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BOOK
REVIEW: TUESDAY, JUNE 11
Innocent until proven guilty: Mac on Mac
By
Joel Drucker
Special to tennisreporters.net
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Ron
Cioffi
tennisreporters.net
John
McEnroe serves at the U.S. Open, back when he was using wood-framed
rackets.
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You
Cannot Be Serious
By John McEnroe with James Kaplan
Putnam, $25.95, 338 pages
John
McEnroe’s autobiography reminds me of another tenacious soul
who fought hard on British soil, Winston Churchill. “History
shall be kind to me,” said Churchill. “For I shall write
it.” McEnroe’s preemptive approach, much like his tennis
game, is designed to disarm any assailant, keeping inquisitors off-balance
long enough so that McEnroe can go on the attack.
Just
as he breathed new spark into net rushing, so he attempts with candor.
“I’m still a work in progress,” he concedes, one
of many confessional statements he makes throughout this curiously
engaging yet undernourished book.
Right
from his choice of ghostwriter, McEnroe shrewdly tilted the court
with all the angles you’d expect from a left-hander. Rather
than expose himself to someone who knew tennis well enough to press
him – such as prolific collaborator Sally Jenkins, long-standing
tennis writer (and fellow music lover) Peter Bodo or any number
of the sport’s informed press corps – he opted for James
Kaplan, an accomplished New Yorker writer and novelist. The less
you’ve been around tennis, the more McEnroe can jerk you around.
SON
OF PRIVILEGE TURNS TO ‘OK DUDE’
But the book engages. Mimicking his playing style, McEnroe
pursues his agenda with feathery sensitivity and the mixing of paces
that makes him such a contrast to the more standard, whitebread
American jock. The basic premise is that McEnroe, despite his foibles,
is at heart an OK dude, an impassioned New Yorker who loves his
family and smoked pot a few times. He is so eager to come off as
some sort of aging counterculture figure that it’s easy to
forget that he’s the Long Island-raised son of a Manhattan
attorney and that young John attended an elite private school, spent
a year at Stanford and become a millionaire by 21. Rock on, Johnny
Mac!
Again
to McEnroe’s credit, his tale is chronologically faithful,
tracking many matches with reasonable accuracy. McEnroe also honestly
appraises the ups and downs of relationships with the likes of doubles
partner Peter Fleming and rival Bjorn Borg. Unfortunately, his emotional
connection to more contentious foes such as Jimmy Connors and Ivan
Lendl is much more remotely articulated.
Also, like McEnroe’s tennis – which was at once both creative
and logical – the flowing tale will seduce many who wouldn’t
know Lendl from lentils. He is, after all, one of a scant few tennis
players with any sort of crossover cache.
Opening
with a look at his life on September 11, 2001, we learn that McEnroe
is a devoted father, a man who slices and dices breakfast fruit
with all the brio he brought to carving up opponents. He’s
also reforming, regularly attending “anger management”
sessions. He has learned much from the tear-filled collapse of his
first marriage to Tatum O’Neal (though why it broke up is never
made clear in the book) and was once principled enough to refuse
to play an exhibition in South Africa (carefully omitting that he’s
at least once called an African-American linesman, “boy”).
And
throughout this book, he repeatedly takes responsibility for his
frequent tantrums, even noting how over time his temper devoured
both others and himself. Another feather in his cap: McEnroe mentions
nary a word about the millions of dollars and hours of time he has
donated to charity – an area where his record is first-rate.
He regrets that he didn’t enjoy his tennis enough, but is wise
enough to acknowledge that understanding his motivations is a complicated
matter: “One of the things I’m striving to come to terms
with is the deep-down part of me that isn’t willing to give
up my anger. After all, I feel certain that it’s part of what
drove me to the top, and though I may not be at the top of my game
anymore, that fire in my belly is still hot. Where would I be if
I let it go out? And what exactly do I need it for now?”
It’s
tempting to say he needs that emotion to generate interest in an
attention-grubbing, TV show/vehicle as lame as “The Chair.”
For so long, McEnroe made the case for himself as authentic, a contrast
to those image-conscious phonys (a concept he may have grasped from
his fellow whiny New York preppie, Holden Caulfield), such as Chris
Evert and Connors. The man who wanted to take tennis “to the
next level” (as player, not promoter) is a game show host?
What about that tennis academy, John?
