Superbrat gets serious
John McEnroe still has a knack for causing controversy, write Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester.
JOHN McEnroe is more elder statesman than superbrat these days. ‘‘I’ll go with elder statesman,’’ he says when we ask him to choose between the two. ‘‘I’m hopefully much more of that, although I’m still a tiny bit of the other one. It’s hard for me to even say that word.’’
The wiry wonderkid who took on the tennis establishment in the 1980s, telling the umpire, ‘‘you cannot be serious’’, is nearly 60 and has become a reassuring presence in the Wimbledon commentary box. But there is a bit of him that likes the fact that for many people he will be ‘‘a caricature of myself for life’’.
Having spent his youth turning down club dinners to party with rock stars, he would still prefer to go to Glastonbury than to Ascot, and thinks it’s ridiculous that tennis players are expected to bow and curtsy to the royals.
We meet him at his hotel in Chelsea Harbour, west London as he promotes his autobiography, But Seriously.
He has impeccable manners, and is more contemplative than confrontational, but can’t stop questioning everything. ‘‘My kids and wife do say I commentate on a lot of things,’’ he says.
Wimbledon, however, is one of his favourite times of year. ‘‘It’s different from the other tournaments, it’s the only grass court event, so aesthetically it’s always been to me more beautiful. As a kid growing up in New York it seemed magical. I like some of the traditions but I don’t think the whites thing is important. I was here at the Olympics and they still played great tennis even though they were wearing their colours.’’
Since retiring from the circuit, McEnroe has been determined to popularise tennis.
‘‘One of my great goals was to bring it to the masses and I don’t think that has happened; if anything it’s got more difficult. If you look at Manhattan, where I grew up, real estate prices have rocketed and the clubs that used to be there have been pushed aside. I think it’s tougher for the poorer kids.’’
Pushy parents aren’t a necessity, he says. ‘‘Federer’s parents – do they seem pushy? No, and he’s the greatest player.’’
None of McEnroe’s five children – three by his first wife, the actress Tatum O’Neal, and two by his current one, the singer Patty Smyth – are professional athletes. ‘‘I maybe feel like I should have pushed my kids harder, to have the fire in the belly and the hunger, but sometimes you don’t know if that’s teachable.’’
He prefers to be at Wimbledon as a commentator. ‘‘It’s easier. As a player I was only here to try to win. That alone puts a lot of pressure on you. There were expectations, controversies, some of which I was responsible for. I exploded a lot worse than even I ever dreamt so it became very stressful. To be a backseat driver is a lot easier.’’
His finals matches against Bjorn Borg in 1980 and 1981 are still seen as two of the greatest ever played on grass. Although the two men played one another only 14 times on the circuit, they have played privately more than 60 times since and McEnroe can’t help saying that ‘‘more recently, I think I was having the upper hand’’.
He has tried hard, he says, to control his temper. ‘‘You have to work at things, like staying fit. Even if you have had a lot of success you have to work at seeing the glass half full. I have had therapy, not a lot, but when my dad passed away recently, when things happen that are emotionally difficult.’’
Many former sports stars collapse when they quit but McEnroe has reinvented himself. ‘‘I could have been a past player of grand slams but I’ve kept going, I take pride in that. It’s difficult when you reach your peak at 25 or 26 and then you . . . feel your life is going downhill.’’
He once said he would have been 20 per cent more successful but 40 per cent less interesting without the meltdowns. ‘‘It would be interesting to see how I would have maxed out as a player if I had behaved a bit better. I can sit here and talk to you about how I should have won more Wimbledons, but if you had told me at 15 I would have won three of them I wouldn’t have believed it, so what kind of message am I sending to myself, my own kids and other people if I say I have regrets? We all go through it, beating ourselves up too much for the past . . . I should have won the French Open.’’
He is surprisingly self-critical for a player who has won 77 singles and 78 doubles titles. ‘‘It’s pretty safe to say I am a perfectionist. I am not as competitive as I was but that doesn’t mean I am still not a lot more competitive than the average person.’’
