Slaying holy cows in candid tell-all

He is devoted to his second wife, singer-songwriter Patty Smyth, and is clearly in awe of the rock ’n’ roll universe.

He plays golf with Roger Waters from Pink Floyd. He hangs out with the Rolling Stones. Paul Simon once gave him a guitar. Chrissie Hynde, from The Pretenders, is a close friend.

But, despite his own pretensions as a rock guitarist, he admits his wife has banned him from singing in their apartment.

What emerges from the pages is a man who, for all his bullishness, has an acutely vulnerable side. With searing candour, he writes about the problems he had with two of his children from his first marriage to actress Tatum O’neal.

It was his insecure streak that, at the start of his playing career, made Mcenroe almost weakkneed with admiration for two other players of that era, Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis.

Mcenroe hoped that some of their off-court lustre might rub off on him.

But other players had the opposite effect, not least his bitter rival Ivan Lendl, now Andy Murray’s coach.

The book begins with his recurring nightmare that he’s still playing the final of the 1984 French Open, which Lendl won from two sets down.

Mcenroe’s fierce antipathy towards Lendl – he describes it as an “allergic reaction” – hasn’t eased much since their heyday.

“Ah, no way, he hired Lendl. It’s not going to work,” he thought in 2012, when Murray first turned to the lugubrious Czech. “Then I realised, oh my God, it is going to work. That was even worse.”

This still-restless man has become an art dealer and even a TV game show host in a desperate bid to find an outlet for his competitive juices.

You can bet your life he will keep a close eye on this book’s performance in the sales charts: it deserves to be seeded No 1. – Daily Mail