You Cannot Be Serious by John McEnroe;James Kaplan

From the stars down to the qualifiers, guys tended to mix with their own kind. But when I ran into a guy named Jim Delaney—he was seven or eight years older than I was, and around 100 in the world to my 233—he was surprisingly friendly.
    Jim had graduated from Stanford a couple of years before, and, unbeknownst to me, Dick Gould, the Stanford tennis coach, had asked him to do anything he could for me while I was at Wimbledon. I didn’t find out about this until years later—thank you, Dick. At the time, Jim just seemed like a terrifically nice fellow, which he genuinely was.
    He showed me the ropes around London. For a young player, one of the most important things to know is where to get good, cheap food—which, in London in those days, basically meant pizza and pasta. I had a blast. I enjoyed the city so much—more than I’ve ever enjoyed it since, even though I still love going there now—because it was the last time I was totally anonymous. I was also slightly clueless. There was a custom there: If the restaurant was crowded, someone you didn’t know could just sit down at your table. One night, a strange guy sat down in our booth, and I said, “Who the hell are you ?”
    Delaney also did something else for me, something that really made a difference. Since he’d been on the tour a couple of years already, he knew the players—he could tell me about the strengths and weaknesses of the guys I’d be coming up against in the opening rounds. It was like having a coach for free.
    But I still had to play the matches.
    It was strange. As I rose through the juniors, I’d always had the idea that the main tour was something special—that those guys were the best of the best. But now here I was at Wimbledon, the main tournament, my first time, winning in the first round (Ismail El Shafei), the second (Colin Dowdeswell), and the third (Karl Meiler). And then in the round of 16, I beat Sandy Mayer, whose game Jim Delaney knew well from their time together at Stanford. That’s when I started to believe that I really could be a professional tennis player. I remember thinking, “Either these guys are a lot worse than I thought, or I’m a whole lot better.” The level that I’d thought existed between the juniors and pros—the Triple–A League of tennis—was simply not there for me.
     
     
     
    C OURT O NE , W IMBLEDON . There’s nothing remotely like it in the world, and until you actually stand on it, it’s impossible to imagine. The smell of the grass, the close-up electricity of the crowd, and the look of the place: how much more intimate it is than TV can ever convey; how vivid the colors are in person—the greens and purples of the backdrops and stands and emblems and uniforms, the whites and pinks and dusty blues of the hydrangeas.
    It was June 28, 1977, I was eighteen, and I had done the seemingly impossible (at least till Boris Becker came along): Having arrived at Wimbledon to play the junior tournament, I had won three rounds of qualifying matches to gain entry to the main draw. And having made it into the main draw, I had—as an unheralded amateur with chubby cheeks, thick thighs, and Snickers bars in my equipment bag; a high-school senior who’d skipped graduation to come over and try his luck in Europe—proceeded to win four rounds against top professionals and made it into the quarterfinals of the world’s greatest tennis tournament.
    Up to that point, as an official nobody at Wimbledon, I had played in total obscurity, both at Roehampton and on the outside courts of the All England Club itself, where you have some of the world’s diciest grass and maybe twelve people (four of them asleep, including the linespeople) to watch you. I had been consigned to the “B” locker room with all the other stiffs who were going to be eliminated after a round or two.
    Court One, though, was the real deal. Now that I had made it through the merciless gauntlet of seven rounds, the Wimbledon