This may be why he is still courting controversy. He recently said that Serena Williams would be ranked ‘‘like 700 in the world’’ if she had to play on the men’s circuit, prompting the 23-times grand slam champion to ask him to ‘‘respect’’ her.
‘‘I never wanted to do a battle of the sexes and play a woman, it seems likes apples and oranges, but I always seem to put my foot in it and say something about this that sounds bad,’’ he says.
His children obviously tell him he can’t be sexist. ‘‘My daughters don’t think I can beat Serena now, but I did until recently think I could. I don’t know why it’s only in tennis that people talk about women and men playing each other. No one asks about the other sports. If people are so caught up in it let the women play on the REUTERS GETTY IMAGES men’s circuit, I don’t think they would do very well. That’s not sexist. I don’t want to be the bad guy or the bearer of bad news. I think generally that a man is stronger than a woman.’’
He is surprised but straightforward when we ask about transgender athletes. ‘‘A local player from where I grew up became a woman and decided to play on the circuit and got to 30 or 40 in the world, it was very strange,’’ he says. ‘‘Was it fair? It’s a tough call. If a guy becomes a girl that’s an extremely heavy thing, you definitely feel you were meant to be a woman so it’s hard to say they’re not meant to compete in a woman’s sport.’’
Winning a grand slam title is as much psychological as physical, McEnroe says. ‘‘With tennis, like boxing, you have to figure out how to get an edge on just one person . . . once you get to the place where people are on a similar plane physically, it becomes very mental.’’
This week he compared Novak Djokovic, who has been on a losing streak, to the golfer Tiger Woods who went ‘‘off the rails’’ after ‘‘issues with his wife’’. It’s inevitable that players will be affected by what happens off court as well as on, he says. ‘‘People lose sight of the fact that these guys and girls are human beings . . . I know from my own personal situation that it was extremely difficult to try to juggle, even when you have a good marriage.’’
Emotional difficulty at home is very distracting. ‘‘My marriage to my first wife ended at the end of my career, this thing emotionally took over.’’ He was thinking more about his three small children than his serve. ‘‘It’s hard to be totally focused, it’s not easy to compartmentalise things and be like, ‘Don’t worry about this’. That’s your life, how do you put it aside?’’
Being almost constantly on the road creates huge pressure. The cult of celebrity has also intensified. ‘‘It seemed pretty crazy when I was around in the 80s but it seems like it’s worse now with social media.’’
What worries him is that the most interesting characters will be drummed out of the sport. ‘‘Nick Kyrgios could be the best player in the world if he was able to harness the mental part. There’s something about him that the non-tennis fan is attracted to – whether it’s his looks or the way he plays, he connects . . . Instead he’ll be out of the game the way things are going in a few years. We don’t want a bunch of flatliners out there.’’
McEnroe has never been a flatliner. Smyth once said that her husband inspired ‘‘real love and real hate’’ simultaneously. ‘‘Maybe that’s not a bad thing,’’ he says. ‘‘If they have a feeling, at least you’re tapping into something,’’ he adds, although he feels sorry that his children have sometimes paid a price for his reputation. ‘‘People would say, ‘Is he going to scream like his dad’?’’
After a successful sports and media career, he has considered going into politics. ‘‘I’ve thought about it because sometimes you feel like you want to do something good as opposed to doing things for yourself. But that’s a way tougher gig than anything. The amount of scrutiny is just insane.’’
He must find it strange to watch Donald Trump having tantrums on Twitter in the way he once did on court. ‘‘He’s a guy who has told everyone for years how brilliant he is, how rich he is, then he backs it up in the ultimate way and becomes the president of the United States.’’
Although McEnroe didn’t vote for him, he understands Trump’s appeal. ‘‘He made himself seem like he’s the everyman that’s going to help the little guy.’’
Even now that he has joined the sporting establishment, McEnroe is still a rebel at heart. ‘‘I was the guy they tried to railroad out of tennis. They said, ‘How dare this guy say what he thinks and disagree with everything?’ To me that was the least I could do. I like to shake things up.’’ The Times