But
let’s be fair, and try to understand how McEnroe got to be
who is. McEnroe admits that in his Irish Catholic household, issues
were treated in a rather black and white manner. Having interacted
with McEnroe’s lawyer father, John. Sr., on several enlightening
and even engaging occasions, I’ve come to believe that the
unstated message around the McEnroe household was something like
this: You are innocent until proven guilty and convicted in a court
of law. Until then, walk the earth a free man. And better yet, you
will be represented to the death by your own flesh and blood.
So
as far as John, Jr. is concerned, he remains innocent. A little
verbal admission is far from a conviction. So instead, tell history
by your account – and dare others to prove you wrong. Go ahead,
dare them. Leave ambiguous matters of ethics, morality and interpersonal
behavior to others.
A
FEW OBJECTIONS
But let’s take the dare (cripes, I vowed I wasn’t
going to mock McEnroe’s game show persona), and offer up a
few objections:
- As
he has for years, McEnroe blames tennis officials for not disciplining
him. This is absurd. Yes, I drive 90 mph on side streets, but
it’s the fault of the police who’ve never ticketed me.
I killed people, but why didn’t they catch me and fry me
after the first murder? I was never convicted, so am I really
a criminal?
- Twisting
history further, he makes it sound as if only the British tabloids
turned him into “SuperBrat,” omitting the fact that
he was admonished three times by officials while playing the Wimbledon
qualifying as an unknown in 1977. I’ve also spoken to many
who played McEnroe in the juniors, and while he was dominant enough
to have little need to lose his cool, his cockiness was such that
you’d hardly call him a man of the people.
- Gracious
enough to cite Rod Laver as his hero, he praises Ivan Lendl for
making fitness a part of his regime – and in the process
overtaking McEnroe. But McEnroe neglects to mention that Laver
was also devoted to conditioning (albeit in a different time and
way than Lendl). Along those lines, McEnroe attributes some of
his emotional volatility to his forward-moving, serve-volley style.
Funny, a great many netrushers, from Patrick Rafter and Stefan
Edberg, back to Stan Smith, John Newcombe and Roy Emerson, were
among the best-behaved players in tennis history. But remember,
he’s aiming this book at those millions who appreciate him
as a personality and only get their tennis insights strictly from
John McEnroe.
- Lamenting
the way the “power game” derailed him, McEnroe skips
over the fact that his best year, 1984, he played with a graphite
racket similar to the one Pete Sampras uses today. Citing his
early days as a time when strategy and finesse were more central
parts of tennis, McEnroe overlooks that he was even uniquely creative
when he first came up, a sexy southpaw upgrade over the Chevrolet-like
style prevalent among most serve-and-volleyers in the late 70s.
Here’s the truth: No matter what the era, players mostly
want to hit the ball as hard as they can and win points with maximum,
ruthless efficiency. That simple.
- His
sense of entitlement around art and music is precisely the sort
of dilettantism he would loathe were someone from pop culture
show up on the tennis circuit (Exhibit A: actor-player Vince Van
Patten). In his indulgent appendix of “My Top 25 Rock and
Roll Moments,” he writes, “As I sat in the broadcast
booth at Wimbledon in 1993 going through a pile of otherwise forgettable
letters from old people asking for my autograph, I found a note
saying, ‘Call George Harrison.’ Does McEnroe have any
idea how hostile and lame that makes him sound? It figures, therefore,
that only after going AWOL from his CBS duties to jocksniff with
Bill Clinton did McEnroe ever vote in a Presidential election
(but again, seeking to win favor, he admits this in the book).
No doubt by now, McEnroe has realized that the only place where
he can still be the man instead of the boy is around tennis. Oddly,
he refers to all of the goodies tennis grants him as “consequences.”
Then again, what should we expect from a man who demands that players
be more accessible to the media and can never make eye contact or
say hello with people who’ve known him for years?
But
who am I to question The Great and Powerful McEnroe? For the truth
is, he doesn’t really care what anyone else sees, thinks or
knows. He was a bully as a player, and is now using as much media
as possible as his bully pulpit. Only if he’s experienced something
is it of note. He didn’t ever see Laver’s workouts, so
obviously, like McEnroe, the genius Australian was purely an oncourt
artist, nothing at all like that dreary grind Lendl. Angry at Steffi
Graf for pulling out of the ’99 Wimbledon mixed competition,
he can now forgive her since she’s become a spouse and parent
(just like him!). So long as he continues talking, though, I suppose
McEnroe is tolerable. But when he crusades for a job like the Commissioner
of Tennis, I’ll oppose him to the ends of the earth. That post,
after all, requires the one skill even McEnroe lacks: listening.
Longtime
tennis writer Joel Drucker (Tennis magazine, TBS) would like to
understand John McEnroe better. Really, he would.
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