from the label of the next Nastase or Connors,” I said. “I don’t happen to think I was as bad as they were, but I was pretty darn close. But hopefully, in the end, I will be remembered because of the way I played.”

My painter friend Eric Fischl was also there that day. Over the years, Eric had shown me the ropes in the art world, and I had given him tennis lessons in exchange for drawing lessons (his lessons, with a nude model, were a lot more fun!). I had asked Eric to paint a small tennis portrait of me to donate to the Hall of Fame, and we unveiled the (six-foot-by-seven-foot!) painting as part of the weekend ceremonies.

Unfortunately, the painting was too big to fit in the Hall; fortunately it now hangs in the living room of my summer home on Long Island. The following year, Eric’s design for a sculpture commemorating Arthur Ashe was chosen from hundreds of applications, and the statue now stands outside the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows.

T
HE NEW PRESIDENT
of the USTA, Judy Levering, was also there that day in Newport. And two months later, in a press conference at the United States Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Judy was introducing me as the thirty-seventh captain of the United States Davis Cup team:

“I believe that John is the best person at this time for the job as Davis Cup captain. It’s as simple as that. There is nobody in the world more passionate about Davis Cup or tennis in general than John. He is perhaps the greatest Davis Cup player in the history of the sport. John’s record as a player was fifty-nine wins and ten losses. That’s remarkable. I think he will be just as successful as captain and bring that same passion and energy as he did as a player. John is certainly the most recognizable figure in the sport of tennis, the most outspoken advocate of Davis Cup, and for tennis. I think it all adds up. He has the respect of the players and everyone involved in tennis. I think this is great for Davis Cup and great for the sport. John joins an illustrious group of Davis Cup captains that include, among others, Bill Tilden, Bill Talbert, Tony Trabert, and Arthur Ashe…. That’s quite a group, folks.”

It sure was quite a group, one to which I was enormously proud to belong. I had received two huge honors in the space of two months, and I felt as if I had stepped up to a new level in my career, and my life.

The first of those honors would live with me forever. The second one also happened to be a job, however, and as I knew all too well from having played under three different Davis Cup captains, it was a very hard one. It was both a figurehead and a political position, and it called for someone with persuasive diplomatic skills. Players had to be wooed away from tournaments, exhibitions, and other lucrative commercial ventures to compete for their country, for less money than they might have been able to make elsewhere. They had to be coaxed to commit to a physically taxing and emotionally draining week at a time when they might be recharging their batteries. And the four separate weeks of Cup play invariably fell at times that didn’t jibe with the players’ schedules. Time and again, I had seen Connors and Vitas blow off Davis Cup, and I knew I was potentially facing the same kind of reaction from Andre Agassi and especially Pete Sampras.

For a few years in the early and mid-nineties, Pete had had some great moments as a Davis Cup player, including two spirited five-set wins in doubles with yours truly in 1992. In what was probably his best moment in Cup play, in Russia in 1995, he won the final just about singlehandedly, taking both his singles matches (including one on the first day, where he was cramping in the fifth set against Andrei Chesnokov), and dominating the doubles, all on an indoor clay-court surface that the Russians had specifically designed to try to defeat his game—just as the French had done against me at Grenoble in 1982, also to no avail.

He won that cup for us, and I knew he had wondered, Where was the recognition? Where was the cover of
Sports Illustrated
? I think Pete had come to feel about Davis Cup, “No one cares, so why should I?”

Well, of course, the reverse of that is, If the top guy doesn’t care, then no one will. You’ve got to keep caring even when others have stopped. It’s like the old story about the comedian: You prefer a thousand people in the room, but if there’s just one person out there, should you not do the show? The answer is, The show must go on. If you believe in the concept of Davis Cup, of representing your country, it’s got to come at a pretty difficult cost sometimes.

I remembered my own conflict, when I wouldn’t or couldn’t play during the Code of Conduct years, 1985 and 1986. I felt I was standing up for a principle, but I still wondered if I was doing the right thing.

I thought that if Andre and Pete and Michael Chang would listen to anyone, it was me. But I knew I still had an uphill battle in front of me.

I lost.

In part, I lost to some of the very powers that had helped enrich me: tennis’s agents. The agents, who work every side of a big tournament, from the players to the TV coverage to the endorsements—damn the conflict of interest, full speed ahead!—see little advantage in their clients’ playing for their country. So whenever a Sampras or an Agassi said, “Why should I care about Davis Cup?” there would be his agent, sitting on his shoulder like a little devil, saying, “You don’t have to care! Nobody else cares! Go play Hong Kong for double the bucks!”

I think Judy Levering, the first woman to be USTA president, was and is a fine person, and really wanted to change things: Picking me as captain over a number of less controversial tennis figures who had lobbied hard for the job was a gutsy move.

In the end, I took us partway up the mountain, but I couldn’t drag us to the top.

For me, Davis Cup was an exercise in mixed feelings: I loved representing my country again, I loved the camaraderie with the team members, I liked being a leader. That’s a natural role for the oldest of three brothers.

What I hated was having to go through a song-and-dance to try to persuade stars to participate—and then, once they’d agreed, to see them drop out at the last minute. I may be many things, but I’m not a salesman. I hated having Michael Chang turn me down, not once but twice—first, at the desperate moment when both Todd Martin and Sampras had pulled out just before our first-round match against Zimbabwe, and then in July, against our semifinal opponent, Spain. (It should be said for Michael that his conflict for the semifinal had to do with some clinics he’d scheduled for his religious group. Still, I couldn’t help wondering: If anyone was going to forgive you for playing for your country, wouldn’t it be a religious group?)

I also hated the captain’s lack of control over any but the most trivial matters, such as tennis balls or practice courts. I wanted to coach my team, but I quickly found that the players’ own coaches were highly protective of their turf and weren’t keen on my stepping in. As I sat at courtside, watching the matches unfold, I thought longingly of the days when, with the ball on my racket, I could change the outcome of an entire tie. Just sitting there, I couldn’t change much. (Nor had I anticipated how much I would hate
just sitting,
in what felt like the very worst spot on the court, my head swinging back and forth, back and forth, like some guy in a bad tennis commercial.)

More and more, I thought of poor Arthur Ashe, in his chair by the net, his face a blank mask as I underwent my volcanic struggles on-court. He always kept his emotions bound up so tightly that I never fully appreciated the frustrations he must have been feeling. Until now.

After losing to Agassi in a five-set semifinal marathon at the January 2000 Australian Open, Sampras went to the tournament doctor complaining of a sore shoulder; the doctor advised him to take a few weeks off. He reached me by phone while I was at a restaurant with Eric Fischl and his wife, April Gornick, discussing the latest events in the tennis and art worlds. The restaurant was crowded and noisy, and I could barely hear Pete making his excuses. I was less than convinced, and Pete promptly accused me of questioning his integrity. Things didn’t feel good between us when I hung up.

Fortunately, against Zimbabwe in February, Andre Agassi came straight from his title at the Australian and played like a true champion—despite exhaustion and the personal turmoil of family illness, despite the incessant drumming that began on the first point of the first match and didn’t stop until the end. After Rick Leach and Alex O’Brien played their hearts out in a tension-filled doubles match, only to lose 6–8 in the fifth set, the tie came down, on the final day, to Chris “Country” Woodruff’s match against Wayne Black.

On the first day, in his first Davis Cup appearance ever, Chris had frozen like a deer in the headlights and lost badly to Wayne’s brother, Byron. I had been subdued—depressed—during that match, but now the whole tie was on the line. At one set all and down a break in the third, Chris was looking tired and panicky, so I decided to give him a taste of the real me. “Country, you can’t let this [blanking] match slip away!” I yelled at him. “You’ve got to suck it up. You can
win
this thing!”